Maybe - but the Taliban are very different from ISIS (or Al Qaeda). It's not an automatic association. If Taliban rule is inevitable in Afghanistan and if people are smart about it, diplomatic recognition could be conditional on them not doing business with those guys.
It's hard to find a firm number, but Pakistan recieved millions and possibly billions of dollars in aid from America in the same year that Osama bin Laden was found to have been hiding there for years, and even that discovery didn't stop the money from continuing to pour in. The Taliban are gonna do whatever they want, and nothing short of guns and bombs will change their minds.
20 years of the US doing something did not change a thing. A complete waste of time, lives, and US resources over a country that could not invade the US if they wanted to. But we should keep on going according to Islamaphobes because killing muslims is the purpose of the US military, according to them. My thought is if they want to volunteer to do their own dirty work we give people like Bill Maher and @14thDoctor some guns, ammo, and a ticket to afganistan and they can fight for their morals. Oh yeah, Islamaphobes are all sorts of chicken shit if they have to do it themselves. Seriously, the country is over there and the battle is going on right now. Nothing is stopping you guys from fighting for the afgan people you supposedly care so much about. But you won't do that because you wanted them bombed to death anyway. 20 years of this shit, and the US could not win. Perhaps that is because the US was never even trying. I find it really hard to believe that if the US really tried it could not have actually won.
I heard elsewhere that Karzai fled the country. If that's not true, and this is, it'd explain a lot. EDIT: Karzai didn't flee, but no corroboration he was a Taliban agent.
Over the last 15 years, I've probably moved in the opposite direction from most American voters whose position on the war changed. Yes, there are many ways in which it was inadvisable, and yes, much of the rationale was based on lies. But I'm no longer convinced it was completely wrong, and the humanitarian argument is probably the rationale that was the most legitimate. True, and I don't know how to respond to that. It feels wrong to be able to help and not do it, but sending troops to occupy every country where there are human rights abuses would lead to a massive death toll. Is a sin of commission equal to a sin of omission? Maybe. Yes, for sure we owe them that. If not because it's the right thing to do, then because it's in our interest for foreign nationals to know that if they help us, we won't hang them out to dry. And, yeah, that's it in a nutshell ...
Your article has very incomplete information. Queen Soraya of Afghanistan pushed for women's rights and reforms and started to have some success. However, in 1929 her husband King Amanullah was deposed by a conservative coalition. That coalition stripped women of their rights and made the veil law once again. I think you'll note a pattern here. Women's rights in Afghanistan did indeed move forward under Mohammed Zahir Shah in urban and well to do areas, and it was 35 years before an equal rights law was enacted. That was not universal throughout the nation, no matter what the letter of the law stated. It was almost solely relegated to urban elites. Indeed, the edicts that stated women were equal were stronger during the Soviet era than any time prior. It wasn't until the early 80s that women got the ability to chose their own husbands instead of arranged marriage, and that the stigma of working outside the home. The pictures in your article you put forward those rights still didn't exist yet, regardless of their ability to dress in western styles. And the expansion of woman's rights is one of the reasons that the Taliban formed. In particular, attempting to mandate compulsory education for girls in rural areas caused armed insurrection - then as now. Rights were horrifically revoked for the next 30 years in areas of Taliban rule. In areas under the Islamic Republic there was some progress made, but again, that was almost entirely in urban areas. In rural areas, honor killings, defacings, and the beating of women are common. Per a 2015 analysis by the UN Human Rights commission, 90% of the women of the Islamic Republic had experienced beatings by their husbands or male families. Stats for one year, there were 240 honor killings, the vast majority were not punished. You can kill your womenfolk without fear of retribution in virtually all of the countryside. Only 1 in 6 women work outside the home. The literacy rate for women is 24%. It would be nice if Afghanistan had created freedom and confidence for their women, but the reality is even in areas outside of Taliban control they were treated as 2nd class citizens. Conservative fundamentalist forces absolutely won the 20th century there. It's a tragedy. And it's about to get even worse.
