Daily Pic: A recent image of Afghanistan by photographer Omar Mullick, from a portfolio that just launched on the Foreign Policy Web site. Mullick is part of a journalistic team called Basetrack, many of whose photos are taken with the iPhone’s Hipstamatic special-effects filters. What’s so interesting in this series is that the filter Mullick chose makes photos of today’s Afghanistan look like images from fifty or even 100 years ago, mixing black and white and a hint of watery color.  I’m not sure you’d get away with such a collapsing of time in almost any other country. What I don’t know, is whether that’s because there’s a fundamental culture in Afghanistan that has stayed basically unchanged, or if we’ve bought into a Rudyard Kipling view of the place that we can’t jettison. Is Afghanistan static, or is it our vision that is? Can we afford any nostalgia in dealing with our mission there?

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