@Demiurge has really regressed in his behavior. He used to be very communicative and engaging in discussion. But, lately ..., he's just blasting at a 12, when everyone else is at a 2.
Women will be allowed to work ... cooking and cleaning. They'll be allowed to study ... whatever men want them to. They're going to be very active ... getting raped by Taliban soldiers.
And as you've amply demonstrated in the What If thread, there's absolutely no point in discussing this kind of shit with you because your fragile masculinity is bothered by the idea that women are equal to men, so we're done here.
Yep. Implicit in the words "...within our framework" are the words "...which the women won't get a say in defining."
Back in 2013 a senior Taliban officer wrote an open letter to Malala. It's an interesting peek into the Taliban mindset and their attitude towards education, fucked up as it is. https://psmag.com/news/heres-the-full-text-of-the-taliban-letter-to-malala-yousafzai-62887 Honestly there's a lot of it that wouldn't sound out of place in a Western conservatives rant against public education.
...Taliban leaders were in fact offering money in exchange for government forces to hand over their weapons, according to an Afghan officer and a U.S. official. Over the next year and a half, the meetings advanced to the district level and then rapidly on to provincial capitals, culminating in a breathtaking series of negotiated surrenders by government forces...
My father had an interesting take from when he and my mom spent the better part of two years in Iran just before the Shah got kicked out. "It's their country. They're not like us. We were hired to help them be like us. They don't want to be like us." How many times do we have to make the same mistake?
I feel like you'd and most Americans would never throw their hands in the air and say that about red states. "They don't want to give rights to the blacks and gays and women, they don't feel like taking lifesaving vaccines, when will we stop making the mistake of trying to change them?" And if the Taliban had real support among the Afghan people, they could have openly endorsed the political party most sympathetic to them and taken over that way instead of threatening to cut off the fingers of anyone that voted.
Trying to impose our world view on someone else and their country when they don't want you there strikes me as an exercise in futility. It also reeks of arrogance and willful ignorance. All of which were on full view in our nation building effort in Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam...
For once the Mormons get something right (Yes, I'm aware it's the Govenor and not the Church in this instance)
First time on the internet? You came in trashing Biden in a marvelously arrogant and aggressively condescending manner, acting as if there was no possible way anyone could disagree. You even equated him as 'an America first' idealogue, like Trump. This, about the internationalist who rejoined the Paris Climate Accords, immediately rejoined the WHO (as opposed to the asshat that withdraw funding from it in the middle of a pandemic), is actively trying to re-engage with Iran on the nuclear deal once again, and has prioritized re-engagement with our traditional allies and is very supportive of NATO. Yes, I condescended to that lack of understanding. It's remarkably obtuse. LOL. Again, the presumption. Of course I know that. But the Taliban have come in and overtaken the entire country in 10 days. The problem isn't explicitly one of centralization. It was corruption and applying Western ideas to a nation that actively rejects them. But not for that reason. This you? We've been trying to impose a centralised system on a nation whose geography, history and ethnic layout makes that completely inappropriate. So yes, you did, even if you meant something else. Again, 90% of all Afghan women period were the subject of domestic abuse per the UN inquiry. Yes, rednecks are going to redneck, but this is to an entirely different level. And the concept of female equality is one of the primary things that started the Taliban - per the Taliban. It was the reactionary madrasses that lost their minds when the Soviets tried to change their culture, and one of the reasons that these archconservatives started attacking the governemt. The US has made many, many mistakes here, but this goes back to Wilson's War, looking only at the Soviets as the bad guys and not seeing what they were supporting. The Taliban and the Northern Alliance came from different impulses, but clearly regressive conservatism won in Afghanistan. I'm appalled at the quick collapse of Afghanistan and what is going to happen to the women there. And I find your analogy right on the money, though directly in opposition to your meaning. If you need crutches after TWENTY YEARS, and someone removes them and you collapse... you were never going to walk again anyway. I think the result is appalling and disheartening. But there are US soldiers now whose parents fought in the first year of the Afghan war. We were never supposed to be there forever. We could have done a better job, to be sure many mistakes were made along the way, but we gave the Afghanis a chance at restoring their previous government prior to the Taliban, Over the last decade we average $4 billion in security aid and $500 million in civilian aid per year. Well, at least until Trump. And we weren't alone. This year Germany has pledged $510 million in civilian assistance, the United Kingdom pledged $227 million in civilian and food aid, Norway pledged $72 million in development assistance and humanitarian aid. This going in to one of the poorest countries in the world every year should have made an enormous difference. It didn't, because of the corruption. They collapsed in 10 days. And in very many cases, had negotiated their surrender without even fighting to attempt to resist.
