“Not content with depriving girls and women of education, employment, and free movement, the Taliban also want to take from them parks and sport and now even nature, as we see from this latest ban on women visiting Band-e-Amir,” Human Rights Watch’s Associate Women’s Rights Director Heather Barr says.
America should have armed and trained the women of Afghanistan, not the men.
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I’ve always wondered how a theocracy that follows it’s rules as strict as the Taliban can rationalize their terrible state and misfortune when the enemies of their god are what the religious would consider “blessed”.
As a Muslim the idea that if you’re a good person you’ll have a good life doesn’t exist, and there’s actually a hadith stating that the stronger one’s belief in Allah the more Allah tests one.
Also as a Muslim, those guys are making their own rules and then following them. I seriously have no idea where in the Quran or Sunnah they found “Don’t let women visit national parks”.
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And a larger group; the vast majority of Muslim men, who favor this but don’t act on it much beyond voicing their support.
I’ll just say that most of us are not like this, speaking as a Muslim guy from a Muslim country. Like seriously we’ve got some nutjobs here, but people who think women shouldn’t be able to leave their homes are vanishingly rare (at the very least I’ve never seen any, and my social circle isn’t particularly liberal).
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Seriously though, people are not black-and-white. You cannot just state some random criterion and postulate that whoever doesn’t match it, is just as bad as the Taliban themselves. Black-and-white is never how real life works.
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Hey, I know this can be an issue that strikes a nerve. That said, acknowledging nuance is important to having a productive conversation. Judging everyone by a set standard and having unkind words for not meeting that standard even before you know much about the person you are engaging with is not going to be productive, and it’s not particularly nice either.
To be clear, I do not intend to ask you to tolerate oppression. By all means you should oppose oppression strenuously! But being harsh to someone you disagree with online is not the way to do that. In the future, please try your best to disengage from the conversation for a bit until you are in a better headspace.
Its pretty difficult to deny at this point that this is the Afghanistan that the fathers and brothers of Afghan women wanted for their wives, daughters and sisters. For good or ill, the Afghan people were not locked in place by the status quo at the point that the US coalition left.
The entire pre-war system was dismantled, USAID spent billions building schools, water treatment plants, roads etc. and the local people blew them up. The people basically started from scratch and chose to build back the same thing from before the war, let their oppressors walk back into Kabul. There’s nothing anyone can do about that from the outside. Maybe in a thousand years Afghanistan will change, but I doubt it.
The people living in afghanistan are the ones being victimized by the taliban. They do have supporters obviously, but to say that all men living in afghanistan are okay with what’s happening is ridiculous.
If America was violently overtaken by gun-toting religious maniacs, would it be fair to say “Oh well some of them voted for it! Their fault!”
America is being taken over by gun-toting religious maniacs, and yeah, most of the populace supports them. Take a look at Trump’s recent poll numbers.
Yes, they are trying. Sorry I should rephrase that to “if America was successfully overtaken”
I still wouldn’t say most of the populace, it’s more like a tie. But thats’ definitely a way way higher number than there should be considering.
But the US did vote for gun-toting religious maniacs to overtake them though …
They definitely did. But a whole lot of Americans voted against them, too. It would be unfair to dismiss all of America because some of them vote for these people.
@storksforlegs @raccoona_nongrata That’s essentially what a lot of people elsewhere in the US say about those of us who live in states run by gun-toting religious maniacs. (For the record, about 40% of us did not vote for this.)
I’m referring more to the fact that the west spent two decades there trying to train Afghan soldiers to defend against the Taliban, we equipped them with weapons tools, spent billions on infrastructure. And after all that literally only a handful of people even bothered to resist when the Taliban came in. There is no underground resistance, no sabotage of the Taliban’s rule etc. There are no real signs of any will to resistance, so what else are we to make of that besides this is the way the majority wants it?
If the US were taken over by the far right, and then that fascist government dislodged by a European coalition it is very likely that there would be a strong effort by a lot of Americans to seize on that disruption because right-wing fascism is not a popular ideology here despite their outsized influence.
There are many victims of the Taliban, I’m not denying that, it’s more that if the majority of people do nothing how can it be said that Afghan’s care about those victims? And if Afghan’s can’t bring themselves to care enough to fight, and outsiders already spent twenty years there trying to do something different, what can the west do besides help people escape?
Okay, but the US didn’t do a great job of preparing Afghanistan for resisting the Taliban when they left. The US basically packed everything up and left overnight. Have you seen John Oliver’s very good segment on the topic? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2hw_ghPcQs&ab_channel=LastWeekTonight
This is true, it was far from perfect and the western coalition has done their fair share of damage, but this eventual exit could be anticipated for years even if it were rushed at the end. The US has been trying to help Afghans to take the lead for a very long time and train a professional army. The Taliban has also been suffering and starving as much as anyone else there, the Afghan government had the backing of the wealthiest, most militarily advanced nations on the planet. If anyone had a chance it should’ve been that government.
Once trucks full of Taliban guys with M16s start moving into every community what are regular afghanis supposed to do?
A similar thing to what we see the Ukrainians doing; using the weapons the US gave them. The country is not unarmed, they threw down their arms when the Taliban approached.
I’m really not trying to be argumentative, but it’s hard to believe that after 20 years the Afghan people needed more to prepare for a US exit.
Not to mention that a lot of the times the Afgan Army went on patrols with US forces, The ANA we’re fucked out of their minds on opiates and just fucked around.
Yes, when I think of the ANA I always think back to this short doc segement from the war, and the absurdity of ever expecting that it would become an actual motivated fighting force that would stand against the Taliban.
The whole ANA wasn’t like this, there were more specially trained groups and those who are ideologically “present”, but I think we got a grim reminder of just how few in number they were when the US pulled out. The motivation to prevent the Taliban taking over simply isn’t there in the population. The people might even suffer under the Taliban rule, but there’s just kind of this complete apathy from huge swaths of the population.
I feel most bad for the girls who grew up in the brief time where they actually had access to education during the occupation, only to have it taken away and be left with this knowledge of how fucked things are for them now, how they’ve been dropped on their ass by their own people.
There are no real signs of any will to resistance, so what else are we to make of that besides this is the way the majority wants it?
I agree with your general point, but isn’t there resistance in the northern parts of Afghanistan? Also there’s the part where the US gave the Taliban some of the best PR out there. Fighting against a foreign invader tends to make you pretty popular irrespective of your stance on other things.
There’s something to be said for “aleast they’re Afghan” sure, but the Taliban weren’t a new faction, they’d been ruling Afghanistan brutally for a long time fore the invasion. They’re not an unknown quantity to the Afghan people.
I wish I had a way to filter all of these posts about how shitty Afghanistan is.
That place is never going to change.
To be fair it must be remembered that the Taliban had (and still have) some of the best PR out there since they were fighting a foreign invader. That tends to make you popular.
