Afghanistan in the 1950s and 60s

http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2013/07/afghanistan-in-the-1950s-and-60s/100544/

by wsieroci • 13 years ago

106 45 13 years ago

Dewie• 13 years ago

Keep in mind, when looking at these images, that the average life expectancy for Afghans born in 1960 was 31, so the vast majority of those pictured have likely passed on since.

... lies, damned lies and statistics. Why do people keep on using the mean for lifespan, when so many interpret it the wrong way?

antocv• 13 years ago

I suspect there is a point or ideological agenda to the lie "People earlier in more 'primitive' cultures were lucky to live to see their 30th birthday", its the old "life was brutal without civilization and a state to keep you safe and well" which then suggests we should also be lucky today to have all this modernism and be thankful to have "progressed" so far as to live to 31.

derleth• 13 years ago

"life was brutal without civilization and a state to keep you safe and well"

It was. Children died in infancy, which is why the life expectancy was so low. If that isn't brutal, you need to redefine the term.

TeMPOraL• 13 years ago

Somebody once told me something along the lines that using mean means that if you integrate it over time, you'll get actual population numbers. It might be a useful measure in that case, but it's definitely misleading in discussions like these. I do strongly believe we should stop using it.

mikeash• 13 years ago

People use it because they interpret it the wrong way.

Sharlin• 13 years ago

Keep in mind, when looking at these images, that the average life expectancy for Afghans born in 1960 was 31, so the vast majority of those pictured have likely passed on since.

Average life expectancy doesn't really work like that. Your life expectancy even in a "primitive" culture has always been 60 years or so, give or take a dozen, once you survive childhood. It's the massive infant and child mortality - the norm everywhere before the 20th century - that drags down average life expectancies at birth.

speeder• 13 years ago

Cannot emphasis this more. Also dangerous professions tend to kill people a lot.

When I mention the age that several famous romans died when they were not warriors, people act surprised (Cato the Elder for example died at 85, I forgot the names, but I even made once a list of senators that died past 90).

Here in Brazil life expectancy is 73 years old, and for example the sole reason it is not much higher, is traffic accidents (it was calculated that if pedestrian crossings were strictly enforced for example, this would bump up our average life expectancy by 3 years!)

rayiner2• 13 years ago

Right. Looking at just average life expectancy makes differences in medical technology seem more dramatic than they are. In the U.S., average life expectancy at birth has increased from 50 to 76 in the last century (26 years). But remaining life expectancy at age 60 has increased only 7 years, from 14 more years to 21 more years. Most of the increase is the result of lower mortality among children, and lower mortality among young adults as the result of a shift from dangerous factory/mining jobs to service jobs.

gadders• 13 years ago

Is it possible to get these adjusted figures anywhere? EG average life-span excluding those that died before the age of (say) five for Romans, Medieval Europe, Sub-Saharan Africa now etc.

smsm423• 13 years ago

Wikipedia has some data: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy#Life_expectanc...

As you can see, if you survived childhood, you had decent chance to get to 60 even in Roman empire. And if you were among rich Romans with access to good food, good sanitation, medical care (however primitive was it back then), etc. your chances to get to an age that is considered advanced even now were not that bad.

notahacker• 13 years ago

I thought that too, but then I remembered that the pictures are 40-50 years old, and the majority of people depicted are well into adulthood. Even the kids depicted who managed to avoided both unusually high levels of child mortality and decades of fighting would now mostly be in their sixties.

All the identified non-Afghans are dead too...

A better crude calculation would be to point out that although there are over a million people living in Afghanistan today who were alive when those photos were taken in the early 1950s, that's less than 10% of the 12 million Afghan population in the early 1950s. (On the same crude basis, around a third of developed countries' 1950s population is still around)

adamlj• 13 years ago

It's really sad to see how effective they have been in ruining this society.

More like this: http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/05/27/once_upon_a...

freehunter• 13 years ago

Foreign influence didn't help, either. It wasn't all the fault of Afghanis.

anderspetersson• 13 years ago

As someone who served in Afghanistan last year, very interesting.

rtpg• 13 years ago

It's amazing how much a country can regress due to bullshit pulled by major powers. While I know that "why can't we all get along" is a tired trope, it disappoints me that we can't avoid completely halting a nation's progress for 60 years almost.

Like when you hear how India was on track to become a major industrialized nation until the British decided to turn it into the world's biggest piece of farmland.

OhHeyItsE• 13 years ago

Like when you hear how India was on track to become a major industrialized nation until the British decided to turn it into the world's biggest piece of farmland.

That's quite a bomb you just threw there. Source?

Tomis02• 13 years ago

Let's not forget Iran in the 50s.

genwin• 13 years ago

Yes, and especially that the US toppled its democracy to install a brutal dictator. The Iran hostage crisis was largely in response to that.

phaer• 13 years ago

Iran is such a good example, it's not even funny. I crushes my heart every time i see or hear something about the living conditions and images of a possible future in Iran during the Mosaddegh government and compare it to the current situation.

rayiner2• 13 years ago

Like when you hear how India was on track to become a major industrialized nation until the British decided to turn it into the world's biggest piece of farmland.

