II — Yesterday morning, I went for a long run around Milford, Hopkinton, and Holliston. The 12.5 miles were a bit slower than they might have been if I hadn’t been sick and/or injured for the better part of the last two months, but I don’t care. I’m looking forward to running Around the Bay in just under five weeks. I have goals for the race, but mostly I’m excited about just doing it.

III — Victoria invited me to join her on a JDRF Ride to Cure Diabetes. More details about the 100+ mile Death Valley bike ride in October and how you can help are on the way . . .

IV — The consensus at the bike store this afternoon is that twelve years is “a very full life” for an indoor trainer. I was surprised myself to realize that we’d had it that long, but I remember riding on it while watching the summer olympics in 2000. A couple weeks ago, forty-five minutes into a nice ride to nowhere, the riding got very difficult very quickly, and I could hear a horrible grinding sound. Fortunately, my awesome new bike was not the source of the sound. Unfortunately, the bearings in the trainer seem to have seized. Sadness. The upside is that now I have a new, very quiet trainer for the basement.

V — Lisa and I have been watching lots of films recently. I like “good” movies, so we made our way through eight of the nine Oscar-nominees for “Best Picture.” (You can’t make me watch “Incredibly Loud and Extremely Close” or whatever it’s called.) I’ve also watched a number of foreign films, popcorn movies, and documentaries. By the way, my three favorite nominated films of the year were “The Artist,” “The Descendants,” and “Midnight in Paris.” Lisa and I also both liked Miyazaki’s new Studio Ghibli film “The Secret World of Arrietty.”

VI — Saturday evening we went to the Providence cheese shop beloved by our friends. We bought a lovely Napfkäse, which is a delicious Swiss cheese somewhere in the neighborhood of Comté (my favorite cheese) and Gruyère, with grainy hints of Parmigiano-Reggiano. If you can get your hands on some, give it a try.

VII — It’s been almost a decade since I decided to stay in software engineering and not go to grad school, but I still miss history. Turns out, I can be a software engineer by day and read history at night. My current choice is Fred Anderson’s Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Face of Empire in British North America, 1754-1766. This book has been on my reading list forever, and I wish I had gotten around to it earlier. If all goes well, I’ll share details with you about this long war that destroyed France’s North American empire, seemed to bind American colonials more closely to the British empire and each other, and then ultimately set in place many of the precursors to the American Revolution. I’m having such a good time reading it.

VIII — I also signed up for one of the history listservs that were so popular a decade ago (academically speaking). It’s like a little bit of early American history enlivening my inbox everyday.

IX — I’ve been doing strength training at the office gym a couple times a week. While I don’t particularly enjoy it, I believe it will make me a better athlete. Strength training reminds me of this ad:

And this Oatmeal comic makes me laugh.

My first job out of college was as a “Customer Service Ambassador” at PlanetAll, a startup in Cambridge, Mass. Before there was Facebook, there were MySpace and Friendster. Before there was Friendster there were PlanetAll and SixDegrees. We were bigger and more successful than our rival, but you’ve probably never heard of either of us.

PlanetAll was an early online community, possibly the earliest social network site. It wanted to be Facebook, but it didn’t know it. Like LinkedIn, it let you keep track of your professional details and make connections. Like (early) Facebook it let you join groups and post messages to the group and share information about high school reunions and useful stuff like that. (If YouTube had existed, it would have let you share links to cute pet videos.) Unlike Facebook it was thought up by a guy after his graduation so that he could keep in touch with people. (Unlike Zuckerburg, who invented FB as a college student so that he could keep track of people down the hall.)

It had good press, back in the day when magazines like PC World and Wired mattered. It had lots of venture capital. It had a shit-ton of newly minted MIT CompSci grads to write code for the web site and for an app to synchronize contact data with your Palm Pilot. (Remember those?)

But what it never had was a profit. In the six months in 1997-1998 that I was there, they burned through a lot of cash. And then one day—just after Christmas—there was a staff meeting telling us about the half of the staff that they let go (including my boss and 2/3 of my customer service cronies).

That’s when I started revising my résumé and checking out who was hiring in the Boston area. It’s good that I left, but it was hard hearing the news a few months later that Amazon bought PlanetAll along with another company for $280 million. True, I had exercised what few stock options were available to me before I left, but if I’d stayed a little longer, I would be writing this trip down memory lane in a house that I could have paid for in one shot.

Why did Amazon buy PlanetAll? It’s because of you and your friends and everyone that you know. Amazon wanted the customer list of PlanetAll to fold into its then-emerging community features: think wishlists and recommendations. And they wanted the idea behind PlanetAll; Amazon used PlanetAll as part of its patent application on social networking.

Basically Amazon saw the potential of PlanetAll better than the executives in the company did. The people running the company thought in terms of “contacts” and always-up-to-date “connections” and hoped that these early social networking ideas would encourage you to come to the web site often enough and long enough so that they could make enough ad “impressions” to turn a profit one day. Unlike Facebook, the web wasn’t mature enough to keep you on the site long enough or to make you want to come back. It just wasn’t interactive enough. No chat. No posting of photos or videos. No good way to see a stream of status updates.