Well on that at least we agree. The overwhelming majority of evidence that ancient societies did not use large numbers of female soldiers remains untouched. Yes, there are individual examples, and several great leaders were certainly female warriors - Boudicca, the Tranh Sisters, Zheng Yi Sao. But the overwhelming bulk of the soldiery throughout the archaeological record is men. No nation in recorded history had more women soldiers than men soldiers. Most didn't allow women soldiers, period. The more technologically advanced a society is, the less that applies. But that is a very recent development. Indeed, as I commented on previously. That part you are missing is that most women still were oppressed, even when this picture was taken. The height of equality in Afghanistan was reached in the early 80s under the pro-Soviet communist regime. And that's one of the primary reasons the conservative forces attacked with great violence to repress that. The simple truth is that the US couldn't wave a magic wand and make the Afghanis change their cultural biases, both due to ancient clannish misogyny and patriarchy, and to religion. The Afghanis are not at the point in their culture where arming women wouldn't cause at least as much turmoil as it solved. The Taliban was created because the Soviets tried to educate their women and allow them some degree of independence. Same reason democracy failed there. We can clearly see that the reactionary forces there are extraordinarily violent, and would never accept modern concepts of democracy, because that implies some level of equality. Hell, significant portions of our own population in the US and the UK is actively rejecting it because of the same reasons.
The "overwhelming amount of evidence" of which you speak, was the assumption that because an individual was buried with a weapon, they were male. There was no attempt to verify that through DNA analysis or detailed examination of the bones. Literally, only in the past 5 years or so, have we realized that, no, them having a weapon in their grave does not mean that the person was male. We know that women 9K years ago hunted big game. Nope. Again, the archeological world is now uncertain as to exactly what roles women played in many ancient societies. And? They still weren't trained by the military. No shit, but one of the things that has been shown by history is that when you give marginalized people opportunity is they tend to seize it. Could we have gotten large numbers of Afghan women to join the military? I dunno, but we didn't really try. You're forgetting the part where the US happily funded groups like the Mujahadeen to fight the Soviets and then promptly abandoned the country after the Soviets pulled out. I'm not saying that had we provided them with humanitarian aid once the Soviets left that the country would have turned into some kind of democratic paradise or that OBL never could have established a base of operations there, but they probably would have been better off, no matter what happened. Yeah, and people have routinely thought that nations, such as the US, or a certain European nation that inspired a couple of world wars, never could really be democratic states because the concept was so foreign to them. The simple fact of the matter is that any democracy is a lot of work, and that since WWII (or the Korean War, at the latest), the US hasn't been willing to put in that effort to help other nations find their footing, even when it was in our best interest to do so.
The American Taliban is still much more of a threat to the US than any afganistan Taliban. Maybe it is time we had carpet bombing oft Sturgis. Really, The sickening distraction of afganistan while right wing domestic terrorists have done far more damage and killing in the US than multiple 9/11 and are participating in a biological attack on america that has killed hundreds of thousands. All for Donald Trump who is the biggest threat to the US since the civil war. https://www.yahoo.com/huffpost/man-stabbed-2-reporters-attacked-055922061.html When the proud boys and MAGAts are all rounded up for their traitorous actions, and their leader imprisoned for his attacks on america then maybe afganistan should be a concern for the US. Until then our biggest threat comes from within, and they do not have to travel thousands of miles to invade because there are already millions of these religious traitors arming themselves and doing terrorist actions living here. Maybe Biden should actually do something and have the Donald and his traitors strung up. At least do some targeted strikes on Mar-a-Lago and other trump owned terrorist cells.
The thought that women's rights in Afghanistan peaked under communist control ought to make a few heads around here explode.
Judging by the last two weeks, Biden is far more likely to order the entire United States military to pack up and move to New Zealand so they don't get in the way of the next MAGA coup attempt.