Yeah, no.

CleanedStar• 13 years ago

Yes.

One must remember that pre-colonization India, say, the Mughal empire, included not only India, but modern Pakistan and Bangladesh of course. Not a central point, but an important one.

In the Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith goes on about "the mercantile company which oppresses and domineers in the East Indies". Acts of Parliament in 1700 and 1720 forbid import of fabric from India. Later on, England began forcing English textiles in India itself with various laws. England purposefully destroyed the thriving textile market of India (again India being India/Pakistan/Bangladesh in the time before and during the British occupation).

pfortuny• 13 years ago

Well, in this case, the collapse started mostly with the USSR as far as I know.

So, what "we" may mean in this context I do not know.

potatolicious2• 13 years ago

Afghanistan's troubles, sadly, predate the Soviets by quite a wide margin. The USSR was just one more interloper in a long line of interlopers. They weren't the first, and clearly they weren't the last.

A good book on this subject is "The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East" by Robert Fisk. Agree or disagree with his stance (particularly re: Israel), but his understanding of the history and context of the Middle East cannot be ignored.

tl;dr summary: Before the Soviets Afghanistan was played as a border state by the British, seeking to use it as a buffer state to protect India against perceived Russian aggression.

a-nikolaev2• 13 years ago

The soviet war in Afghanistan was a part of the confrontation between the USSR and the USA, all major powers were heavily involved there. http://terrorism.about.com/od/warinafghanistan/ss/Afghanista...

Shivetya• 13 years ago

Nah, the King tried to modernize his country which was not widely popular with the tribal culture that did exist. Hence while out of state he was replaced with a new government.

The Soviets only moved in later, the US much much later. However in that time anarchy did destroy much of what had been accomplished prior to 73

mseebach• 13 years ago

Like when you hear how India was on track to become a major industrialized nation until the British decided to turn it into the world's biggest piece of farmland.

British rule in India started in 1612. The industrial revolution started in Britain in 1760 at the earliest. India certainly suffered from british rule, but this is a stretch.

saryant• 13 years ago

60 years? The Brits and Russians have been using Afghanistan as the world's most explosive football since the early 19th century. It was a key battleground in the "Great Game" of espionage between those two nations. Britain was afraid the Russians would try to take India from them and the Russians wanted control of Central Asia.

The Great Game ran up to World War I and can be seen as a precursor to the Cold War. I recommend Peter Hopkirk's "The Great Game" for a more in-depth perspective on the topic.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Great-Game-Struggle-Kodansha/dp/15...

at-fates-hands• 13 years ago

>>It's amazing how much a country can regress due to bullshit pulled by major powers.

I actually posted a similar article to Reddit about 6 months ago and got a lot of the same reaction. It's amazing what happens to a country when they are in the constant state of war and aggression. Generations of families have been lost and all that is left is apathy. It is incredibly sad and depressing to think about.

Here's the article which is quite eye opening:

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/05/27/once_upon_a...

jread2• 13 years ago

I just returned. The contrast in culture is striking - flying overhead in a sophisticated aircraft watching farmers till land by hand outside mud huts in remote villages - living life as they have for a millennium. Afghans are resilient - Nato will leave, the war will fade, and they will choose their destiny.

barry-cotter• 13 years ago

the war will fade Afghanistan is now and has ever been a war zone. Why would that change just because the Americans declared victory and went home?

jread2• 13 years ago

I'm not arguing there will be peace - I'm referring to the Nato war, and I don't think anyone familiar believes it is ending in victory.

cstavish• 13 years ago

I didn't realize Thomas Friedman was on HN.

enraged_camel• 13 years ago

You realize your comments adds absolutely nothing to the discussion, right?

To respond to the OP:

>Nato will leave, the war will fade, and they will choose their destiny.

I'm not sure if NATO will leave in the foreseeable future. Even if they withdraw troops, their presence will always be felt in the region.

gautamsomani• 13 years ago

Looks so peaceful then .... I wish it goes back to then.

chrisdevereux• 13 years ago

Some context here: 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.

teh_klev• 13 years ago

I love Adam Curtis's work and that is a great series on Kabul. Sadly a lot of that footage isn't viewable outside the UK. It's a shame he's not permitted to publish those videos on YouTube or Vimeo.

DrinkWater• 13 years ago

The sad thing is: this is almost analogue to Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, etc, the list goes on an on...

I wonder when (and if) the middle east will become again what it used to be.

beat2• 13 years ago

When the oil runs out, so they no longer have influence over the rest of the world, and the rest of the world has no interest in them.

Afghanistan may not directly have oil, but it plays into other things. It's a symbolic point for both the Muslim world and the outside world. Militancy is funded by Saudi oil money. Invasions are funded by the US (and previously, by the Soviets).

Pouring billions of dollars of outside money into resource/cultural wars in otherwise poor and isolated nations turns them into nightmares. Afghanistan is just another tumor in this cancer.

codegeek• 13 years ago

This reminds of the book The Kite Runner. It describes a very different Afghanistan in the 70s before the Soviet intervention.

Afghanistan in the 1950s and 60s

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