As many of you students of Antiquity may know, the Jewish community around 100 BCE to 150 CE was full of complex sectarian tensions between conventional groups such as the Sadducees and Pharisees (the latter ultimately won out and became the mainstream rabbinic faction) and more extreme factions...
It looks like Hamid Karzai's preparing for his American benefactors to leave in 2014 by talking turkey with Russia, China, etc., about filling in some of the gaps. That got me thinking, what would happen if the USA never invaded in the first place?
Don't get me wrong: the Taliban was a...