The issue relating to Afghanistan is not simply about the NAME “Afghanistan” - The issue is that for most of recorded history what is now called “Afghanistan” was the Persian speaking Eastern Province of Iran in the same way that East and West Germany were one country that was separated for a period of time.
About 200 years ago the British took “Afghanistan” from Iran with their troops and their hired Indian soldiers during an era when Iran had been defending against Russia in the North. The British then bribed and put in charge a couple of drugged-up Afghan tribal chiefs that were their puppets; the British renamed the land “Afghanistan” and they separated "Afghanistan" from Iran which had shared thousands of years of linguistic, cultural and family ties with Iran.
As a result, "Afghanistan" never got a chance to develop like the rest of Iran and became stuck in tribalism and warlordism which still exists and acts as a tinder box for future conflict. Today, *Afghanistan" is controlled by the US army - who wants to use it as forward operating base against Iran, China, Russia, and Pakistan. (The Taliban are bad, but still the land is occupied by America, a foreign and imperial power with no cultural, linguistic, or family ties to the land. America controls the Afghan army, economy, and political leadership.) What America is doing will drag the people of Afghanistan into further poverty, war, and conflict.
One of the games the US and its puppet warlords are now playing is to create a country called "Khorasan" -- but no such country has ever existed before. Khorasan is only the name of a province of Iran that got its name from the Sasanian Iranian Dynasty. The Sasanian Dynasty was headquartered in South-West Iran (near the Persian Gulf).
The British and Taliban policy of de-Iranicization were damaging to the people, but also America's and it puppet-warlords' attempts to create a separate identity from Iran is going to create the same problems: they are both forms of tribalism, warlordism, and separatism sponsored by foreign powers distant from the region and/or newly founded states (i.e., the U.S., NATO, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia) . Only the warlords will prosper under such conditions and the people in Afghanistan will continue to suffer.
For Afghanistan to be successful, it has to rejoin with Iran – the same way East and West Germany rejoined -- and the international community must let Iran develop Afghanistan like other provinces so people can live in a society with a higher standard of living. Iran is connected to Afghanistan the same way East and West Germany were connected to each other before being separated. But the US is not connected to Afghanistan; the US is simply an imperial power from outside the region that has hired warlord puppets to do its work. Also Pakistan is a relatively new country.
To control Afghanistan, the US simply makes a handful of Afghan tribal chiefs rich and uses them as puppets to control the people, while the US sponsors propaganda against Iran. Pakistan does the same with the Taliban (and ironically the U.S. helped to create the Taliban several decades ago). In effect, what the US is doing is the mirror image of what Pakistan is doing with the Taliban. The only result for the people in Afghanistan will be a continuing insurgency, a civil war, poverty, crime, trafficking, and/or living in a corrupt puppet country controlled by America. Afghanistan might as well be named “New Texas” because that’s what it is … it is presently a vassal of America that the America will exploit for its own benefit in the region.