Canada has committed taking 20,000 Afghan refugees that are at the greatest risk of Taliban reprisal. It's not enough, but it's something. IMHO, every Western nation should have a policy that offers immediate unconditional refugee status to every woman that escapes Afghanistan or any other Muslim-ruled country.
The OMG are we surprised the Taliban came in while we call it a retreat is a fucking lie. If we call it a retreat that is because we know someone is coming in to take it as we run away. So we know we didf absolutely nothing to cripple the taliban over 2 decades of fighting. This is because the Taliban is much more an idea among a lot of people than it is a country. You cannot bomb an idea large numbers of people are fighting for across multiple countries. But really, if you claim you did not know these people were coming in behind you as you "retreated" you are either completely stupid or you are lying. 2 decades and you failed. It is time to retreat and go find someone else to shoot at because your invasion sucked.
This is one I can agree with. If we really wanted to help with a guaranteed freedom and some improved rights for people who want to live under the protection of better countries, then we should offer refugee status to those people who want to forgo the rule of Islamic law for the freedom to practice their religion without imposing it on others. however, that does not mean we are setting up a religious state for the refugees to pull the same fucking shit the taliban does, only under the regime they want to live under. How many of these afgan people simply would rather have their caliphate run things while they kill and rape their enemies? We have immigrants from the middle east who have come here to live under our laws. Look at the countries who have taken refugees over immigrants and see how that is working. Not all refugees want a non-islamic state. They want their brutal Islamic state, and are simply refugees because they are getting their asses kicked by other Islamic factions. A number of european countries have accepted Islamic refugees forced from their countries by their opponents. A lot of them do not w8ant to live in another country that values freedoms and rights of other people. many of them want to set up their own land in another country with their own rules and laws that allow for the brutality of the religious right. before anyone goes there this is a thing with the jews and christians too. we look at places like isreal and the US and we see way too many christian and jewish fascists who want to do the same thing. If they want to be immigrants and live under US freedoms and laws without trying to set up a religious fascist government in our country then we can work on making you safe here, and I am all for cracking down on anti-islamic hate here so you can live safely and practice your faith here. However, if you are a refugee who wants to make a fascist Islamic state where you kill anyone not in your sect and subjugate your women to rape and killing, then you go fight the taliban and fuck all your idiot dead.
Biden is going to get the blame for this -- and it's true he could have stopped some of it -- but can someone please refresh my memory as to which president started the "bring them home" chant and signed the order to, well, pull the military out of Afghanistan?
It was never about "conquering" Afghanistan, it was about holding back the Taliban. If you're visiting someones house and you find out there's a murderous rapist in the attic just waiting for you to leave, you don't leave that house until the rapist is dead or in police custody. You just don't. I honestly don't care what Trump did to contribute to this, Trump is an sociopath who doesn't care about anyone but himself and understands fuck all about geopolitics. Biden has decades of experience at the highest levels of American politics and is supposed to be a good, caring, moral person that goes to church every Sunday and personally understands the pain of losing loved ones after experiencing his own personal tragedies. I pin this 100% on Biden and I hope he suffers for it.
