When, in 1969, I travelled through Afghanistan (this was in the days of good King Zahir Shah, good certainly by comparison with all who came after him), it never occurred to me, callow as I was, that the country might be transformed any time soon into, say, a Scandinavian-style social democracy. But twenty years later, when the Berlin Wall fell, I did think, wrongly, that ideological politics in the West, at any rate, would be at an end.
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