From Foreign Policy by Mohammad Qayoumi:

On a recent trip to Afghanistan, British Defense Secretary Liam Fox drew
fire for calling it “a broken 13th-century country.” The
most common objection was not that he was wrong, but that he was overly
blunt. He’s hardly the first Westerner to label Afghanistan as medieval.
Former Blackwater CEO Erik Prince recently described the country as inhabited by “barbarians” with “a 1200 A.D. mentality.” Many assume that’s all Afghanistan has
ever been — an ungovernable land where chaos is carved into the hills.
Given the images people see on TV and the headlines written about
Afghanistan over the past three decades of war, many conclude the
country never made it out of the Middle Ages.

But that is not the Afghanistan I remember. …