They web just wasn’t ready to be used as a platform. In fact, the primary way of communicating was the pre-Web: e-mail. They built a “mail cannon” to deliver all of the status updates and class newsletters and jokes-of-the-day and swingers ads and whatnot. While you did need to visit the site to make new connections or join new groups, the tools for finding people to link were primitive, and it never got a critical mass of users.

Plus the technology often failed. Everything was hacked together. I learned SQL so that I could fix database problems and restart stalled processes. I learned shell scripting so that I could relaunch the mail cannon after deleting lots of unset messages. (Sorry if yours was one of them.) And I learned SMTP (simple mail transfer protocol) so that I could pretend I was a computer and debug why the mail cannon wasn’t working.

In a nutshell, PlanetAll was a good idea that hatched before its time. It failed to thrive in a web ecosystem that wasn’t nourishing enough to keep it going. Which isn’t to say that it wasn’t successful or important. Part of $280 million is a lot of loot just for an idea. Then again, PlanetAll’s part of $280 million is a minuscule fraction of all of Facebook’s $100 billion current valuation.

Some other events are just as important but only in retrospect. These are subtle things, a turning of the tide. A high school student teaches you a bit of French in fourth grade and inspires a life-long interest in la belle langue and the nation of France. You go to camp a couple years later where you bicycle a couple hundred miles around Iowa and realize that cycling is the activity that you really love. You appropriate the family camera on a trip to Yellowstone and pick up the habit. You ride the 80 bus from Watertown to Cambridge and start to give up most of your conservative political views as you see that the working people (of which you are one) need more opportunity than they’re getting. The tragic, brutal death of a young gay man in your home state makes you rethink some of the other bullshit ideas you had.

Another thing that slowly changed me was the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building fifteen years ago yesterday.

I should note that I was in my second year at Grinnell in the spring of 1995. I loved Grinnell, but I felt like I lived in a cave. Very little news made it my way. That is, I consumed very little of it. I remember the Republican revolution of 1994 — I may have been one of the few students there who didn’t really mind it. I seem to recall there was (still) a war in the Balkans. And the farm bill was rewritten. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to know what was going in the world; I just wasn’t very connected to the media at the time.

McVeigh and Nichol’s act of terrorism really struck close to home — figuratively, of course. At the time, I still considered myself a Wyomingite. Like many people in Wyoming I felt that the federal government was a more-or-less foreign, colonial power. DC is almost 2000 miles from the Equality State, but unelected officials there ultimately control how most of the land in the mountains and plains can be used. With only three electoral votes, our Congressional delegation might have had disproportionate power relative to our population, but we felt marginalized on the national stage. It seemed like a lot of the issues that mattered to us didn’t matter to the rest of the country, and vice versa. People on the coasts and in the cities wanted to take away the guns we (truly believed) we relied on for our protection. We might not have had “Live Free or Die” on our license plates — we had a broncobuster — but we felt like we actually lived what New Hampshire was trying to claim.

I knew a guy — a sort of family friend/hanger-on — who taught me about the militia mindset. He spent a lot of time at the gun shop. (I should say one of the gun shops, for there were several.) And he would tell us what he heard and (thus) believed. He was a real life Dale Gribble. The government had designs on our guns and our liberty. For reasons I didn’t understand, the Clinton Justice Department was training a secret NATO army using black helicopters to impose the “one world government” under the auspices of the UN. The Federal Reserve was part of an ancient secret society that finally surfaced at the Bretton Woods summit in the 40s; they too were part of this enormous plot, and at the appointed time this unelected body would devalue the US dollar for their nefarious ends. Ruby Ridge and Waco and Vince Foster’s suicide were visible corroboration of the dozens of other insidious events for anyone who would just bother to connect the dots. He buried guns and ammunition in PVC pipe in the backyard so that once ATF agents came to take his “sacrificial” firearms away, he would be ready to carry on the fight. He stocked extra food and claimed to have survival skills. And he “knew people” who claimed to have shot down a helicopter that was scaring their cattle on BLM land. But the “real” militia action was always over the border in Montana, where the crazy people live.

(If it weren’t for the talk about aliens, it was almost conceivable as an alternate reality. After graduating college I watched “X-Files.” And I felt like I had heard all of the stories already. The guy I knew was a wannabe Western version Fox Mulder, uncovering the evil machinations of the Cigarette Smoking Man. After my first year working in tech support where I frequently helped people working in the defense industry on government contracts, it became crystal clear to me that the very idea of a “massive government conspiracy” crumbles because it’s just not possible to hold it all together secretly. Even people working on secret things need help completing their part of the secret.)

So when a couple of “lone wolves” put an actual plan into effect, I was stunned. I knew that some people believed the government wanted to make them slaves to its bureaucratic will. I knew that there were a lot of well-armed, slightly off-balance people out there. And I knew that there was a lot of angry — or, at the very least, agitated — rhetoric. (“Talking treason” the guy I knew liked to say.) But I didn’t think anyone would actually do this sort of thing. If I were old enough to remember the Weathermen, it wouldn’t have been so surprising.

After the bombing — which thankfully didn’t actually touch my life directly — just about anything associated with the militia point of view rapidly lost whatever bit of Revolutionary-era-throwback legitimacy I had carved out for it in my mind. These are modern times; there’s no need to “water the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants,” because we are so far away from tyranny. Government wasn’t the problem; it was the bulwark against domestic terrorists. Gun legislation might not always be consistent; but it seems like a necessity. There should be no such thing as a “well-regulated militia” except as run by the states.

