Biruni

[Biruni @rayhan_biruni]

@yejaazy @grok list major battles between soviet and Massoud who was the decisive winner.

[Biruni @rayhan_biruni]

The Afghan Who Won the Cold War (Ahmad Shah Masood)
Wall Street Journal (1923-); May 5, 1992

"Every citizen of every former communist regime owes a deep debt of gratitude to Afghan mujahedeen commander Ahmad Shah Masood ... Mr. Masood broke the back of Soviet imperialism”

[Biruni @rayhan_biruni]

The catastrophe that followed Najibullah’s fall should not become an alibi for the repression that sustained his rule.

As head of KhAD, he presided over a security apparatus that tortured, disappeared, and executed suspected opponents. Students, teachers, civil servants, and political rivals faced imprisonment and interrogation at facilities including Sedarat, Shashdarak, and Pul-e Charkhi.

Built with Soviet KGB support, KhAD extended the state’s reach into universities, workplaces, and households through an extensive network of officers and informers. Its operations crossed into Pakistan through bombings, abductions, and assassinations. War orphans became subjects of ideological indoctrination intended to produce loyal servants of the regime.

[Biruni @rayhan_biruni]

@CMShehbaz This is how it started: "SA bombed the Houthi-controlled Sana’a airport in protest at Iranian efforts to send a plane to the city containing a Houthi delegation returning from the funeral of the Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei."
https://t.co/8DO2q97trm

[Biruni @rayhan_biruni]

@MikeLevin Congressman, have you looked the unemployment rates for newly graduates cs major in San Diego. Why are more concern for h1b over your own constituents?

[African Maps @MapsAfrican]

The Persian language concentration in the 17th century

[Biruni @rayhan_biruni]

Phillipson’s framework actually weakens the claim that “Persian colonized Pashto,” because linguistic imperialism requires more than cultural prestige: it requires political and institutional power systematically reproducing one language’s dominance over another.

Persian certainly had greater literary prestige, bureaucratic reach, and value as an interethnic lingua franca. But linguistic imperialism, in Phillipson’s sense, is not just prestige. It is the reproduction of linguistic hierarchy through state and institutional power.

In Afghanistan, the historical picture is almost inverted: Pashtun dynasties held political sovereignty, while Persian retained enormous cultural and administrative capital; the modern state then repeatedly intervened to elevate Pashto.

So the better description is not “Persian colonized Pashto,” but a mismatch between political and linguistic power: Pashtun political dominance coexisting with Persianate cultural hegemony.

[Mahmood Marhoon @MahmoodMarhoon1]

#جنابان و خانمان که دعوه بلند و مطالعه کمتر دارند و برای بار اول اصطلاح بسیار مهم (استعمار زبانی یا امپریالیزم زبانی) را می شنود حتماً به این مراجع سر بزند.
شاید چیزهای جدید بفهمند.
به پرخاش کردن، چیغ زدن، تهمت بندن و هرزه ګفتن خود برحق ثابت کرده نمی تواند این قرن بیست یک است استدلال نماید حرف بزنید، نوشتن پارسی بنده را بمانید به استدلال و محتوا توجه نماید .

[Biruni @rayhan_biruni]

@Mariamistan @KarzaiH @grok who did Daud Khan militarily supported in Pakistan and what was his aim ?

[Biruni @rayhan_biruni]

For centuries, Persian served as a transethnic lingua franca across Central and South Asia. Turkic Ghaznavids, Mughals and Pashtun Durranis all operated within this Persianate political tradition.

The major break came with modern nation building. Influenced by nineteenth century European ethnolinguistic nationalism, Afghan nationalists such as Mahmud Tarzi argued that national identity should instead be centered on Pashto.

Persian had historically connected populations across ethnic boundaries. The elevation of Pashto as Afghanistan’s national language was therefore a modern state building project, not a continuation of the region’s older administrative tradition.

[karamez @z4dran]

He’s right that Pashto is the national language of Afghanistan. im not a qawaparast but if you look at the history of the Afghan state we played a central role in its formation and political development and we are the country’s largest ethnic group.

[Biruni @rayhan_biruni]

Podcast: “Ahmad shah Masood was an effective, amazing, sensible, intelligent, and lovely commander”

Pashtun Nationalist: according to the podcast ASM was an cia asset

[𝐊𝐡𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐝 𝐖𝐚𝐫𝐝𝐚𝐠🇦🇫 @Kali_Vardag]

The latest episode of @EmpirePodUK released with the special guest, Steve Coll, two times Pulitzer Prize winner and author of Ghost Wars.

The "national hero" leaves behind a massive piece of history: #Ahmad_Shah_Massoud was directly on the #CIA payroll.

According to Steve Coll’s Ghost Wars, Massoud received $200,000 A MONTH in direct CIA cash, alongside lump-sum payments like $500,000 & 900,000 for specific CIA funded assignments.

In his own memoir First In, CIA officer Gary Schroen explicitly acknowledged that he personally delivered these secret cash payments directly to Massoud's network in Pakistan.

While portrayed as a purely grassroots independent liberator, primary accounts from the intelligence officers involved reveal a deeply funded covert relationship.

