Some context here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/2009/09/kabul_city_number_one.html http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/2009/09/kabul_city_num... Gre

Some context here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/2009/09/kabul_city_number_one.html http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/2009/09/kabul_city_num... 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.