Above all, the tremendous amount of lost life, the needless deaths, and the premeditated brutality of the Oklahoma City bombing shows us the danger of unchecked bullshit. I don’t claim to know what was in McVeigh’s mind, though I hear he was upset about Waco and Ruby Ridge (which were unfortunate and needless in their own way). But the idea that these events herald despotism makes no more sense than the gun shop hearsay that the family friend shared with us.

Looking at American history, we see that our form of government is more durable than we let on. We have never had periods of despotism. The Republic has never fallen, although it did crack apart from within during the Civil War because of or own inconsistent ideas of “liberty.” Neither fascism nor communism — the two greatest external ideological threats to democracy — took hold. (The methods of prophylaxis — Palmer raids, strike-busting, Pinkertons, McCarthyism, widespread FBI surveillance — may even have been worse than what the forces of stability were trying to prevent.) We have survived wars and contested elections and depressions. The historical power behind the idea of America is the strongest argument against militia activity.

In fact, militias have only gotten us into trouble since they peeled us off from the British Empire. (And depending on your point of view, maybe even then too.) Shay’s Rebellion helped destroy the first post-Revolutionary confederation. Armed white civilians moving into the interior of the continent committed ethnic cleansing and spread race-based tyranny. John Brown’s raids and the Missouri troubles hastened the Civil War, while the South Carolina militia’s siege on Ft. Sumter actually started it. The Ku Klux Klan began as anti-Reconstruction civilian militia. The Gilded Age’s corporate militias killed working men and their families. The counterculture’s left-wing terrorist/nihilist militias in the 1960s and 70s helped usher in the current generation’s culture wars.

So it bothers me very much to see a contemporary resurgence in the kind of sentiment and speech that I heard in my late adolescence, the kind of words and ideas that led McVeigh and Nichols to kill 168 people fifteen years ago. I didn’t say anything about the notions I heard before Oklahoma City because I thought it was diverting, idle chatter — a jester’s story, if you will. Now that I’m starting to hear the same BS, I must say that it’s time to stop . . . before our nation’s adolescent obsession with civilian militias gets people killed again.

Recently — and by that I mean the last few months — I’ve been working on two big podcast series.

Earlier in the summer I finished listening to Jeff Curto’s excellent History of Photography Podcast. As someone who liked school, loves photography and dabbles in history, I found myself really getting into the fifteen-part rebroadcasts of Curto’s college course.

I can hear some of you out there now. “But, Jeff, it’s an audio podcast. And photography is an inherently visual medium. How does that work?”

Well, the podcast has two things going for it. First, the podcast is enhanced with a lot of photographs, which are in sync with the lecture. Furthermore, Prof. Curto is a very gifted lecturer. He describes the photographs quite well, along with the ideas they contain and the artists who made them. (It probably helps that I had previously seen many of the photographs, too.)

A new semester of classes just started, so consider subscribing to it.

I also want to mention Adobe’s Lightroom podcast.

I love Lightroom! It’s a brilliant piece of software for photographers, taking all of the most important parts of Adobe Photoshop that a photographer needs, adding superb image management features, and putting it within a user interface that emphasizes workflow. It challenges the widely held view among geeks (and probably most software users) that powerful software has to be difficult to use. It makes me want to write better software myself.

So what’s so great about a podcast about Lightroom? George Jardine, formerly the product manager of Lightroom, brought together a diverse group of people during the public betas of Lightroom and had them talk about a bunch of subjects that really interest me. Professional photographers discussed photography and their digital workflows, which gave me ideas how to improve my own. A couple of analog printmakers took the long view, helping me think about how to make better digital prints. And then there were the software engineers.

Software engineers? Really?

Yeah, it sounds odd, especially since I try to keep my photography discussions about art and not about gear or f/stops or color profiles or pixels. But . . . I know a few things about image processing, color science, and software engineering. And I know how hard it is to make really great software. So I really appreciated being able to learn tidbits from people with more experience than me, as they talked about the things that interest me. And these guys aren’t just dilettantes. No, these Adobe engineers are deep into it; they know the trade-offs you have to make in the real world when implementing image processing and I/O algorithms. And did I mention that they worked really, really hard with Lightroom to get it right.

If you use Lightroom and want to get some ideas how to use it more effectively, you should listen to the podcast. Or if you just want to hear about the evolution of a software project, it’s also for you.

Finally, check out Edward Burtynsky’s SALT lecture on the “10,000 Year Gallery”. The SALT (Seminars about Long Term Thinking) podcasts by the Long Now Foundation cover a wide range of subjects, all of which attempt to get us to think on a millennium-long timeframe. (At first I thought it was something like a cult or a Burning Man-esque art project; but now I see it for what it is: transcendent, if somewhat eccentric.) Anyway, Burtynsky is helping create a gallery of photographs about who we are today that should last at least 10,000 years and will be installed inside an enormous clock that will toll every 10,000 years. Seriously… Not the most exciting podcast episode, but in general the whole seminar series is worth listening to.

The early part of our travels led us to the northwestern-most point of the first federally funded expedition to the west which included professionally trained scientists and artists. Unlike the Lewis and Clark expedition of 1804-1806, the infamous Zebulon Pike trip to Colorado and the myriad Army Topographic Corps expeditions of the mid-to-late nineteenth century, the western journeys of Major Stephen Harriman Long doesn’t seem to have stuck in the American imagination.

