I wouldn't call the most recent Western misadventure in Afghanistan an example of "imperialism," though. Afghanistan should have become the fourth place in the world to have Western forces stationed there indefinitely by mutual agreement, after Germany, Japan, and Korea, to prevent a particular local threat from getting out of hand and causing the rest of the planet grief ever again. When the Vulcans show up, I'll ask them to do the same thing in America just in case the Trumpers try again. I know Trump wouldn't care, but I hope Biden gets this shoved in his face every day for the rest of his life. I want him to have to look at pictures of murdered and abused Afghan women every morning as part of his intelligence briefing. I want him to get pictures of acid attack victims shoved in his face when he's trying to enjoy an ice cream. I want him to hear about every rape, every murder, every child bride/sex slave he created with his cruel, cowardly abandonment of the Afghan people. I want him to never sleep soundly again.
Sounds a lot like the humanitarian arguments for the Iraq War. Rings even truer for North Korea (not specific to women there), maybe Iran. Syria (also not specific). Sudan. Saudi Arabia. Rural Pakistan. Xinjiang. There’s no consequential difference between not invading in the first place and leaving. Maybe to some there’s a difference, the translators and contractors, and absolutely, we should be getting them all out with their families. Hell, we should probably offer a ride out of the country to any Afghani who wants to go. But that’s a small fraction. To most, no difference. Women, children, and sometimes men are going to suffer and die. Either we are the world’s policeman, or we’re not. It sucks, but there it is. The UN has no spine, and no stomach for actually stopping humanitarian disasters at their roots: oppressive governments. Sure, they’ll supply refugee camps, but root causes? No, that’s smothered by realpolitik. Maybe there’s a third way, maybe we could declare ourselves open to all refugees and emigrants, and, to minimize bloodshed, willing to assassinate any governments, not invade the whole country, who stand in their way of freedom-seeking people coming here. But it seems pretty unlikely *that’s* going to be on the table, for a myriad of reasons.
There are a lot of false dichotomies being thrown about between inaction and "more of the same". Maybe if the US had conducted themselves better while in Afghanistan, this point would not have been reached. Meanwhile, the Taliban are at the gates of Kabul and are saying they won't take it by force, but will wait for the "transition". What?
Well done, NATO. Now the Taliban have free reign. May $deity have mercy on the women of Afghanistan because they will not.
That might work in the West, but it would be an absolute debacle in a Muslim patriarchial society. One of these days we'll be wise enough not to assume our values on others, but clearly today is not the day.
US invades a country: Fuck the US being world police. US leaves a country: Fuck the US for not being the world police.
Back when the US invaded Afghanistan in 2001, I'm pretty sure most folks around the world (except radical Muslims) were on board. Most NATO countries, including my own, provided a lot of military and financial support. It was the Iraq misadventure where things went completely off script.
Meh. They had a reprieve of 20 years. They are just going back to the status quo. I'd prefer we maintained a presence to keep that from happening, especially considering it really didn't cost us all that much, but it's not the US fault that the country was overrun with fundamentalist Jihadists. That was Pakistan's fault - and their own.
Are you kidding? I’m quite certain that we could have found 300K+ Afghan women willing to have military training, regardless of what their male relatives said. I dunno if they’d have been able to wipe out the Taliban, but given that they could expect no mercy if they fell into the Taliban’s hands, they certainly wouldn’t give up easily.
You need a whole swath of sociological changes in place to make that viable, and Afghanistan isn't there yet. There's a reason there are no historical female comprised armies among primitive (or even less developed) societies. Men are physically more powerful and usually capable of physically dominating women, which is reality regardless of your point of view. It's not that women don't try to resist. Force changes things, which of course is not right, but is reality. This is a society that routinely beats its women and refuses them basic rights. 'Regardless of what their male relatives said.' You mean the nice people who beat them, torture them, throw acid on their face and execute them if they show ankle or talk unsupervised with a man? That's what huge swaths of Afghanistan are like, and it was only in the urban centers that had the protection of the US and basic judicial protections that allowed it to be different than the other areas. It would have been nice if they could have implemented those changes in a more widespread fashion in the time that the US was there, but it didn't work out. Change like that takes decades. Tribal areas are still full of honor killings and violence against women.
It's a tough call, to be sure. I don't envy our leaders on this issue. One of the slides from the sermon I'll be preaching shortly: It's just kinda hitting me today.
Fair enough, it is really sad. I have a friend who married into an Afghan family, half of them are over here, the other half... probably aren't going to fair well. She's beside herself. It is a tragedy.
And is unlikely to get there any time soon. I can tell you haven't been paying attention to archeological and anthropological news. Right now, archeologists are having to re-evaluate a lot of what they thought they knew about ancient societies thanks to DNA and forensic analysis of bones. In the past, they automatically assumed that any skeleton buried with weapons was male, that turns out not to be the case. Certainly, the number of women buried with weapons is a small number, but that number is growing all the time. It also turns out that a lot of societies weren't (and aren't, in the case of existing hunter-gather tribes) as patriarchal as we thought. That's not to say that societies, where equality was the norm, were dominant, but our ideas about how repressive they were/are isn't correct. The caveman walloping a woman on the head to take her back to his cave to be his wife? Complete myth. In some cases the evidence showing that women were more equal than we thought was ignored, in other cases it was deliberately erased. I assume you've seen this picture of Kabul before the Soviet invasion? It took less than twenty years for women to be reduced to sackcloth wearing broodmares. We were there for two decades. And we have a model for how arming women could be done successfully in that part of the world. The simple truth is that we never gave a shit about Afghanistan, we just assumed that if we slapped them around enough, they'd STFU and leave us alone.
Not really. Afghanistan used to be roughly as civilized and progressive as any Western nation, until religious extremists used violence to roll that progress back. Until the conflict of the 1970s, the 20th Century had seen relatively steady progression for women's rights in the country. Afghan women were first eligible to vote in 1919 - only a year after women in the UK were given voting rights, and a year before the women in the United States were allowed to vote. In the 1950s purdah (gendered separation) was abolished; in the 1960s a new constitution brought equality to many areas of life, including political participation. But during coups and Soviet occupation in the 1970s, through civil conflict between Mujahideen groups and government forces in the '80s and '90s, and then under Taliban rule, women in Afghanistan had their rights increasingly rolled back.
In the space of a few weeks we've gone from denying the Taliban were going to take over the country to helicopters flying our staff away from the embassy. This is about the biggest strategic clusterfuck imaginable. I suppose it could get worse: our embassy staff could wind up as hostages.
https://news.trust.org/item/20210815124245-lf5o6 Russia says no need to evacuate their embassy Hmmmm. Maybe someone should look into that and who exactly is bankrolling the Taliban
So basically we’ve reset back to pre 9/11 and have a country full of religious lunatics who will be easily able to recruit angry moderates that are upset with America to launch attacks on Western soil
I'd say it's even worse than pre-9/11 thanks to all the surviving ISIS fighters that got a taste of the full Caliphate experience, complete with brutal ethnic cleansing, sex slaves, and free Red Bull. They're not going to give up that dream any time soon, and now they've got another country to shelter and sponsor them.
