Foreign Policy Blogs

All Our Yesterdays in Afghanistan: A Photo Essay.

Writing day in and day out about the collapse of this and the fall-out from that, it can be difficult to step back and assess where we are in Afghanistan’s broader narrative. I promise you that today, the soldiering attempt  to seek some clarity in Afghanistan’s historical trajectory will break your heart.

The photographs that Foreign Policy magazine published not too long ago, are nearly shatteringly romantic, full of pride of all those things that Afghanistan once was; full of promise of all those things that Afghanistan could have been.

Look at the picture below taken from the FP photoessay. Could you not swear that this is a photograph of some record store somewhere in Rome in the 1960’s?

Please spend some time with the remainder of the photographs that you’ll find at this link.

Afghanistan Library

 

Author

Faheem Haider

Faheem Haider is a political analyst, writer and artist. He holds advanced research degrees in political economy, political theory and the political economy of development from the London School of Economics and Political Science and New York University. He also studied political psychology at Columbia University. During long stints away from his beloved Washington Square Park, he studied peace and conflict resolution and French history and European politics at the American University in Washington DC and the University of Paris, respectively.

Faheem has research expertise in democratic theory and the political economy of democracy in South Asia. In whatever time he has to spare, Faheem paints, writes, and edits his own blog on the photographic image and its relationship to the political narrative of fascist, liberal and progressivist art.

That work and associated writing can be found at the following link: http://blackandwhiteandthings.wordpress.com