Third World Wired

I first spotted the visual that dominates this site in an online exhibition called Battlespace: Unrealities of War. It depicts the harsh mountain topography of Nuristan Province,  eastern Afghanistan. Photographer Jared Moossy, who shot the image in early 2008, describes it as a “pivotal landscape” revealing an “intimidating” terrain of war. The explorer Eric Newby, writing in A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush fifty years earlier, observed, famously, of its highest peak: “one of the lonely places of the earth with all the winds of Asia droning over it, where the mountains seemed like the bones of the world breaking through.”

Rugged and brutal, its lines and crags suggest an impossibly remote, impenetrable environment – where life, you might imagine, is reduced to a primitive emphasis on survival. Violent asceticism seethes and simmers here, matched by a rich, amplified loam of histories, beliefs, and behaviors. The militants and warlords who thrive in landscapes like this one, the International Crisis Group argues, are as plugged in as any urban technophile. “The Taliban,” it writes, “has created a sophisticated communications apparatus that projects an increasingly confident movement.” Practiced guerrillas, they use “the full range of media… tapping into strains of Afghan nationalism and exploiting policy failures by the Kabul government and its international backers.”

Wired to the hilt. Living in the stone age.  These juxtapositions – and the seams and subtleties they obscure – are where bare life and global world splice high capacity threads of mutually corrosive syntax. They’ve  often been described in colonialist and orientialist terms;  a third world wired that lends itself to defiance and imagination… anchored, through its stolid topologies, in optics of breathtaking scale.

Newby wrote “I had the sensation of emerging from a country that would continue to exist more or less unchanged whatever disasters overtook the rest of mankind.” Something to think about. Maybe something to write about.