If he’s remembered at all, he’s usually referenced as “that guy who called the Great Plains the ‘Great American Desert’ on his map” or “that guy who climbed Longs Peak.” It’s unfortunate because he blazed a trail for later expeditions that, like his, mixed scientific inquiry and artistic depiction in equal measure. Of course, they also brought their early 19th century prejudices about agriculture, science and scenery with him, thus leading Long not to recognize one of the most biologically diverse and rich ecosystems in the world while he trod over the short-grass prairies.

If you’re interested in learning more about Major Long’s 1819-1820 expedition, you might consider reading “Sandy Wastes:” Exploring and Experiencing the Great Desert, a paper I wrote for an environmental history class about six years ago and then submitted with my graduate school applications. Here’s a short excerpt from the concluding remarks:

[Major Long] inadvertently interfered in the emerging manifest destiny of Americans to overrun the continent. The effective western border he seemed to propose reached barely half-way across the possible extent of the nation. While it is possible that he did slow expansion to the Plains, within three decades a torrent of migrants would make their way through the region and draw their own conclusions. Indeed . . . the idea of the West as a garden held more currency among Long’s contemporaries than the idea of a desert West.

The early appraisals of the West given by Long and other naturalists are complex and require careful consideration, especially when viewed in conjunction with their own scientific evidence which seemed to contradict their conclusions. The volumes of textual, visual, and physical data generated by the explorers ultimately yielded a fairly balanced view of the Plains: a region that is at once hot and dry and yet well-adapted to life, just not necessarily human life. In this respect Long’s conclusions about the habitability of the region prefigured John Wesley Powell’s conclusions about the need for irrigation to aid development in his 1876 Arid Lands report. Moreover, Long blazed the trail for a new type of federally-sponsored western expedition that included scientists, artists, and (later) photographers as an integral part of balanced exploration. Though these explorers were often serving the utilitarian and imperial interests of the state, like Long they strove to help an expanding nation understand and create itself by looking at the land. The conclusions of Long’s party indicate the role of ideological orientation and expectation in the creation of place at the same time that they caution against trusting our initial reactions to alien environments.

Denver Convention Center – Click for larger

Anyway . . . We’re only two days into our trip and already having a great time. We just returned from an evening of baseball at Coors Field.

It’s been a while since I saw a really good game. Lisa and I prefer well-pitched games with good defense and a bit of drama. So we were very happy when the Rockies’ Aaron Cook pitched a beautiful, complete-game shutout with just 79 pitches in a shade less than two hours. It’s not like the Padres played poorly either. They had some great defensive plays. The losing pitcher just had a bad fifth inning: four runs on three hits, a fielder’s choice, an errant throw by the shortstop and three stolen bases.

The Colorado Rockies’ park is very nice, and Lisa found us great seats. The weather this evening accommodated us, too. It’s too bad there wasn’t a bigger crowd in the house.

Tomorrow we’re heading to Rocky Mountain National Park. Despite living in Wyoming for several years, I’ve never been there. It looks very pretty from the pictures I’ve seen. We’ll need a little respite after the eventful day we’ve had.

Colorado Capitol Building, Denver – Click for larger

Yes, it was a very busy, hectic day. Let’s see. On account of a small bit of jet lag we got up a bit earlier than expected and had to stand in line with the young urban hipsters at Starbucks on their way to work. (No one here really understands how to pair shoes with an outfit.) Instead of going to the office we toured the Colorado Capitol. It’s kind of quaint. Government was not in session, so the building had the feel of a ghost town. I think we saw a tumbleweed blow through the rotunda. Everything is gilded, but they don’t have a bronze cod hanging from in the assembly chamber; so chalk another one up for the Mass State House.

Pioneer Mother, Denver – Click for larger

Just outside, we saw the “Closing of an Era” statue. If you believe the symbolism in the statuary, you might think that Native Americans killed the last bison and thus hastened their own doom. Compare and contrast that with the heroic pioneer woman holding a rifle and raising a child. (Your 2000 word essay is due by the end of the week.)

Closing of an Era, Denver – Click for larger

We continued our Western art historical adventure a few blocks away at the Denver Art Museum, which has a nice collection of Western American art. The rest of the collection befits a city of its size, but it feels a bit hodgepodge in places. Of course, we’re spoiled by the Boston arts environment, which is significant but very little compared to New York.

Western Art, Denver – Click for larger

I have mixed feelings about Western American art. Much of it is backward-looking, sentimental and overly romanticized; yet there are strains within “traditional” Western art that provide wonderful insight into how we experience and imagine the West. Plus there’s a lot of technical and artistic virtuosity in the genre as well. And I really love the landscape art of the West, especially the pieces by artists who show the West as it actually was in their time. I like the re-castings, re-imaginings, and re-examinations of the mythic place. After all, I do believe in the West and the Plains as places distinct from the much of the rest of the country. There’s something in the soil, the rocks and the sky and in the way we came about taking possession of it and struggle to hold onto it . . . or even know it.

