The two artifacts I chose, deal with the small tribal nation of Afghanistan. These two political cartoons are from vastly different periods.

The first political cartoon is from the cold war in 1982, shortly after the USSR started their invasion of Afghanistan. The first cartoon is constructed by the “Internal Islamic Fronts Afghanistan”.

This was a Sufi organization based in Afghanistan. They were paid by the United States so that they could spread propaganda attacking the Soviet Union. The rhetorical situation this cartoon intends to address is the USSR invasion of Afghanistan and the prevention of the spread of Communism.

The second cartoon is much more recent, dating January 2015 when a man crashed a small quadcopter into the white house. The United States viewed this as an attack on the president even though the quadcopter was small; and caused no harm, considering the president was in Delhi, India, at the time.

The cartoon was illustrated by Nate Beeler and published in the Columbus Dispatch. The cartoon was made to showcase how we overreact to small-scale problems that affect our country but turn a blind eye to when we mercilessly murder women and children overseas every day with drone strikes.

We have perhaps become the chaos we were warning the Afghanistan people of.

I chose to deal with this issue because I do not believe in the military-industrial complex. The American people deserve for their tax dollars to be utilized effectively, opposed to being wasted on a war without an end in sight.

Rather than crucifying children overseas and creating the terrorist organizations we vow to destroy, we should be building a better infrastructure and investing in education. I also think that this topic is relevant today because we have just withdrawn from Afghanistan, an event that is bittersweet in many ways.

It is time that we get out of Afghanistan, but we did very little to build back Afghanistan, which has lead to a bad taste in the mouths of the Afghan people. We have abandoned them not only once but twice now.

Once they beat the Soviet Union, the United States abandoned them and chose not to build back their country after we encouraged them to fight back. Now we have abandoned them, allowing for the Taliban to take control, which allows for tyranny to reign supreme.

These two pieces would be good in conversation with one another because they showcase the length we have been in Afghanistan. The cartoons also show how we have become the very thing that we warned the Afghan people against. We painted ourselves as these saviors of Afghanistan, protecting them from Communism, but in reality, we were no different from the Russians.