Afghanistan pullout: Biden’s biggest call yet - will it be his most calamitous? - BBC News:

Afghanistan… The decision of the President to withdraw from the region is no doubt hard, but I think there’s good reason to understand that lasting change there can’t be made from the outside.

As a mystery reader/viewer, I was … struck… when watching Sherlock the first time, specifically for how little one thing had changed.

“Nothing of the sort. I knew you came from Afghanistan. From long habit the train of thoughts ran so swiftly through my mind, that I arrived at the conclusion without being conscious of intermediate steps. There were such steps, however. The train of reasoning ran, ‘Here is a gentleman of a medical type, but with the air of a military man. Clearly an army doctor, then. He has just come from the tropics, for his face is dark, and that is not the natural tint of his skin, for his wrists are fair. He has undergone hardship and sickness, as his haggard face says clearly. His left arm has been injured. He holds it in a stiff and unnatural manner. Where in the tropics could an English army doctor have seen much hardship and got his arm wounded? Clearly in Afghanistan.’ The whole train of thought did not occupy a second. I then remarked that you came from Afghanistan, and you were astonished.”

A Study in Scarlet, Arthur Conan Doyle

I didn't know, I saw. Your haircut, the way you hold yourself says military. But your conversation... Bit different from my day. ...said trained at Barts - so Army doctor, obvious. Your face is tanned... but no tan above the wrists. You've been abroad, but not sunbathing. Your limp's bad when you walk, but you don't ask for a chair when you stand, like you've forgotten about it, so it's at least partly psychosomatic. That says the original circumstances of the injury were traumatic. Wounded in action, then. Wounded in action, suntan - Afghanistan or Iraq.

Sherlock - s1e1 - A Study in Pink

It’s a neat narrative trick, but it belies… Over a hundred years different, but embroiled in essentially the same conflict.