Black American West Museum, Denver – Click for larger

Those who know us probably won’t be surprised that after some lunch we took a walk north from downtown, past an invisible red line, to take in the Black American West Museum. I had read a little bit about the “Exodusters” in Nell Irvin Painter’s fantastic Standing and Armageddon, but I really didn’t understand just how much the experience of African Americans in the West mirrored the experiences of almost every other non-indigenous group that emigrated in the 19th and 20th centuries. Doctors, miners, farmers, cowpokes, rodeo cowboys, soldiers, homesteaders, inventors, business owners — not to mention the obvious: fathers, mothers, children, laborers, strugglers — this museum presented a wealth of photographs, documents, and artifacts that showed African Americans chasing and creating the same American Dream that shows up in whitewashed histories and entertainment. It also played down overt racism and suggested that the West was much more egalitarian that those same mainstream sources suggest.

So if you’re in Denver for the Democratic convention or just passing through like us, take a walk up California Street or a short trolly ride to the museum. It’s worth it.

You can download the bibliography in EndNote 4 format. (Hey, it’s been a while since I used it.) Or you can browse it online. Some of the entries have additional notes not shown in the HTML.

(And I guess it’s time for me to admit that when I sat on a Bahamian beach soaking up the warm winter sun in December 1999, I was reading a 1924 copy of Benjamin H. Hibbard’s A History of the Public Land Policies. Yep, it was a strange time for me.)

One of the things I love about studying American history is seeing the evolution of the “American Character” — which I believe actually exists, for better or worse (mostly for the better) — or at least the expression of various recurring aspects of an ever-changing character. It’s something I can’t satisfactorily explain even to myself as I stare dimly across the unbridgeable void to the past; but at times I feel like it wouldn’t be much harder to relate to a Midwesterner of the early 19th century than one from today.

Yet, despite being a Westerner who knew militia folks and who thought for a while that federal laws made by D.C. bureaucrats and Northeastern elites were at best advisory when applied to a wild place like Wyoming, I still have trouble grasping the fire and passion in the mid-18th century over states’ rights conflicts, abolition, and Indian Removal. I can understand but not feel the ardor of the Second Great Awakening, which helped inspire the latter two. (For that matter, I can barely understand 1968 and am pretty sure I would have been a conservative square.)

Anyway, let’s bring this rambling reminiscence to a halt and get to the point. In 2000 I wrote a paper that examined Andrew Jackson’s differing reactions to the Marshall Court’s 1832 ruling in Worcester v. Georgia (in which he nullified the Supreme Court’s decision to exert Federal supremacy over states’ right regarding so-called “Indian removal”) and the Nullification Crisis (when he was ready to send federal troops to South Carolina to enforce an act of Congress.)

I never got around to revising it when I applied to grad schools in 2002, opting instead to go with a paper I was writing at the time about the western journeys of Major Stephen H. Long. (Perhaps I would have had better results if I had.) But if you can stand a few rough edges, you might be interested in reading To Raise Up an Interesting Commonwealth: Jackson’s Reaction to Worcester and Nullification.

But it was not to be. It’s hard to make up that much lost time, and I didn’t really have the mindset for researching in original sources, a skill that my “catch up” survey classes didn’t push. Now that I know better and have no serious desire to be a professional history, I would really love to do some original research (which probably explains why I’m so fascinated with tombstones these days).

And more than anything, I’m prone to scratch at an itch until I’m satisfied that I know enough about it to be able to define its key features, its edges, its historiography, and the why (not just the when and what). Since I finished my class early this month I’ve been reading voraciously about Afghanistan.

Afghanistan: the crossroads of the world, the graveyard of empires. Its recorded history extends thousands of years — Alexander of Macedonia lent his name to Kandahar, for goodness sake, and there’s another four to five thousand years in the archaeological record before he showed up. I’ve been reading a bit about that history recently, and I’d like to share it with you; but there’s way too much for one dispatch.

Its modern history intersects many of the 20th century’s historical themes: empire, globalization, the Cold War, and transnational terrorism. I think I was like most people who could only briefly describe Afghan history by giving a few keywords: Soviet invasion, mujahideen, Taliban, al-Qaeda. Not surprisingly, there’s a lot more to it than the plot of a Rambo movie. Since Sunday marked the round-number anniversary of the beginning of what might euphemistically be called the “Afghan’s troubles,” let’s take a closer look at the last thirty years of Afghanistan’s history.

Important note: Be sure to see the “Important Note on Sources” at the end of this dispatch.

An Overview

The last thirty years in Afghan history trace an arc that began with instability and war and continued downward to disaster intermingled with stability through totalitarian theocracy before the reemergence of a fragile civil society in the midst of war. It’s fair to say that Afghans have endured one insurgency or another since 1978. Here are some of the key dates for future reference:

• April 27, 1978 — Communist coup
• December 24, 1979 — The Soviet Army invades
• February 15, 1989 — The Soviets withdraw
• April 1992 — The communist government falls to the Mujahideen
• September 1996 — The Taliban take Kabul
• December, 2001 — The Taliban flee Kandahar

The Saur Revolution

Picture it, Kabul 1978. King Zahir Shah had been living in exile for five years since a mostly bloodless coup led by President Mohammed Daoud Khan. Afghanistan was a poor developing country with powerful neighbors. Its western neighbor, Iran, was close to theocratic revolution in 1979. Pakistan, to the east and south, had seen General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq seize power in a coup the year before. And the Soviet Union loomed large on its northern border. Though nominally unaligned, the Soviets poured billions of rubles of influence south over the preceding decades in the form of economic and military aid.

