Salaam aleikum

The world of the large and the small, of the fast and the slow  and the quick and the dead.
We are conditioned to the systems in place around us and  it tends to blind us to other communities and other ways of living.
Opening our mind through travel is supposed to be revealing but often the way we travel and the communities we mix with in our travels limits us, like the tortoise carrying his home on his back into a slow regurgitation of what we had left behind.
Walking across Afghanistan, Rory Stuart (now MP) describes a remarkable and brave attempt to discover the real Afghanistan, particularly its people and the tribal makeup of the country.
Afghanistan a country which has fought off the most powerful armies in the world. The British in the 1800s, the Russians in the 1980s and the Americans from then onwards, has been the sanctuary for Al-Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden (an international Muslim Jahid) and the Taliban (a localised Afghanistan Muslim Jahid) who rose to power after the Russians left but were driven out of the main centres of the country by the American invasion.  In and amongst these players were the War Lords, the mujahideen and their followers, the communities in the villagers.
To understand Afghanistan one has to turn conventional (Western) thinking on its head and evaluate, not from a central governance point of view but from the ties of local allegiance rather than the state. To see this inversion of what we in the West regard as the modal for the State one has to get up close to the people. Not the people in the cities like Kabul but the people who live in this mountainous country where mountain passes split communities into waring factions and governance is roughly the 'Sharia' defined by the Mullah and the village elders.
In a dangerous and physically demanding journey this Westerner did what few have done, he relied on the grace of the Mohammedan instinct to provide rough sanctuary for the traveller.

Salaam aleikum (peace be with you). Manda na Bashi ( May you not be tired ), Waleikum Salaam (And also with you ). The ritual greeting and affirmation between men signified a bond of respect and shared humanity towards each other, no matter how poor or destitute, the hospitality was ingrained in the custom of the society. 

Stewart walked from Herat to Kabul in the footsteps of the Mogul Emperor Babur, (in the 1500s) through the snow with his wild dog who he named Babur. It's a touch and go journey in which alone he surrendered his fate to people along the way, walking from one "territory" to the next which could be hostile or welcoming, only time would tell.
His overriding impression was of a grudging responsibility towards the traveller on foot in which no matter how strained the budget no matter how little food was available it was shared as a matter of Koranic commitment.
The strength of the people lay in their religion and the grouping of neighbours into clans which would come together and support each other. With such strong affiliations central government is a poor cousin being sufficiently outside the family to be largely ignored !