History
Originally six holes, the course opened in 1967 during the reign of Mohammed Zahir Shah, was closed in 1978, and reopened in 2004. During these three decades it has undergone several changes. It was relocated to its present site in 1973 after the king was overthrown in a coup d'état and completely closed following a 1978 communist coup. It was reopened in 1993 but closed again in 1996 when the Taliban regime banned sports. After the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, the course was used as an area for military training in the removal of land mines. In the process of restoration to its present state, three Soviet tanks and a multiple rocket launcher were removed by a nonprofit agency.
In 2004 the Kabul Golf Club was reopened again. During the intervening seven years little has changed. Play on the golf course has been sporadic, and at the mercy of the local security situation. Beginning in 2011, a fund-raising effort has been underway with the goal of restoring the golf course and related facilities. Funds are also being sought to subsidize operations until the war is over, assuming the organization will eventually become a viable business.
Read more about this topic: Kabul Golf Club
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“History ... is, indeed, little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.
But what experience and history teach is this—that peoples and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)
“There is a constant in the average American imagination and taste, for which the past must be preserved and celebrated in full-scale authentic copy; a philosophy of immortality as duplication. It dominates the relation with the self, with the past, not infrequently with the present, always with History and, even, with the European tradition.”
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