The People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) split into two factions in the 1960s. These two groups reunited in April 1978 following the assassination of a PDPA politician by Daoud’s forces. Fearing for their lives and seeing the chance for a socialist uprising, they initiated the Saur Revolution (or April Revolution) on April 27.

Nur Muhammad Taraki became the Prime Minister and packed the government with members of his own faction. Meanwhile rural Afghans were opposed to the secular regime and its anti-tribal policies: more rights for women, land and debt reform, an end to forced marriages, literacy campaigns, wage reforms, and policies aimed at reducing the influence of mosques. Meanwhile the PDPA attacked those who had formerly been part of the elite; most of those who were not killed fled the country. The government also imprisoned or killed many tribal leaders and mullahs. Over the next two years, the PDPA would kill more than 27,000 political prisoners. At all levels the state’s social and political institutions were in shambles.

The Insurgency

A grassroots insurgency — which had started as an anti-Daoud movement in the Panjshir Valley in 1975 — gained strength and took inspiration from Zia-ul-Haq’s recasting of Pakistan as an Islamic republic in 1977. It’s important to know that from the beginning the Afghan mujahideen reflected rural tribal structures and were ideological diverse. Resistance against an out-of-touch government intermingled with jihad in favor of redefining Afghanistan as a nation with an essentially Islamic character. In addition, the PDPA targeted “disloyal” members of Daoud’s military infrastructure, which led to a high rate of military defections to the resistance.

The insurgency was disorganized but still capable of disrupting the functioning of the state. Pakistan aided the rebels, worrying that the new government would attempt to reunify “Pashtunistan,” which straddles the rather arbitrary Afghanistan-Pakistan border. The PDPA government repeatedly requested Soviet military assistance, which slowly started arriving in the form of logistical support and training in June 1978. US President Jimmy Carter worried that the communist coup was the harbinger of a Soviet power play for Middle Eastern oil fields. In July, he authorized the CIA to start giving military assistance to the mujahideen in the hopes of eventually drawing the Soviets into their own costly Asian land war. Thanks to foreign involvement and the tenacity of the insurgents themselve, by the middle of 1979 the PDPA-run People’s Democratic Republic of Afghanistan was near collapse.

Meanwhile back in Kabul, the two factions of the nominally reunited PDPA struggled for control over the levers of government. In September 1979, internecine ideological battles erupted into partisan violence whne Hafizullah Amin led a bloody coup against Taraki. Over the following months, the Soviet military already in the country became increasingly weary of Amin, his allegiances, and his competency.

In addition, Moscow saw the February 1979 Iranian revolution as distracting the US from the region. At the same time, the Soviets were worried that the Egypt-Israel peace treaty signed in March 1979 threatened to draw the region closer to the USA. There was evidence that the US sphere of influence was extending over nonaligned nations that had previously leaned eastward: namely Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Iraq.

The Soviet Occupation

Worried about the stability of the Afghan government, trying to bolster their waning influence, and convinced that the US was distracted, on December 24, 1979, the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan en masse. They quickly seized Kabul, killed Amin, and installed Babrak Karmal as the new head of state. International reaction was swift but hollow and proved incapable of directly countering the Soviet intervention.

The mujahideen insurgency stepped up the ferocity of their activities in a nationalist backlash against the invasion. And Karmal quickly induced the Soviet army to take on the mujahideen throughout the country. Instead of executing a quick display of overwhelming force that would lead to stability, the Soviets found themselves fighting urban uprisings, tribal forces, and mutinous Afghan army units. The fighting quickly settled into guerrilla warfare, with the resistance armed mainly by the US CIA via the Pakistan intelligence services (ISI) due to the covert nature of US aid and in order to keep Pakistan stable. The mujahideen was also partly funded by the Saudis.

The PDPA never really gained unity or independence during the Soviet occupation. The government was fractured along regional, social, linguistic and ideological differences and disagreements. The new Gorbachev government in 1985 publicly expressed its displeasure with the state of the war and the direction of the Karmal government. In particular, he knew Soviet citizens were tired of war, and he didn’t want the Afghan situation to get in the way of a broader resolution to the Cold War. In May of the next year, Mohammed Najibullah took over leadership of the government, and Moscow was looking at him to increase internal security and set the stage for a Soviet withdrawal. He succeeded in integrating some non-Marxists into his government and sent out offers of a ceasefire to over 40,000 insurgents. These actions had limited success, and Najibullah was primarily strengthening his post-withdrawal situation.

The UN-brokered 1988 Geneva Accord between the USSR and Pakistan was a face-saving agreement that stipulated a Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan. The Soviet forces started leaving on May 15, 1988, and the last troops left on February 15 of the next year. At the time of their departure, there was no political agreement among the various Afghan factions. The minority Shia groups and the refugees were not included in the de-escalation process. And the opposition thought that with the Soviets gone they might be able to win outright. Pakistan’s foreign policy was too fragmented for the ISI or General Zia to broker a solution. Ten years of war had increased tribalism and the role of warlords while killing over 15,000 Soviet and Afghan troops, an unknown number of mujahideen, and more than a million Afghan civilians. Throughout the war, five and a half million Afghans fled to Iran, Pakistan, and other countries.