I'll tl;dw this one since I actually was interested enough to watch it. Why is Afghanistan impossible to conquer? The borders are artificial and make little sense, having been (surprise!) drawn without regard to local culture by the British Empire. Afghanistan is made up of several distinct ethnic groups, and the Afghani-Pakistan border runs right through the middle of the largest one -- the Pashtun people -- with the result that if you're fighting Pashtun resistance, they can easily retreat over the border to regroup and resupply in Pakistan. (That last one is less of a factor now that Pakistan has fenced the entire border.) It's landlocked, so to supply an occupying military, you need the cooperation of at least one of its six bordering nations. There are a fuckton of mountains. In fact the country is 75% mountains. Nearly all of the people live in valleys between the mountains, which are so separated from each other that they developed their own distinct cultures and identities over many years. Control by any central government has always been weak and intermittent, and any attempt to create a sense of national unity has always been imposed from the outside. Kabul may have de jure control, but has never really had de facto control. Building roads to connect communities is insanely expensive. This, combined with the country's poverty, means that it would take the annual wages of 9,800 people to build just one mile of road. (By my shoestring calculations, the cost to build a mile of paved two-lane road in the rural U.S. is equal to the annual wage of about 65 Americans.) The mountain passes are really good chokepoints. Control a few of them, and you can completely control access to an entire population area. Control the Khyber pass, and you can really fuck up somebody's year. (Which the Taliban has done at various points, forcing the U.S. to create completely new supply lines through the countries to the north. Two of those countries are also landlocked, and the third is run by a raving lunatic, besides which the Caspian Sea isn't all that much help. Oh, and while the Pakistani government is semi-cooperative, the Pakistani people really don't like us, so the government has to walk a pretty thin line.)
The news is bombarded now with the woe is us whining because the taliban moved in within days of the US leaving. We spent 2 decades there fighting for people who are not willing to fight for themselves. We gave them weapons, training, and support and as soon as we are gone they go running from their posts and join up with the Taliban? No fight? Just com0plete surrender? If that is their thing, then what were we fighting for? Here in the US if our domestic right wing terrorists want a fucking fight, they are going to get one. If the police and military start going down the street forcing us to be christian trump supporters there is going to be a fight. There is no going back to slavery, lynchings, christian rule, genocide, and white christian nationalist rule. This is the country I was born in, and I am killing the domestic fascists in the republican party if things fall apart to the point of civil war. There will be no surrender to the american Taliban. It would be nice to have some foreign help, but I am not relying on it. Meanwhile these people just let america do the fighting and when they do not these people submit to the Taliban. I might feel a bit like helping them if there was a fight after 2 decades to live free of the Taliban, but there isn't even when they were set up to hold their land. While America was there these people helped out the Taliban and terrorists to attack american troops, and they covered for their attackers when the terrorists were sought out. Message received. It is your country and we are not invited. We have better things to do, and no I do not feel guilty that you never secured yourselves and always left this to the american military. It is your country, you die and fight for it. It does seem that every time some foreign country comes in you somehow manage to fight pretty well for yourselves. The only people you do not seem to want to fight against is the taliban. Perhaps that is a sign you love what the taliban does.
You cannot fight for a faction that does not want to fight for itself. Even according to these ideas we are not fighting for a group that wants to fight for themselves. Of course they will let the US fight and die for them. They do not give a fuck about us, and if we give them weapons and support that faction is happy to take them, just as anyone would. When it comes down to holding what they were given they do not do shit. The Taliban comes in and sends the message. Traitors will be fucking slaughtered. That is the message you have to send to stabilize your lands. You are correct this goes back to the difference between boundaries established by war and boundaries established by people who do not understand. Had these boundaries been fought for then they would have fallen on the fronts each side could hold. Maybe it is about time these people decide their own boundaries that they can hold? Why are we trying to hold these areas when they are strategic nightmares and waste of resources?
The Pashto translation for "Afghanistan" loosely means in English "please invade us, we double dare you." In the translation from Dari there are a few more swear words but it's the same sentiment.
