season 4 of blowback talks a lot about the Afghan-Pakistan region. fun fact: the line between Pakistan and Afghanistan, a completely imaginary line drawn by a British Civil Servant named Mortimer in 1898 has never been recognized by the people in the area.

if i recall correctly, though afghanistan was struggling to cast off feudal past much like the people of the czarist russian empire, it had the beginnings of a socialist movement by the time of the revolution. afghanistan was the first country to recognize the Bolshevik government. pakistan, though fully breaking off from india post british-raj was still a political project with deeply entrenched connections between their elites, intelligence services, and their anglosphere counterparts. the pakistan side of the eventual durand line was used as a site to amass people and materials for empowering and protecting the opium gangsters that fueled the Opium Wars which had made many british lords / East India Company very wealthy. in the cold war era, it was again used to re-establish connections to the entrenched warlords that had birthed in the manure of those gangsters and their opium wealth. another fun fact: pakistan got to be site of the bank that funded western sponsored terrorism. it's really critical to remember that during this era of the cold war (1970s), the US/UK was militarily allied with Pakistan, Turkey, Iran, and Iraq. it was literally called the Bhagdad Pact.

Investigative journalist and author Joseph J. Trento has argued that the bank's transformation was guided by the head of Saudi intelligence with a view to enabling it to finance covert American intelligence operations at a time, in the aftermath of Watergate, when the American intelligence agencies were defending themselves from investigations by domestic authorities.

these gangsters with their fiefdoms HATED what socialism/communism represented and routinely issued public death threats to women politicians (the only women politicians in afghanistan were communists, of course) and engaged in political violence to intimidate and murder them and eventually anyone who supported women's rights. they were of course naturally approached by the CIA to partner up against the soviet neighbors. i believe in a single year with CIA support and training, these monsters and their private militias burned out 1500 schools just for the crime of teaching literacy to girls/women. this and the sponsoring of incursions into the USSR was an untold part of the lead up to the soviet invasion of afghanistan for me.

there's more details in the episodes about dates, times, events, and individuals... but anyone who claims the tribal areas of Afganistan-Pakistan and their reactionary features are not a direct product of british colonialism and hardcore cold war anglosphere meddling is ignorant.

on a more personal note, i have never met anyone associated with USAID that didn't have insanely racist / US state department brainworms, with memory holes where there should be knowledge of historical events.