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Comment by newyankee | Hacker News Reader

I do not mean to be snarky, but do you think they really care about long term. Even with education and healthcare slowly coming along around the world, the Afghanistan fertility rate is still above 5 kids per woman or something. It is a society still rooted in tradition. People from the West try to create a halo around traditional ways of living and tribals and other such things for different reasons (some genuine, some not). The truth is they are competing in their own Darwinian way to maximize their own benefit with whatever resources they can land their hand on. The farmers generally are relatively richer land owners and will alway strife for output maximization and regulation of output is not easy for the state in a place like this.

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> It is a society still rooted in tradition.

Societies change. Do you know anything about Afghanistan of the 70's? Look it up if you don't. It was fairly westernized. I suspect there's a large portion of the population that would like to return to that, but they either don't have the control, or even if there are a majority of them, they don't have to the will to go against fundamentalists willing to die (or, more importantly, kill) to prevent it.

In any case, painting the entire country with such a broad brush seems unwarranted.

I think it would be more accurate to say that a small urban class was fairly westernised.

Sometimes, such a class starts a trend, and everyone follows. IMO it helps a lot if there's real economic growth, I mean from useful jobs not from oil etc, so that country bumpkins can live out the dream of moving to the city & having nicer things. But it's not a sure thing, sadly.

Sure, but I don't think it's a stretch to say it could have gone a route that left it significantly more modern and with much more of what we would consider western values, as portions of the country were already like that as recently as 50 years ago.

I think any narrative along the lines of "Afghanistan is traditional and tribal and you can't change that" which doesn't address that at all is at best poorly communicated, but more likely working from poor assumptions.

> and you can't change that

I didn't get this sense from anything anyone was saying.

Pashtuns make up the majority of the population of Afghanistan but the government and power has largely been controlled by the Tajiks. Pashtun culture is tribalistic and isolated. It's not wrong to say that it is a society rooted in tradition. It very much is. The westernization of Afghanistan was very much isolated to large cities like Kabul and Kandahar. Most of the country at the time (and still is to this day) smaller tribes of Pashtuns that remain largely isolated from even the happenings of their own government.

My point is mainly that I think a statement that "it's a society rooted in tradition" that doesn't cover the not-so-distant past where a significant portion of the population, even if not a majority, was much less traditional in views needs to either account for that. Kabul (and the metro area around it) looks to have had over 6% of the total population of Afghanistan in 1978, and that's just one city.

The median age in Afghanistan is ninteen.[1]

When the Soviet-Afghan War started in 1979, the population of Afghanistan was 13.41 million. Current population is 38.93 million.[2] Afghans who were 14 or older when that war started make up less than 7% of the population.[1]

While I don't doubt that many Afghans would like a more stable country, I'm skeptical that a large portion of them have any real idea of what their country was once like. (Nor do I know how accurate and the Westernized portrayals I've seen really were.)

1 https://www.indexmundi.com/afghanistan/demographics_profile....

2 https://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/afghanistan-popu...

I was thinking less of people with specific memories, and more of the people those people raised and or interacted with. This can actually have even more of an impact than actually being in the period, as what's related may be selective, and based on what people want to remember.

There's a reason why the 50's in America were portrayed so often as a golden age and a time where things were simpler, and part of that is just people that wanted to remember a time before the 60's and 70's where there was lots of upheaval and unrest. Were the 50's as simple and wholesome as depicted? Surely not, there was plenty of intolerance for those that didn't fit into the mold ("beatniks"), and that's before we even broach the rampant racism, segregation, etc. Yet, if you're of a certain age in America, you were raised on the idea that the 50's were wonderful, everyone lived the nuclear family dream, and everyone's mom was like June Cleaver.

How much this applies to current Afghanistan? I have no idea. But I don't think it's impossible there's quite a bit of rose tinted longing for that age among certain segments of the population, even if they aren't old enough to remember it.

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