Afghanistan in the 1950s and 60s
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
Average life expectancy doesn't really work like that. Your life expectancy even in a "primitive" culture has always been 60 years or so, give or take a dozen, once you survive childhood. It's the massive infant and child mortality - the norm everywhere before the 20th century - that drags down average life expectancies at birth.
When I mention the age that several famous romans died when they were not warriors, people act surprised (Cato the Elder for example died at 85, I forgot the names, but I even made once a list of senators that died past 90).
Here in Brazil life expectancy is 73 years old, and for example the sole reason it is not much higher, is traffic accidents (it was calculated that if pedestrian crossings were strictly enforced for example, this would bump up our average life expectancy by 3 years!)
As you can see, if you survived childhood, you had decent chance to get to 60 even in Roman empire. And if you were among rich Romans with access to good food, good sanitation, medical care (however primitive was it back then), etc. your chances to get to an age that is considered advanced even now were not that bad.
All the identified non-Afghans are dead too...
A better crude calculation would be to point out that although there are over a million people living in Afghanistan today who were alive when those photos were taken in the early 1950s, that's less than 10% of the 12 million Afghan population in the early 1950s. (On the same crude basis, around a third of developed countries' 1950s population is still around)
Like when you hear how India was on track to become a major industrialized nation until the British decided to turn it into the world's biggest piece of farmland.
That's quite a bomb you just threw there. Source?
Yeah, no.
One must remember that pre-colonization India, say, the Mughal empire, included not only India, but modern Pakistan and Bangladesh of course. Not a central point, but an important one.
In the Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith goes on about "the mercantile company which oppresses and domineers in the East Indies". Acts of Parliament in 1700 and 1720 forbid import of fabric from India. Later on, England began forcing English textiles in India itself with various laws. England purposefully destroyed the thriving textile market of India (again India being India/Pakistan/Bangladesh in the time before and during the British occupation).
What you're thinking about is the Calico acts. They were two because the first one, passed in 1699 IIRC, was easy to circumvent -- as it only banned the import of some types of calico. The second one was passen in 1720. Neither of them actually had anything to do with the industrial revolution, which was still a couple of generations away. They were passed mainly due to the heavy impact imported cotton had over the national wool and silk production, and people were naturally growing weary about the toll taken by the national economy (both in terms of actual production, and in terms of workplace et co.); apparently, those guys realized, three hundred years ago, that outsourcing can have some bad consequences :-). There was also a more or less xenophobic component: other European countries banned cotton trade as well, while England still allowed raw and undied cotton, which drove many cotton manufacture workers to England, where their job was still in demand. There was a fair amount of "nationalism" in the Calico acts.
(Yeah: England was actually one of the last European countries to implement this. When the first Calico act was passed, France, for instance, aws already forbidding cotton period.)
The ban was later maintained, partly due to intertia, partly because the cotton processing industry later had to be protected, but that was hardly that much of a showstopper. There was no ban on cotton use or processing -- nothing that restricted either producing cotton for internal use, or export to anywhere except England. There were other factors at stake that slowed down the development -- and the first textile mills in India (with Indian owners, no less) opened in the early 1850s.
So, what "we" may mean in this context I do not know.
A good book on this subject is "The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East" by Robert Fisk. Agree or disagree with his stance (particularly re: Israel), but his understanding of the history and context of the Middle East cannot be ignored.
tl;dr summary: Before the Soviets Afghanistan was played as a border state by the British, seeking to use it as a buffer state to protect India against perceived Russian aggression.
I don't think "factual errors" is a correct representation here, considering that the original article[1] made no accusations of factual impropriety. Nor was there question w.r.t. the facts as Fisk represented them.
The original rebuttal centered purely on alleged reverse racism on Fisk's part - that he received a beating at the hands of Afghan refugees and chose to blame their circumstances rather than the individuals. The event itself and the facts surrounding it were not questioned - only Fisk's stance on it.
The main thrust of the article does not dispute any facts, or representation of facts. Fisk's piece is criticized as "leftist pathology", and the opening of Fisk's article is described as "one of the defining quotes of the idiotic left".
This does not strike me as a "fact-based, point by point rebuttal". I'm familiar with the argument-form that fisking refers to, but the article that inspired the term seems to be a shockingly poor example of it.
Anyways, considering that Fisk is an unapologetic member of the far Left, and Sullivan an unapologetic member of the far Right, I'm not convinced that "fisking" is a credible criticism of Fisk himself. If anything, Sullivan's original article that criticizes Fisk shows that his facts are on the money, it's his stance on them that's problematic.
[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20040416224040/http://andrewsulli...
It's not one article. There were many others. The term was coined exactly because Fisk produced a lot of content that resulted in well deserved debunking, not just one questionably racist article.
On top of it, the guy seems to be a proponent of Internet censorship[1] - which of course doesn't make his ME dispatches wrong, many other factors do - but add to the portrait.
>>> Sullivan an unapologetic member of the far Right
Err, how exactly a person that publicly supported John Kerry, Barack Obama and Democratic Party and identifies with them on many issues - from same sex marriage to Middle East policy - qualifies as "far right"? He calls himself conservative, but I can call myself the Pope - it wouldn't make me one. He's a moderate liberal with some libertarian leanings, nowhere near "far Right".
[1] http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/anonymous-commen...
The Soviets only moved in later, the US much much later. However in that time anarchy did destroy much of what had been accomplished prior to 73
British rule in India started in 1612. The industrial revolution started in Britain in 1760 at the earliest. India certainly suffered from british rule, but this is a stretch.
The Great Game ran up to World War I and can be seen as a precursor to the Cold War. I recommend Peter Hopkirk's "The Great Game" for a more in-depth perspective on the topic.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Great-Game-Struggle-Kodansha/dp/15...
I actually posted a similar article to Reddit about 6 months ago and got a lot of the same reaction. It's amazing what happens to a country when they are in the constant state of war and aggression. Generations of families have been lost and all that is left is apathy. It is incredibly sad and depressing to think about.
Here's the article which is quite eye opening:
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/05/27/once_upon_a...
Great series of blog posts by Adam Curtis on Kabul over the last 50 years. One of his main ideas is that the war on terror is a sort of accidental continuation of the Cold War. The huge leftover infrastructure, bureaucracies and culture needed to do something, so lacking a real enemy, it invented one.
If you buy that at all then Afghanistan is really interesting because it was a major conflict in the Cold War, and also (obviously) the war on terror. So current foreign policies and attitudes towards Afghanistan often mirror those of the Cold War in a strange and dissonant way.
Lots of great BBC archive footage in there too. Hopefully it's viewable outside the uk.
To respond to the OP:
>>Nato will leave, the war will fade, and they will choose their destiny.
I'm not sure if NATO will leave in the foreseeable future. Even if they withdraw troops, their presence will always be felt in the region.
More like this: http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/05/27/once_upon_a...
I wonder when (and if) the middle east will become again what it used to be.
Afghanistan may not directly have oil, but it plays into other things. It's a symbolic point for both the Muslim world and the outside world. Militancy is funded by Saudi oil money. Invasions are funded by the US (and previously, by the Soviets).
Pouring billions of dollars of outside money into resource/cultural wars in otherwise poor and isolated nations turns them into nightmares. Afghanistan is just another tumor in this cancer.
... lies, damned lies and statistics. Why do people keep on using the mean for lifespan, when so many interpret it the wrong way?
It was. Children died in infancy, which is why the life expectancy was so low. If that isn't brutal, you need to redefine the term.