Also, since some people here (and elsewhere, including my own family) seem to be under the impression that Afghanistan has always been a pre-modern shithole, here you go:
https://allthatsinteresting.com/1960s-afghanistan
It's exactly the same for Iran. And hell, Transjordan (modern Saudi Arabia), to some extent, before the fucking Al-Saud family took it over... Take the Islamism, and the geopolitics (Britain, USSR, AND the US, also increasingly China and India) out of these places, and you would have had a modern, functional country, if not necessarily a Western-style "democracy"...
See also Egypt, Turkey, Algeria, Pakistan, Palestine, Lebanon and fucking Indonesia. I am not kidding when I say that all these places have gone massively backwards since the 1970s, and that is absolutely not a coincidence...
Also, since some people here (and elsewhere, including my own family) seem to be under the impression that Afghanistan has always been a pre-modern shithole, here you go: https://allthatsinteresting.com/1960s-afghanistan
It's exactly the same for Iran. And hell, Transjordan (modern Saudi Arabia), to some extent, before the fucking Al-Saud family took it over... Take the Islamism, and the geopolitics (Britain, USSR, AND the US, also increasingly China and India) out of these places, and you would have had a modern, functional country, if not necessarily a Western-style "democracy"...
See also Egypt, Turkey, Algeria, Pakistan, Palestine, Lebanon and fucking Indonesia. I am not kidding when I say that all these places have gone massively backwards since the 1970s, and that is absolutely not a coincidence...