She is My Son: Bacha Posh, When Girls Become Boys

[Yildez]

Organised. endemic pederasty. I first came across it reading The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)

You you see why many people think the West is mad to pour billions of dollars into a country so utterly corrupt that they cannot/will not deal with this well-known practice even though it's contrary to the teachings of Islam

It's illegal of, course.

But so is the trafficking of heroin .....90% of the world's supply grows in Afghanistan.

The "Kite Runner" came to my mind in the first few minutes of the film Newcastle. Very well written, but incredibly painful to read, even though the ending was one of hope. I remember reading "Caravans" by James Michener back in the 1960's - it gave me a hunger to travel to Afghanistan that I never fulfilled, and the war put an end to any possibility of travelling there.

It seems to me that Afghanistan is a country that is locked into an age-old, almost Medieval, mindset. It's defeated change since the invasion of Alexander the Great, and continues to do so.

[newcastle]

Afghanistan earned the soubriquet "Graveyard of Empires"....although it's a bit of a misnomer in that it never brought empires to their knees. Rather , as Yildez says, successive empires have failed to subdue it, or assimilate it.