| The Secret War - Washington's First Invasion of Afghanistan |
As the 21st century buries its first decade, America has
a critical need to understand the people of Afghanistan
and the history of their conflict. In 1981 Philip Bonosky,
a journalist for the Daily World, was an eyewitness to
America’s clandestine war against the Afghanistan
government. Then, as now, Washington failed to
understand the proud people of Afghanistan.
Pushing their herds before them—sheep, horses,
camels, cattle—they go from pasture to pasture, and on
their way they are waylaid by history, which comes to
them as a violent and alien intrusion. Out of those
mysterious spaces & beyond the mountains strange
monsters periodically leap at them: an Alexander of
Greece, who admired their horses; a Tamerlane, a
Genghis Khan from far-off Mongolia—all tormented
them for a time and then were gone...
...these Pushtun shepherds were equal to all of history’s
surprises, cruel-ties and treacheries. They were to know
kings and emperors. Traders from far Cathay and the
near Indies had passed through their valleys along the
“silk route.” Hellenic culture had touched them.
Buddhism arrived from India but had fallen to Islam by
the 7th century. But good or bad, whatever befell them,
these nomadic, pastoral peoples understood how to
deal with it, and in the end they absorbed their
tormentors as the immemorial movement of time ab-
sorbed their own history...They shook all of the past
centuries away like water...
Except this one, the 20th.
This most formidable of all centuries broke open the
cocoon of time in which they had been wrapped by
silence and spilled the contents of their lives—only half-
real, still merged with myth—into the pitiless glare of
klieg lights and TV cameras, and confronted them with
their own history as an accusation. They had slumbered
too long. They had come into the modern world too late.
They would now be fearfully punished for it.
a critical need to understand the people of Afghanistan
and the history of their conflict. In 1981 Philip Bonosky,
a journalist for the Daily World, was an eyewitness to
America’s clandestine war against the Afghanistan
government. Then, as now, Washington failed to
understand the proud people of Afghanistan.
Pushing their herds before them—sheep, horses,
camels, cattle—they go from pasture to pasture, and on
their way they are waylaid by history, which comes to
them as a violent and alien intrusion. Out of those
mysterious spaces & beyond the mountains strange
monsters periodically leap at them: an Alexander of
Greece, who admired their horses; a Tamerlane, a
Genghis Khan from far-off Mongolia—all tormented
them for a time and then were gone...
...these Pushtun shepherds were equal to all of history’s
surprises, cruel-ties and treacheries. They were to know
kings and emperors. Traders from far Cathay and the
near Indies had passed through their valleys along the
“silk route.” Hellenic culture had touched them.
Buddhism arrived from India but had fallen to Islam by
the 7th century. But good or bad, whatever befell them,
these nomadic, pastoral peoples understood how to
deal with it, and in the end they absorbed their
tormentors as the immemorial movement of time ab-
sorbed their own history...They shook all of the past
centuries away like water...
Except this one, the 20th.
This most formidable of all centuries broke open the
cocoon of time in which they had been wrapped by
silence and spilled the contents of their lives—only half-
real, still merged with myth—into the pitiless glare of
klieg lights and TV cameras, and confronted them with
their own history as an accusation. They had slumbered
too long. They had come into the modern world too late.
They would now be fearfully punished for it.
| Reissued in 2010 with a new introduction! |