"Many of these young warriors did not even know the history of their own country or the story of the jihad against the Soviets. These boys were a world apart from the mujaheddin whom I had got to know during the 1980s - men who could recount their tribal and clan lineages, remembered their abandoned farms and valleys with nostalgia and recounted legends and stories from afghan history. These boys were from a generation who had never seen their country at peace - and Afghanistan not at war with invaders and itself. They had no memories of their tribes, their elders, their neighbours nor the complex ethnic mix of peoples that often made up their villages and their homeland. These boys were what the war had thrown up like the sea's sirrender on the beach of history.

      They had no memories of the past, no plans for the future while the present was everything. (...) they admired war because it was the only occupation they could possibly adapt to."

            (p.32, Taliban, Ahmed Rashid )

" - If I didn't take these pills, I'd commit mass murder on half the parents of this school and help the other half throw their kids through the window ... "

      ( excerpt as I remember it said by one of the teachers in Detachment, movie by Tony Kaye, with Adrien Brody ).

        Though I use them a lot, the phrases "west", "first world", "third world", etc ... are totally misguiding. They tell us more of what we would like the world to be ( rich and peaceful and dominating the rest - in the First, the West, and well, the rest, the problems and the wars and misery in the rest of the world ), than what the world is like. And when you read this book, by Ahmed Rashid, and see this movie, you clearly see the inanity of these phrases : the misery, especially the mental misery, is everywhere as powerful and destroying. Kids in Afghanistan have nothing left to grow up, not even whole families where they could feel secure, let alone food and school and homes etc ... And in one of the richest countries in the world, you see lives of people, who even with food, schools and sort of homes, are totally lost and perturbed, with nothing to hang on to.

         That's why I try, too, not to read or watch this sort of books and movies too often, because precisely I totally lack the necessary "detachment" so that I can live the rest of my day or week without being seriously saddened, if not depressed, by these stories, as far away from me as they seem to be.