Uncharted Thoughts.

We all remember where we were on September the 11th, 2001. When two Boeing 767 aircrafts crashed into the twin towers in New York.

I was 6. In my morning computer class at school. If I remember correctly we were sent home early. My mum came and picked me up and we walked home through the park next to my school.

I remember my father being home at the time. He was sat watching the T.V. I walked past it and glanced at a burning tower.

Is this where my obsession with understanding Afghanistan came from? Perhaps… or was it old stories my dad used to tell me about his youth, about a man who lived in his street when he was a kid… Spike… Spider… Syd… something like that.

He used to throw wild parties, dad would go along with some friends, drink beer, smoke some strange weed. Have fun.

One day, Spider, went missing. He just left town one day and never came back. His house, which was decorated by a mattress on the floor and a couple of rugs on the ground, was left to rot.

Everyone forgot about Spider, everyone grew up. Dad, turned 19 or 20. One day while at home, he looked out his bedroom window and saw a man, ragged looking, shuffling down the road. It was Spider, it had been three or four years.

Dad ran out to meet him “Hey, Spider, what the hell?”

Spider looked at him, half blazed, half… aware “Oh hey clive how you doing?”

“Where have you been man? It’s been years”

“Oh, I went out to Afghanistan. Been out there”

Maybe it was Spider, and his strange adventures that triggered my curiosity.

Or was it because so many of the people I love served there. Fought and lost themselves to the fog of war. When I was 16, 17, my best friends brother served in Afghanistan. He was 18.

Whatever the start gun, Afghanistan has been in the back of my mind for many years, and will continue to be for many years to come.

In my research for this new project (The Bravest Women on Earth), I have been deep in the archives of real world and online libraries. While doing so, I stumbled across a picture album of Afghanistan before NATO, before 9/11, before the Taliban and the Soviets. (Lost in Time: Groovy Afghanistan).

Women dressed in skirts walk to classes at the University of Kabul. Now, of course women are confined to the thin blue fabric walls of the Burqa.

Men selling records at a local record shop. Now, music is banned by Sharia Law.

Foreigners camp in the Band-e Amir canyon. Now, the majority of foreigners would be banned from visiting, or perhaps their life at risk for doing so.

Women graduate side by side with men at the university. Now women are unable to attend classes past the age of 6.

A picture of a woman working at a local pharmacy or hospital, counting stock. Now, women are even banned from learning about midwifery.

We are told on a regular basis that the world isn’t as bad as it was 200 years ago, 100 years ago. That life is better now than it ever has been.

But I think this is a lie. I think poverty is on the climb. Religious fanaticism is on the climb. Parts of the world are becoming medieval and ignored by the west. War is creeping back from the shadows of the ‘long peace’. Migration is spiking, civil unrest is blooming.

We are no longer in the ‘long peace’… Evil is shifting, and it is being met by poverty and unrest.

I believe we are entering a new era of conflict and destruction. Our generation, and those below, will witness horrors unimaginable to our comprehension.