"Afghanistan never has had, and never can have, the cohesion and consistency of a regular monarchical government. The nation consists of a mere collection of tribes, of unequal power and with divergent habits, which are held together, more or less closely, according to the personal character of the chief who rules them. The feeling of patriotism, as known in Europe, cannot exist among the Afghans, for there is no common country... There is no natural or ethnical reason why Herat and Candahar should be attached to Cabul. Herat is inhabited by races entirely alien to the Afghans, by Jamshidis, Eymaks, and Hazrehs; while at Candahar, though the lands were parcelled out by Nadir Shah in the middle of the last century among the Durrani aristocracy, and their descendants still exist as a privileged class, the peasantry are everywhere of Persian, or Tajik, or Turkish descent, and have no community of felling with the northern and eastern Afghans."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Henry Rawlinson, as quoted in Modern Afghanistan: A History of Struggle and Survival (2004), by Amin Saikal, p. 30
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Kabul
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Kabul
3 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Kabul →
Related Quotes
"The Arab traveller-geographer-chronicler al-Istakhri gives the following picture of Kabul in 921. Kábul has a castle …"
"When day broke Sam returned to Manuchehr’s side. The king said to him, “Choose some chieftains and go from here to In…"
"Islamabad, “the city of Islam,” the capital of Pakistan, was new. It had been built about twenty years before by a mi…"
"Warschau wird glattrasiert."
"’Twas a night to make the bravest Shrink from the tempest’s breath, For the winter snows were bitter, And the winds w…"
"From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind tha…"
"When the Jews finally staged the uprising in April 1943, the Polish underground refused them almost every form of ass…"
"So there is no single European people. There is no single all-embracing community of culture and tradition among, say…"
"Cultivation, old civilization, beauty, history! Surprising turnings of streets, shapes of venerable cottages, lovely …"
"Well, from here I will go to Bonn and then Berlin, where there stands a grim symbol of power untamed. The Berlin Wall…"