HONG KONG — It is a magnificent land, a high plateau, landlocked, bitterly windswept and freezing in winter; sweltering, parched and dry in summer. It has a proud stiff-necked people who reflect the tough climate, rugged, stubborn, fiercely tribal, traditionally loyal but with a tenaciously vicious mean streak if they consider themselves wronged.
They sprawl across one of the ancient crossroads of civilization but live almost as poor as the dirt of the land. This land is also a graveyard of history that has buried several empires and hundreds of thousands of their troops as they clashed with the proud people.
Is history now repeating itself, with another empire about to fall to the stubborn Afghan tribes? If so, we should all — in Japan, in China, in the West — be worried.