History isn't built on sanitized myths. Know the whole story.
#Afghanistan #History #AhmadShahMassoud #GhostWars

[Biruni @rayhan_biruni]

He is talking out of ass, the book talks about how Masood took money from cia but didn’t follow commands which made him too independent for an ally. Also, the amount of funding that went into ant Soviet are in billions. Free 100k is nothing. From the book he is citing:

https://t.co/8tfc5FaYIJ

[Biruni @rayhan_biruni]

“There were reasons to be skeptical about the value of such a liaison with Massoud. Most CIA officers who knew Afghanistan admired Massoud’s canniness and courage. But episodes such as the $500,000 Salang Highway payment signaled that Massoud’s innate independence could make him an unpredictable ally. “

[Biruni @rayhan_biruni]

“There were reasons to be skeptical about the value of such a liaison with Massoud. Most CIA officers who knew Afghanistan admired Massoud’s canniness and courage. But episodes such as the $500,000 Salang Highway payment signaled that Massoud’s innate independence could make him an unpredictable ally. “

[Biruni @rayhan_biruni]

Do you even read what you talk about ? “Massoud negotiated for a $500,000 cash payment, and Schroen delivered the money to one of Massoud’s brothers on January 31, 1990.
But Massoud’s forces never moved, as far as the CIA could tell. Furious at “that little bastard,” as he called him in frustration, Harry cut Massoud’s monthly stipend from $200,000 to $50,000. The Islamabad station sent a message to the Panjshir emphasizing the CIA’s anger and dismay.
All across Afghanistan the CIA’s offensive stalled. The mujahedin seemed uncoordinated, unmotivated, and distracted by internal warfare. They did not capture any major cities; Najibullah remained in power in Kabul, unmolested.”

[Biruni @rayhan_biruni]

Women’s inheritance and marriage rights were already mandated by Islamic law centuries before Abdur Rahman Khan; he did not create them. The relevant question is how women were actually treated under his state.

Dr. John Alfred Gray was a British physician who served as the Amir’s personal doctor and lived at Abdur Rahman Khan’s court in Kabul for several years. He wrote At the Court of the Amîr after leaving Afghanistan, publishing it in 1895. His position gave him unusually close access to the Amir, his household, officials, military officers, and the daily workings of the court—not as a distant traveler, but as a physician who treated the ruler and moved within his inner circle. Gray recorded that during the Hazara wars, after the men were largely killed, “the women and children became a glut in the market.” He described gangs of Hazara women being marched through Kabul under soldiers with fixed bayonets, and wrote that the Amir would reward loyal officers and servants by giving them captured women “as an addition to his Harem.”

Gray described slavery in Kabul as “simply a question of property,” writing that an owner had the power to “sell, kill, or do as he pleases with his slave.”

He also recorded reports from Turkestan that “Girls had been fastened to the earth and tortured; women and children sold as slaves—and much more.”

And regarding the Hazaras specifically, Gray wrote that their rebellions were driven by the “outrages and atrocious cruelties practised upon them by His Highness’s troops.”

Source: John Alfred Gray, At the Court of the Amîr (1895)

[Sanga Siddiqi @SangaSiddiqi]

تاریخ سیاه و سفید نیست!

هر سیاستمدار و حاکمی، همان‌طور که می‌تواند کارنامه‌ای سیاه و پر از اشتباه داشته باشد، مسلماً اقداماتی نیز انجام داده است که نمی‌توان آن‌ها را انکار کرد یا از ��فحات تاریخ حذف نمود.

بخشی از صحبت‌های من که مورد انتقاد برخی دوستان قرار گرفته، مربوط به مبارزات سیاسی و اجتماعی زنان پیش از استقلال افغانستان بود. منابع تاریخی ثبت کرده‌اند که در دورهٔ عبدالرحمان خان، حق میراث زنان به رسمیت شناخته شد و این موضوع در قوانین مکتوب آن دوره نیز انعکاس یافت.

پذیرفتن این واقعیت تاریخی به معنای تأیید تمام عملکردها و سیاست‌های عبدالرحمان خان نیست؛ همان‌طور که نقد کارنامهٔ او نیز نباید باعث شود هر اقدام مثبت یا هر تحول تاریخی آن دوره را انکار کنیم.

تاریخ را نمی‌توان بر اساس علاقه و نفرت شخصی بازنویسی کرد. اگر کسی با این بخش از تاریخ موافق نیست، بحث دیگری است؛ اما نخواندن یا نپذیرفتن یک صفحه از تاریخ، آن صفحه را از تاریخ حذف نمی‌کند

منی��: زنان افغان زیر فشار عنعنه و تجدد از داکتر سید عبدالله کاظم

STATE STRENGTHENING
IN AFGHANISTAN
Scott Smith and Colin Cookma

[Biruni @rayhan_biruni]

@HasnainWizard Adamec (ed.), Historical and Political Gazetteer of Afghanistan, Vol. 5 (1980), p. 513.

[Biruni @rayhan_biruni]

1/14 🧵 Afghanistan’s modern state was not built on an ethnically neutral foundation.

From 1747 onward, taxation, land, migration and access to state power often privileged specific Pashtun constituencies over non-Pashtun populations.

[Biruni @rayhan_biruni]

14/14 The larger history is not simply one of conflict between ethnic groups.

It is the history of how states used taxation, land, migration, language and centralized institutions to create unequal access to power.

That history still matters.

[Biruni @rayhan_biruni]

13/14 These patterns did not simply disappear with monarchy.

Later governments, including the Khalq communist regime, continued to show major ethnic imbalances in parts of the bureaucracy and security apparatus despite very different ideologies.