The Post-Soviet Civil War

Throughout the Soviet occupation, the Mujahideen took aim at both military and civilian targets. When the USSR departed in 1989, they turned their attention to Najibullah, who held on much longer than anyone suspected. The mujahideen were hindered by their inability to coordinate tactics and logistics and had little political cohesion, despite the formation of the Islamic Unity of Afghanistan Mujahideen (IUAM) in 1985 and the declaration of the Interim Islamic State of Afghanistan two years later. So who were the leaders of the anti-Soviet war who now set their sights on finishing off the so-called Democratic Republic of Afghanistan (DRA)?

• Gulbuddin Hekmatyar — Pashtun, favorite of the ISI, political Islamist affiliated with Hezb-i-Islami (Gulbuddin) party, IUAM.
• Ahmad Shah Massoud — Tajik, led the Northern Alliance, affiliated with Jamiat-e Islami. He was closely aligned with Rabanni, Bimusllah Khan, Mohammed Fahim, and Gul Haider.
• Mohammad Yunus Khalis — Pashtun, hardline fundamentalist political Islamist affiliated with Hezb-i-Islami (Khalis) party and IUAM. He eventually supported the Taliban and was supported by Abdul Haq and Jalaluddin Haqqani.
• Burhanuddin Rabbani — Tajik, led the Jamiat-e Islami and supported the Northern Alliance, member of IUAM.
• Abdul Rasul Sayyaf — Pashtun, led the Islamic Union for the Liberation of Afghanistan, a political Islamist, was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood and IUAM with Hekmatyar and Rabbani, received a lot of aid from Arabs, worked with and later betrayed Massoud.
• Pir Syed Ahmed Gailani — Pashtun, a leading traditionalist figure among the royalist expatriates, led the National Islamic Front for Afghanistan, member of the IUAM.
• Sibghatullah Mojaddedi — Of Arab origin, the traditionalist leader of the Afghanistan National Liberation Front. He was a moderate figure and largely marginalized by the ISI despite being selected the titular head of Interim Islamic State of Afghanistan in 1987.
• Mohammad Nabi Mohammadi — Pashtun, traditionalist leader of the Revolutionary Islamic Movement and member of IUAM.
• Abdul Rashid Dostum — Uzbek, leader of National Islamic Movement of Afghanistan, allied with the Northern Alliance and funded by Turkey.

Hekmatyar, Massoud, and Sayyaf were the most powerful mujahideen leaders and each sought to topple the government in Kabul. The USSR still hoped to prevent the collapse of the DRA, while the US worked to inflect more humiliation on the Soviets with Najibullah’s defeat. Each superpower continued to pump money into the civil war, which quickly devolved to rocket attacks on urban areas.

In 1989 Najibullah’s nationalist forces repelled the mujahideen at Jalalabad in 1989, which strengthened the central government. But a year later following a failed coup, the president purged the army, hastening defections to the mujahideen; and he governed more through personal alliances, which deepened divisions within his government and weakened the state. The final blow to the DRA came with the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The Russian and American presidents Boris Yeltsin and George H. W. Bush agreed to suspend aid to both sides of the conflict on January 1st, 1992. Militia loyalty sagged, and desertions rose. Provincial officials had been making deals with mujahideen fighters with whom they shared common ethnicity, and when Dostum defected to the insurgency in March 1992, many others followed him. On April 17, 1992, Najibullah dissolved his government and fled to the UN compound in Kabul, where he remained for four more years.

Following the fall of the PDPA, the Jamiat organized to take Kabul with Mojaddedi as president, with Massoud and Sayyaf in the cabinet. Most of the remaining PDPA members fled the country or joined forces with Hekmatyar, who started artillery and rocket attacks on Kabul in an attempt to dislodge the Jamiat government. Shortly after Rabbani took over in June 1992, the alliance started to crack. In particular, Dostum wanted more influence in the government. The Kabul administration had little control over Kandahar, which suffered tribal violence. And external forces (such as Iran and Saudi Arabia) further destabilized the country via proxy armies. Several peace attempts failed for personal and ethnic reasons.

The rise of the Taliban

By 1994 Afghanistan had endured more than 15 years of instability and violence. Following the Soviet withdrawal, more than 25,000 civilians had died in Kabul alone due to indiscriminate violence between factions trying to control the destiny of the nation. During the same period, more than five million Afghans sought refuge in Iran and Pakistan, mostly in the Pashtun tribal areas.

At the same time that the US provided money and weapons to the insurgency, many Arab nations provided their own funding and mujahids. Yet more funds went toward creating schools that mixed strict, fundamentalist interpretations of the Koran with paramilitary training. Pakistan’s ISI trained an estimated 100,000 mujahideen at these madrasas during the civil war.

Mullah Mohammed Omar was one of the mujahideen at the center of all of these forces. He admired the Saudi Sheikh Abdullah Yusuf Azzam, who issued a fatwa urging men to fight in Afghanistan, set up a logistics service in Peshawar, and inspired Osama bin Laden to found al-Qaeda. With ISI support Mullah Omar began organizing tribal commanders and other mujahideen during 1994, capturing Kandahar in November 1994 and Herat in September 1995. A year later, his forces took Kabul and formed the new Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.

