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.