Playing the goat.

• Author: Howell, Llewellyn D.
• Position: WORLD WATCHER

BACK IN 1963, WHEN I BEGAN my training program for a Peace Corps assignment, our group was shown a film about Afghanistan. I knew nothing about the country other than its name. Thinking about it today, I only can recall one part of the film--and I remember it vividly. It was about a game that Afghan men play called buzkashi, in which horsemen fide up and down a field with goals at each end but, instead of using a ball, they use a goat, which is roped and dragged up and down the field until shredded, and someone puts what is left of its body through the goal. I came away thinking the game primitive and barbaric. The film left an impression of a country that was exotic, rugged, violent, and stubbornly out of the mainstream of 20th-century modernization. I thought to myself that I never would want to go to Afghanistan and, frankly, tried to put the country and its culture out of my mind. I went to Malaya instead.

At the end of a long Chinese Communist rebellion, Malaya expanded into Malaysia and learned to balance its combined Muslim-Buddhist-Hindu culture. When I arrived, gunfire was remote and infrequent and the insurgency sputtering. The last of Chinese rebels surren dered in 1989 and Malaysia's anti-Communist struggle came to an end. It was the last successful suppression of a violent anti-state war.

Nearby, the Chinese had occupied Vietnam from 111 B.C. to 938 A.D. Despite a long-term concerted effort, Vietnamese culture persevered and the Chinese ultimately were thrown out. Later invasions (1255, 1285, and 1979) by Mongols and the Chinese were repelled. The French intruded in the mid 19th century and, 100 years hence, fell victim in the same way. The U.S. tried to help the French, beginning in 1948, and ultimately went to war, losing more than 58,000 men and women while suffering hundreds of thousands of physical and psychological casualties. We crawled away in 1973 and did not learn a thing.

Afghanistan, though, went on. Afghans were no more controllable by outsiders than their game implied. The Soviet Union invaded in 1978 after failing to run Afghanistan's government indirectly. The USSR's military did not stand a chance against this foreign culture. After fighting in the alleys and crevices for a decade--with their empire collapsing ideologically and economically behind them--the Soviets understood that they had lost and went home. Clearly superior firepower served no good purpose against culture and religion, so CCCP cut its losses.

...