Bitter Lake: searching for meaning in the Afghan abyss

Bitter Lake: searching for meaning in the Afghan abyss | Afghanistan | Arts & Culture | Politics | TV and radio | War on Terror | spiked:

The film, lasting over two hours and only officially available on BBC iPlayer, is ostensibly a search for the meaning of the absence of meaning that afflicts contemporary Western society. It is told through the prism of the West’s engagements with Afghanistan – specifically Helmand Province – over a 60-year period, as mediated by relations with Saudi Arabia and occasionally reaching back as far as the Anglo-Afghan wars of the nineteenth century.