Comments by "Faithless Hound" (@faithlesshound5621) on "The Royal Afghan Army - "Prussians of the Orient"" video.

Well, Afghanistan under King Amanullah abolished slavery in 1926. He also abolished the burqa and started coeducational schools, which led to his overthrow by conservatives, who had British support.
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@madscientist5969 They're not the only group who want the entire world to bow to their gods. I remember posters outside churches saying "Africa for Christ!" Fundamentalists need outside support to get anywhere in their own countries. The Wahhabis would have been nowhere without Western companies paying Ibn Sa'ud for oil. The Shah of Iran brought back shariah law in the hope of undermining the communists: fat lot of good it did him! The CIA funded Bin Laden and the Taliban to fight the USSR. In the US, billionaires who lead far from Christian lives bankroll the evangelicals, who have been persuaded that capitalism is Christian. Similar things happen to Hindu and Buddhist cults elsewhere.
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We're talking here about soldiers and Great Power shenanigans. What about the money? The East India Company sourced much of its opium from Afghanistan, since most of the land it ruled was unsuited to growing poppies. After they withdrew from general trade in the 1780's, the money for their dividends came from taxation (mainly) and the opium trade with China (secondarily). Opium became a Crown monopoly. Afghanistan still produces most of Europe's opium, and thus its heroin also.
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Looking at it another way, countries with many ethnicities work best if the leader of no single ethnic (or linguistic or religious) group can hold power over the rest. That used to work for Yugoslavia and the Lebanon and still does for the European Union. It is failing in the USSR and India, where there is one dominant community which has been captured by a party or leader who relies on his own group's support.
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@vk2ig To reply at length, regional, racial, religious (etc) chauvinism was held in check by the Communist Party in both the USSR and Yugoslavia. When those entities broke up into states with distinct ethnic identities, ambitious politicians like Slobodan Milosevic choose to pose as champions of the majority community against upstart minorities, at the cost of provoking a civil war which he eventually lost when the outside world intervened. The same happened in the USSR, where newly "freed" Soviet Republics went to work persecuting their own minorities. The most successful ethnic leader was Vladimir Putin, whose operatives blew up tower blocks in Moscow so that he could pose as a tough leader crushing rebellious Chechens. That has worked for him so far, but Chechnya has become another Afghanistan, whose exiles have become involved in jihad all over the world. The difference is that it is INSIDE Russia.
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