Friday, July 20, 2007

Coming to a country near you

In the coming decades, close to 500,000 Afghani males will reach fighting age each year. Almost all of these young men want to prove themselves in the traditional warrior spirit of their homeland. Since 1945, every Afghan father who has retired from the battlefield has left his unfinished fighting to three or four sons. Almost none of these sons can find a legal job, i.e. in opium-free agriculture or within the army and police units financed with western money.
-- Gunnar Heinsohn, The demographics of rage.

I recall Emmanuel Todd, shortly after the publication of After the Empire: The Breakdown of the American Order back in 2001, making some disturbing projections for Pakistan on the basis of its demographic and sociological trends.

No comments: