I cannot know a country or its people by seeing a single image of poverty, or of greed or indeed of wealth, a picture of a skyscraper in Dubai tells me little of anything. Afghanistan is a misrepresented nucleus that sits at the centre of a western paranoia. It is more than just a malignancy, it is a people and a culture, a ‘play thing’ and a religion, it is a thousand unexplained facets that never make the light of day, and would be misunderstood all the same. The essential power of the media misaligns the truth of our perceptions so that we are left with a poor mans distillate, a place of fact without resonance, a smash of issues without context. Afghanistan may be the ‘New Great Game’ but mostly it is 30 million people with 5,000 years of heritage, which in 30 years has been reduced to a dark void in the pantheon of humanity.