Is any of this really so surprising? America is supposed to love freedom, but it should be quite evident america never had freedom, and when recently it started to become less the tyrany of the majority and float more towards minorities having power we have seen religious fascism was always alive and well. America had some great words, but it was never a place where real freedom existed. We just did not have a lot of muslims, jews, free brown people, and other cultures deciding they did not want to be WASPy. We have not had women's rights very long, and given we still have rape, stalking, and sexual harassment being common we are not very much better than other places. We still have large factions in america who want to kill women and doctors for performing abortions based on religion. We still have large chunks of women declaring they should just be mothers and are not fit to lead or work. We still side with sports legends, religious leaders, and politicians when they rape and assault women. Just today I read how we still have the ability to marry 14 year old girls in North Carolina. The muslim and Jewish populations of the US are tiny groups. We still have christians killing each other because of satanic possession. We have a ton of people who think the blood of jesus will protect them better than science and doctors. We are still prejudiced against the GLBT community, and we still have people threatening them. We have people wandering the streets with assault rifles threatening brown people because they said BLM. When we look at the number of people who support this shit we see that we have over 70 million of them who voted in the last election for a man who wanted to use religion as a power to remove freedom from the US. The veil has been ripped and these people are saying they want a dictator who will hang people who fight for any freedom beyond the ability to be a WASP here in america. We could barely muster a majority of voters over the religious zealots of the right wing. Is it really that surprising that the people of the middle east are actually fond of their religious leaders? Is it so amazing there are only a small minority of them that actually want freedom from Islamic tyranny? The US does not even have half it's people who really want freedom when you consider large parts of the left are cool with opressing minorities. If the US is the harbinger of freedom to the world, then we are centuries away from freedom and we have not even begun to be free yet. For the people around here who hate muslims on the left, freedom means freedom for them to chose to be muslim. Even if that means choosing to subject themselves to the will of their husbands and fathers. Even if that means choosing to cover themselves and their faces in the name of their god because men are animals in their view. It is not a choice if you ban the burka and tell them they have to disagree with their men for the betterment of females. You do not impose freedom on people through occupation and forced culture. It does not work that way.
Hahah, no. You literally have shown examples of TWO women. Yes, I believe there were women warriors and hunters. No, that doesn't change the fact that the vast majority of warriors in both the archaeological and recorded history were men. Oh, and one of those women warriors may have been erroneously identified, because the bones tested didn't match the pictures of the bones as found at the original site, and may have been accidentally mixed up. At least, according to the woman scientist that examined the claims and found it dubious. The Amazons didn't exist, which remains the current belief of greek historians and archaeologists, but they could have been inspired by Scythian warriors, which are known to have included some women in their ranks. https://www.history.co.uk/article/did-viking-shield-maidens-really-exist https://www.inverse.com/science/real-life-amazons There are a few myths with warrior women, but even in myth the overwhelming majority are men. That's different than matriarchial societies, such as the Nabataens, the creators of Petra. They had a matriarchal system, one of the very few identified in ancient history that ascended beyond the tribal, but even there we see the depictions of soldiers being men. And while some exceptional women did exist that led armies, either as heads of state such as Boudicca, divinely inspired figures such as Joan of Arc, or pure badasses such as the Trung sisters, every depiction of them whether in history or mythology shows that they lead armies overwhelmingly comprised of men. But the Terracotta Armies of the first Chinese Emperor are all depictions of men. The myths of Akkadia, the Hittites, Babylon, Sumer and Ur all show warrior men. The bible and the Bhagavida Gita and the Kojiki of Japan, the Welsh legends of Taleslien that became the later bases for Arthurian legends, the written records of the Romans, on and on and on. That doesn't mean a woman can't be a soldier, especially now when technology is making the difference in strength and stamina less and less important. It does mean that your ideology is fucking irrelevant to whether there were large numbers of them in the past. There are some, dotted throughout history, to be sure. But your assertion is that they were prevalent, and that is not backed by any hard data to this point. No, I'm not forgetting that, because none of my comments were directed toward it. Yes, I agree with your statement. We spent hundreds of billions trying to recreate Afghanistan and Iraq in our image. They rejected these things because their religion was more prominent than any desire to be like us. We didn't spend money on the Mujihadeen after the Soviet war was over, and we perhaps could have made more of an impact there at that time. But we certainly tried after we routed the Taliban in the initial stages of the war, and that simply failed. And what we found among even the pro-democratic forces in the Arab Spring that the majority of the population preferred Islamic Repbulics, not Western democracy.
