I'm not sure when my fascination with Afghanistan first took root, but I'm thinking it may have happened before I reached my tenth birthday. Certainly I knew by the time I finished second grade where Afghanistan was situated and (generally) why it had historically been strategic. Exposure to international programs -- and real live international people -- with my mother at the University of Pittsburgh that year helped my worldview and curiosity grow like generously watered weeds.
Being a casual but enthusiastic student of Russian and Soviet history by the time I made it out of seventh grade in the early 1970s, I was well primed to closely follow the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in late December 1979 and the ensuing decade-long war. In the mid- and late 1980s, I tracked events in Afghanistan as part of my hobby of monitoring and summarizing worldwide English-language shortwave radio news broadcasts and distributing the summaries internationally by email.
Fast forward to the spring of 2005: my (now former) wife, a military intelligence officer serving with the Indiana Army National Guard, had just returned from a year-long peacekeeping deployment in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and was considering a deployment to Afghanistan. Upon learning this, my friend John Brademas highly recommended George Crile's book, Charlie Wilson's War: the Extraordinary Story of the Largest Covert Operation in History (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2003), which tells the tale of former US Representative Charlie Wilson (D-TX02), and his mission to covertly support the Mujahideen in their resistance to the Soviet invaders. (Tom Hanks' portrayal of Wilson in the 2007 film remains one of my favorites. The late great Philip Seymour Hoffman's performance as Wilson's CIA cohort, Gust Avrakotos, ranks close behind.)
I later came across Ben Mcintyre's book, The Man Who Would Be King: the First American in Afghanistan (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), which tells the story of Josiah Harlan (1799-1871), a Pennsylvania Quaker who visited Afghanistan in 1838 and whose exploits there are believed to have inspired Rudyard Kipling's The Man Who Would Be King. (Josiah is my fourth cousin, six times removed, and a person of considerable interest to me.)
My interest in Afghanistan continued and grew during and after my (former) wife's first deployment there (circa 2006-2007), and a few years after our divorce, I enrolled in the online graduate program for security and intelligence studies with the American Public University System (APUS), where I wrote a paper for the research methods course on the topic, "Displacing Afghanistan's Poppy Crop"
My interest continues.
