I’m not claiming that the political-economic culture wasn’t impacted or slightly altered by outside forces, but my point is that the rotten core has persisted.
Boiled down even further, that rotten core is just a flavour of the feudal phase that Marx described in his historical analysis. Marx believed, based on the experience of Europe, that historical forces could overcome that political-economic system/culture and progress through his later stages to the Communist paradise. Both his Soviet adherents and his neoCon opponents later found that, at least in Afghanistan, that core dysfunctional political-economic phase was indeed somehow immune to those forces.
Marx being Marx, the analysis is a bit reductionist while also being true (the same can’t be said for his prescriptions). In the end, my view of the political-economic culture supports my contention that we should stop meddling militarily and politically in that region.
