The Middle of Nowhere

I think it really is worth noting that afghanistan was one of the only countries actually not to be successfully colonized by a great power. The soviet union lost 15 thousand, approximately, combat dead out of a total force of a hundred and 50 thousand deployed through those eight years. And an americans also built highways and schools and hospitals. Both sides did that, but the soviets being much closer, because they were the neighbor but were were more visible. So there was always, in some ways,  a great tragedy that all the forces of modernity, of what we would call, for lack of a better word, secular humanism, or something resembling civil