Then as now

Rico says he's been enjoying The Man Who Would Be King (the book, not the movie) by Ben Macintyre, about Josiah Harlan, a Quaker from Pennsylvania (born not far from where Rico lives, as it turns out), who went to Afghanistan in 1838 to find a kingdom. As Kipling put it in his retelling of the story: "If I want a crown I must go hunt it for myself."

But there's a part that is so reminiscent of today's Afghanistan:

The bewildering confusion of plot and counterplot, blood feud coagulating on blood feud, brother against brother, king against vizier, had reduced Afghanistan to a Hobbesian war of all against all, riven with feuds between interrelated warlords. One commentator said of Afghan politics:

Sovereignty was an exceedingly uncertain commodity. One moment the Amir of Kabul might be a potent monarch, in the next he might be an object of ridicule, an outcast whose life would be very precarious, if indeed it existed at all.

Rico says it sounds a lot like Afghanistan today, with Karzai as the Amir, no?