Winston Churchill at 22 in Afghanistan

Con Coughlin:
...
...   he is less well disposed to the mullahs who incited the violence in the first place, and is appalled by their habit of trading their womenfolk to buy rifles. “This degradation of mind is unrelieved by a single elevated sentiment,” he writes. “Their religion is the most miserable fanaticism, in which cruelty, credulity, and immorality are equally represented. Their holy men – the Mullahs – prize as their chief privilege a sort of droit de seigneur. It is impossible to imagine a lower type of beings or a more dreadful state of barbarism.”
... 
This is from Coughlin's book, Churchill's First War about the fight with the Pashtun in Afghanistan in 1897. There does not appear to be much that has changed in Afghanistan since that fighting.

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