Another reason NATO/US should leave Afghanistan

Here's part of an email i received today from an afghan woman:

this date (23/12/1386) is solar year and it is the official date for Afghanistan. the date you mentioned (1429) is the lunar year. most Islamic countries use lunar, but Afghanistan, Iran and some other countries use solar. this is Mohammad's (peace be upon him) date of birth.

And Nowroz is on Saturday not Thursday.

She is based in Kabul, which is 3-1/2 hours ahead of where i am at GMT+2. This map also indicates that Nepal is 5-3/4 hours ahead of me - no idea what's up with that, although until someone sets me straight, i'm going to assume the extra 15 or deficit 45 minutes (depending on how you want to calculate) has something to do with either elevation or religion. Or maybe it's a new designation, post-kingdom, that has to do with Maoism? When a whole country has its head in the clouds, anything's got to be possible.

Nowruz is the Zarathushtrian (Gk. Zaroastrian, Persian Ahura Mazdian) New Year. The website zaroastrian.org offers this background on the calendar:

The Iranians of old had a tropical [solar] calendar for many centuries. The downfall of the Sassanian Empire in the 7th century disrupted the astronomical structure of the religion and the state. The 365-day year, followed by the majority of Zarathushtrians in India and Pakistan with little astronomical knowledge, for the last eleven hundred years, has advanced the calendar to where Nowruz now occurs in the late summer. However, almost all Zarathushtrians in Iran and a minority of Parsis of India and Pakistan follow the "Fasli" or seasonal calendar. It is an almost tropical calendar. It is corrected by observing the leap year. Meanwhile, although the Iranians, who were converted to Islam, observed and are observing the Muslim lunar calendar for religious purposes, the Iranian calendar was soon restored within a century for administrative and economical reasons and that it continues to be their daily time reckoning.

I think we can agree that any country juggling two calendars already at odds with each other has no use for implementing a third. Additionally, the framework a society uses to understand the intersection of events and time should, theoretically, have a direct impact on how it responds to whatever traumatic events befall it. (A lot of psychologists study this relationship; unfortunately, their academic papers are largely unavailable to non-subscribers of the professional journals.) However well-meaning NATO soldiers may be, they are still an occupying force working under a completely different sense of time from most people in Central Asia. Since the ability to survive trauma and sustain resistance seems intimately connected to how one measures time, two opposing forces using different systems of time are utlimately never going to establish a symbiotic relationship that makes any kind of sense. You either go insane, or you go home. My suggestion to NATO is that they opt for the latter.