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.