Look What Radical Theology Has Done to Afghanistan: Before/After Photos

Liz Harrison March 15, 2014

246 1 minute read

Amazing what a couple decades and some radical theology can do.

I love the folks over at ViralNova, especially when they offer me something that places today’s issues in. Above are a couple photos that should be fairly familiar to everyone by now. They are some of the last photographs of Osama bin Laden – the top one is a still from his last video that he produced in Pakistan, and the bottom one truly shows how much he had aged.

What got him started in the “terror business” was the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan, after America helped to get the Soviets out of that country during the Reagan years. That’s also why it’s been said at least a few times that Bin Laden was a creature of our own making. We got rid of the evil Soviets, but didn’t bother to keep track of or prevent what ended up filling that power vacuum – the radical Islamic Taliban. That was in the 1980’s. If we go back about a couple decades before that (a guess, based on the fashion in the following photo), Afghanistan wasn’t really all that backward.

Yes, those are women in Afghanistan, and they are apparently in a library. At that time, they dressed like many Western women, had access to education, studied in colleges, and had careers. Precisely what went wrong might be debatable, but the significant change between then and now is the rise of radical Islam.

Back to Bin Laden for a moment here, take a look at the following photo:

Bin Laden is the second boy from the right, wearing the green shirt and impossibly bright blue pants. That is a family photo from the 1970′s, showing them on vacation in Sweden.