Rohullah Nikpai, Afghanistan's Taekwondo Master

Since the Soviet Red Army smashed over Afghanistan in December 1979, there hasn't really been an Afghanistan. With a few years' exceptions, there's been a country serially splintered along tribal, religious and extra-national lines. Between the Soviets, the mujahideen, "the village-idiot vigilantes known as the Taliban" (as Martin Amis calls them) , al-Qaeda, Iran, Pakistan, NATO and the United States all attempting to control the country (and none of them succeeding), Afghanistan isn't just a failed state. It's almost a failure of history: nothing seems to stop the place from crumbling back toward something primeval, pre-historic.

Yet as the 2008 Beijing Olympics end, Afghanistan as the nation formerly was, and the nation it wishes to be, can rally around one unifying achievement: Rohullah Nikpai winning bronze in the men's under-58kg class of taekwondo. It's not just Afghanistan's only medal at these Olympics. It's Afghanistan's first-ever medal at any Olympics since the country sent a delegation to Berlin in 1936. (In the Middle East, Bahrain, too, got its first-ever medal, a gold in the 1,500m.)

Nikpai's early reaction? "I hope this will send a message of peace to my country after 30 years of war."

Afghanistan won their first Olympic medal Wednesday, when Rohullah Nikpai defeated world champion Juan Antonio Ramos of Spain to take the bronze in the men's under 58-kilogram taekwondo competition. Just 21 years old, cherubic-faced, flashy and and as wily as Kabul's famous kite duelists, Nikpai, a Hazara Afghan, has been at the sport since he was 10, finding in it an escape from Afghanistan's more lethal battles. He defeated Spain's Juan Antonio Ramos, a world champion, 4-1 for the bronze and won himself a $50,000 prize from a mobile phone company in Afghanistan.

It's too much to expect sports to do what diplomacy, culture, war, guilt and sheer exhaustion haven't: unify a country. It's silly to put that much expectation on sports, anyway, though at this point in Afghanistan, anyone should be excused to wish that an unlikely medal would also symbolize an unlikely break in the carnage.

See Also:

• Afghanistan at the Beijing Olympic Games
• What Happened to Afghanistan's Mehboba Ahadyar?
• Return of Repression in Afghanistan
• You Can Be Good Again, But Can Afghanistan?
• Taliban Resurgent in Afghanistan and Pakistan
• "The Kite Runner," by Khaled Hosseini: A Review
• Afghanistan: Country Profile