Arguing over who to blame is booooooooorrrrrrrrriiiiiiiiiiing and I'll be glad when the media moves on to substance.
I took a few days to examine my thoughts on this. Well... and this is a really shitty situation we're leaving this country in. Not much better than when we got there. With that said, without the political will to stay in Afghanistan for another 10-20 years on top of the 20 that we put in already, this was inevitable. In that time, all of the original Taliban fighters would be dead or old and the majority of the country would have known nothing other than living in a civil, democratic society with all the advances that come with it... and even then that would be a gamble. Leaving Afghanistan now is not something I'm going to fault our leaders with, but I'll be damned if I'm going to sit here and take criticism from people who opposed accepting the Afghani refugees as citizens. People who supported any sort of Muslim ban and sit back and cry now that they see Muslims chasing and clinging on to American planes with their bare hands as they take off... Well... to put it plain and simple... fuck you. So... our original mission was to attack and dismantle alQueda, the people who attacked us and to make sure that terrorist would never find a safe haven in Afghanistan ever again. To that, I'll say "Mission accomplished?" We'll see. The exit plan was to establish a government of Afghanis that would keep the country stable and we invested 20 years and billions of dollars to that end.... and the minute we pulled out, the people our forces worked closest with yielded to the Taliban without a single shot fired. What am I supposed to make of this? The biggest tragedy in this is the refusal of the entire western world to accept as many refugees as we can.
But how do you define the "someone else"? I doubt the women and girls of Afghanistan are as blasé as some of the men are about letting the Taliban take over.
Was it really? This kind of dichotomy is pissing me off - as if after the US went in, things couldn't have developed otherwise. I mean, maybe if you don't drag people off to Guantanemo, run other torture camps in Afghanistan, kill innocent people with drones, attack hospitals and so forth, people there might be better disposed to you. There's an incredible amount of denialism and victim-blaming going on here, inculcated by the kind of whitewashing "we're the good guys!" media dishonesty that was mentioned upthread.
While I can't refute any of this with a straight face, do you think they are better off under the rule of the Taliban? Do you think it's reasonable for them to believe they are under the rule of the Taliban? The Taliban moved in and took over without a single shot. Zero resistance. To me, this is just a further indication that leaving was the right move at this time.
Obviously, I don't prefer the Taliban, but what the fuck do I know, sitting thousands of miles away? The most important question here is why large numbers of Afghans either prefer them or don't actively oppose them. And yes, they have cultural differences and so on but they're human beings with the same basic needs as us and they are not simply unreformable savages. Clearly there was something seriously deficient with the alternatives they were offered.
I don't think people who believe women should be nothing more than domestic slaves, rape toys and brood mares for men would magically like us if we didn't have Gitmo.
I'm quite sure you're right about that. The problem is that the people with the means (i.e. guns) to fight the Taliban didn't. The situation really illustrates where we're at as the only democratic superpower. If we try to use our muscle to steer things in the "right" direction we're pilloried as "imperialists" if we don't, we're accused of throwing up our hands and abdicating our (white man's?) burden. Leaving aside what we should have done differently leading up to where we are, the question is what choices did we have leading up to this fiasco?
You do understand that there's a difference between the actual Taliban (who think that) and a much larger volume of people who merely acquiesce to it and who support or tolerate the Taliban for other reasons? Hard as it might be to understand, maintaining womens rights simply isn't the most important issue for Afghans. Making the conversation only about that caricatures their views and doesn't really help.
He thinks that only means the Taliban. When in fact it means large swathes of their society - even a significant percentage of their women, who have been indoctrinated by their fundamentalist religion for decades. This happened because the people of Afghanistan in large measure wanted it to happen, even if it was going to be catastrophic to many, many people. Like the twitter thread he referenced said - business runs better under the Taliban. And the corruption that existed prior to this under the Islamic Republic? It was voted in, over and over again. And now the President of the nation has fled with $169 million, almost certainly all aid money that was supposed to make the people's lives better.
