Afghanistan: The generational shift you always end up waiting on

WORLD: "The Afghan Age Divide: A rising generation wants a bigger voice in shaping its nation," by Aryn Baker, Time, 14 August 2009.

Nice piece. More than 70% of Afghanistan is under 30.

While today's young Afghans have experienced the ravages of war, they have also witnessed--as refugees or through TV and the Internet--an alternative: governments accountable to the public.

Connectivity is a dangerous, destabilizing thing, creatively destructive in the worst way. The rap on me (Barnett thinks connectivity creates peace instantly) has always missed the point about it being the Pentagon's new map: connectivity is revolution. It will almost always get scarier and more unstable before it settles down, and no, containment is a chimera. There is no containing globalization, our international liberal trade order unleashed upon the planet. There is only mitigation.

The revolution is largely generational (young v. old) and gender-based (women against men). It offends custom on almost every level possible.

Comments

[Louis Heberlein]

It seems like tacking a sailing ship into partial headwinds through a dangerous strait. If you tact too soon you waste momentum because you approach rocks too soon and have to tact back the other way. If you tact too early you stall at the mid point and are pushed backward. Meanwhile the unskilled folks on board chatter on how they could do better ... but not this time with all those rocks.

[Tom Barnett]

Everybody wants it neat, like their scotch.