Afghanistan [Theme]

- He is clean before the law. There are no sins behind him.

- I want to help veterans with post-traumatic syndrome. Now such doctors are needed. Experienced in the war sometimes does not leave a person and at home.

He didn't catch us. He hunted. For something big. A log is a trap. The rule for setting the trap is to take five times the weight of the animal. I don't know what it is, but it got through. And killed him.

Have you noticed? When Putin spoke via video link, he spoke interestingly about Afghanistan. What Americans Should Pay to Rebuild Afghanistan. Notice how the general said. What they say we will compensate. And it seems to me that this is a creative debut idea, as they said before. And if you count how much the Americans owe for the restoration of those countries that they destroyed? And sue them. In the UN Security Council, two countries can raise these topics. China and Russia. China has already spoken about war crimes. Which countries? Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya are on NATO's conscience. I'm not even talking about Yugoslavia.

But especially fiction and truth merged when I found our old house in the Wazir Akbar Khan area, the house I grew up in, just as Amir grew up in the house next door. It took me three days of searching, I did not remember the address, and everything around me changed beyond recognition. But I searched and searched until I came across a familiar arch.
I entered the house and the soldiers who lived there now were kind enough to allow me my nostalgic tour. And I saw that the paint on my house, as well as on the house of Amir, peeled off, the grass withered, the trees in the courtyard were no more, and the wall that enclosed the yard almost collapsed. Like Amira, I was struck by how small my house was compared to what lived in my memory. And - I swear! - when I went outside the gate, I saw on the asphalt the same tar spot in the form of a Rorschach blon, which Amir also saw. I said goodbye to the soldiers and walked away, and there was a growing feeling in me that if I hadn't written The Wind Runner, my encounter with my stepfather's house would have shocked me much more. After all, I've already experienced it - in the book. I stood next to Amir at the gate of his house and with him I experienced the loss. I saw him put his hands on the rusty pins of the fence and we peered together into the sagging roof and crumbled porch.
You'd say fiction stole life, well, that's probably how it is.

Explanation of the quote:

2013 edition
The story takes place in pre-war Kabul of the 1970s. In this magical city, shimmering with all shades of gold and azure, live two weather boys, Amir and Hassan. One belonged to the local aristocracy, the other to a despised minority. One father was handsome and important, the other was chrome and pathetic. Master and servant, prince and beggar, handsome and crippled. But there were no people in the world closer than these two boys. Soon the Kabul idyll will be replaced by terrible storms.

I decided to sit in the hallway of my apartment, relatively safe, in my opinion, and began to count the missiles. When the sixth of them exploded nearby, the phone rang. Moscow. Mummy.
- How are you? Is it very dangerous there?
- What are you, it's in order, amazingly interesting, wonderful fruit.
Ba-bah! The seventh rocket rustled over the roof and spat in the distance.

This book is about the war, and it looks like a piece of bacon: it contains layers of reports from Afghanistan, where I worked for almost four years as a war correspondent, and pages from my diary. In the reports - what the military censorship allowed for publication, and in the diary - what I wanted to say and remember. The book was started right after the war ended and I crossed the bridge over the Amu Darya on the penultimate Soviet armored personnel carrier, and it is finished today ...

This is a book about how for ten years the United States financed the Afghan war, training and arming hundreds of thousands of fighters, many of whom then turned their weapons against the Americans themselves. On September 11, 2001, the Americans were burned by the devilish porridge that they helped to brew in Afghanistan. But now Americans at least know how it all happened. When will we have the same books describing how our country was dragged into the Afghan adventure?

We need to understand what is Afghanistan. <...> The Taliban to pay for something that they had killed Americans? Yes, it's nonsense! They are nineteen years of doing it themselves, for free.

What can you expect from a country where people are taking jobs away from animals?

...Rue des Bouchers is the image of Afghanistan. Here reigns a merry mess, complemented by inaction, which upsets me. Nothing is destroyed, nothing is created, everything is transformered. I have a feeling that we live in the void. No changes. No change. We are waiting for. We are the bull, heavy and passive, which allowed to cut themselves to pieces in the street.

... he explained to me that the earth is round. I want to believe it. In some way it calms me down. If it is round, it means that there are no irregularities. If it's round, so there is no cubbyhole where you can get lost. If the earth is really round, it means that Afghanistan, like any other place can be the center of it. This discovery puts everything in its place.

For us [Afghans] politics is a family history.

Trump wrote on Twitter that there will be a national hero, when withdraws from Syria and Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, the Americans are negotiating with Taliban for the destruction which they broke two years ago. And Pro-American Afghan government, the negotiations did not allowed.
Exactly 30 years ago, 15 February, Soviet troops with banners unfurled solemnly left Afghanistan. Ended the fourth Afghan war, of which there were five. And they all three British, one Soviet and the latter, American - in a certain sense are copy of each other.
The first Afghan - years 1838-1842: the capture of Kabul, the capture of the Emir Dost Mohammed, and then a rebellion, a terrible massacre, shameful defeat and the restoration on the throne of Dost Mohammed. The second 1878-80 years: the capture of Kabul, the rebellion, the terrible massacre, shameful retreat. Third, the shortest - 1919: accession to the throne Amanulla Khan and the Declaration of full independence of Afghanistan, the British invasion, the rise of the Pashtuns, the truce, the recognition of Amanulla Khan. Fourth, we have mentioned, the Soviet - 1979-1989. But who would have thought that in ten years our best allies in Afghanistan will be Ahmad Shah Massoud and Burhanuddin Rabbani, with whom for some reason we fought for ten years. And fifth, American enduring freedom, which began in 2001, like in retaliation for the support the Taliban, "al-Qaeda". All they have achieved in Afghanistan is the organization and provision, almost legal, the world's most powerful heroin drug trafficking. By the way, do not be surprised if a secret condition of the agreement with the Taliban is the preservation of the drug. The British left without saying goodbye, the Americans say goodbye, but not gone. And they can understand.