Following the Taliban takeover, the United Islamic Front (better known as the Northern Alliance) coalesced around a half-dozen mujahideen groups. Rabbani was the putative leader, but Massoud was the driving force along with Mohammed Fahim. The various NA groups were aided by Iran, Turkey, and India; and they included many Shia Afghans. They captured Bagram in October 1996 but couldn’t take Kabul. In Mazar-e-Sharif, a key defection caused Dostum to flee to Uzbekistan, allowing the Taliban to retake the city in August 1998. The Taliban persecuted the Shia Hazara, killing eight thousand. At the end of 1999, the Taliban controlled 95% of Afghanistan.

Despite their success at capturing territory, the Taliban were not very interested in government. They combined sharia law with Pashtun social codes and strict, punitive interpretations of Islam. The Taliban replaced most national bureaucrats with (frequently) unqualified Pashtun loyalists; the central government effectively ceased to function. At the local level, Taliban loyalists replaced ethnic and tribal leaders and frequently couldn’t even speak the local language. The new Afghanistan was a failed state from the very beginning.

The lingering fall of the Taliban

From 1978 to 2001, Afghan political history was characterized by a steady state of instability punctuated by rapid changes in political control. Throughout these years foreign involvement acted as a major catalyst. First the Soviet influence and invasion, followed by American covert aid through Pakistan, who went on to be the major external force. So it shouldn’t be surprising that following the 2001 terrorist attacks, the United States would be capable of quickly transforming Afghan politics. Nor should it be surprising that six and a half years later Afghanistan is still has an active insurgency, with the government pointing the finger of blame at one of its neighbors.

I’m not especially interested in military history; for me, wars and battles are the lacunae between the political and social causes of wars and the reconstruction and reconciliation that follow. So I’m not going to go into tremendous detail about the dozens of military operations that have happened since 9/11. But I would be delinquent if I didn’t provide a sketch.

The combined Afghan-American rout of the Taliban was unprecedentedly swift. The CIA was on the ground coordinating Northern Alliance operations in September 2001, several weeks before the US declared war on the Taliban on October 7, 2001, starting with air strikes around Kabul, Jalalabad, and Kandahar. On November 9, the Northern Alliance took Mazar-e-Sharif in one day. The next day the Taliban completely collapsed in the north, retreating southward. On November 12, the Taliban fled Kabul; the Northern Alliance entered on the 13th. A day later, all of the Taliban governments in the provinces bordering Iran collapsed. Only Kunduz and Kandahar were still under Taliban control. Kunduz collapsed after nine days of siege on November 25, and when the Qala-i-Jani fortress was retaken on December 2, the war in the north was effectively won. On the same day that Kunduz fell, the US Marines arrived, the first regular troops in the country. Mullah Omar infamously fled Kandahar on December 7, 2001.

Taliban and al-Qaeda forces regrouped in Tora Bora, a mountainous area near the Pakistan border. By mid-December the senior leadership of both groups had fled across the mountains into Pakistan’s tribal areas, eventually making their way back into Afghanistan in 2002. Since that time the NATO-led coalition has waged dozens of operations against the Taliban insurgency, and the violence has spread east into Pakistan in the so-called Waziristan war, greatly destabilizing the Musharraf government.

The Islamic Republic of Afghanistan

Hamid Karzai, a mujahid in the traditionalist strain, quickly became the West’s favorite for political leadership. He became the first chairman of the governing committee after the Bonn Agreement of December 5, 2001. The political agreement was just one of four competing loya jirgas held after the start of the war. Another loya jirga in June 2002 appointed Karzai the transitional president, and he later was elected president of the new Islamic Republic of Afghanistan in October 2004.

And that’s more or less where history meets the contemporary. And now I will follow the lead of Thucydides and bow out until a sufficient period has passed for us to be able to clearly see the outcome of uncertain events.

Important Note on Sources

This is not an original work of scholarship. Most of this article is recreated from notes that I took reading a warren of articles linked to the much-better-than-average Wikipedia series on the Civil War in Afghanistan. It is entirely possible that I have inadvertently lifted passage wholesale. Furthermore, despite the high quality of several of these articles, some are flagged for bias, incompleteness, and accuracy. If you are doing academic research, you should consider this article an overview with a rather basic level of analysis. You certainly must go to the original Wikipedia articles for context, attribution, and original sources (if they are given).

With that said, I try not to spout nonsense. The Wikipedia details (for the most part) match those in three very good sources. For the period between 1978 and 2001, see Steve Coll’s Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001; it’s the best source currently available. For details on the “Afghan Arabs” and their links to the anti-Soviet insurgency and the Taliban, see The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, which I previously reviewed here. And for first-person account of the CIA war in Afghanistan after 9/11, see the infuriatingly redacted Jawbreaker: The Attack on Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda by Gary Berntsen and Ralph Pezzullo.

For background on the Taliban, see Ahmed Rashid’s Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia.

I undertook to write this article because after seven years of casually following Afghanistan, I was still deeply confused about why there was still continuous fighting. During the height of the US- and NATO-led war I primarily listened to NPR reporting and read articles in the New York Times and The Economist. Sarah Chayes, the NPR reporter who reported much of the news, stayed in Afghanistan and has written a book about life after the invasion: The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan After the Taliban.