- cross-posted to:
- news@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- news@beehaw.org
There is a young woman sheltering under a tree between two busy roads clutching a pile of documents to her chest.
These pieces of paper are more important to Bibi Nazdana than anything in the world: they are the divorce granted to her after a two-year court battle to free herself from life as a child bride.
They are the same papers a Taliban court has invalidated - a victim of the group’s hardline interpretation on Sharia (religious law) which has seen women effectively silenced in Afghanistan’s legal system.
Nazdana’s divorce is one of tens of thousands of court rulings revoked since the Taliban took control of the country three years ago this month.
Guess we shouldn’t have bombed a random country to the point where they’d rather have the Taliban than anything approaching western values since they associate all western values with indiscriminate slaughter
I think you’re confusing America bombing Afghanistan into the ground with the Soviet Union bombing Afghanistan into the ground. Since the Soviets invaded, and the US propped up the proto-Taliban in response, Afghanistan’s government has been fundamentally broken. The US bears a lot of responsibility for that but the invasion of Afghanistan arguably made things better for a brief window.
Who do you think was in charge before the US started bombing them?
The people the us spent millions making sure was in charge to fight those evil commies, who were clearly so much worse than the Taliban, with their equal rights for women and such.
Care to try again?
I think you’re misreading the comment of the person you’re replying to here, it’s worded a little wonky and I don’t know if you picked up on a bit of a sarcastic tone there, I think you also may not be reading far enough into the history to really have a handle on the situation but frankly neither of you are doing a great job of explaining your positions so it’s a little hard to say what point either of you are trying to make
Tl;dr of modern Afghan history:
Around the 80s, Russia invaded Afghanistan and installed a socialist government
The US backs Islamic militants, essentially the Taliban or the groups that eventually morph into them, to oust the Russian backed government,
The Taliban also likes to style themselves as the Islamic emirate of Afghanistan
Some power struggles ensue, by the 90s sometime the Taliban is in charge of the country
9/11 happens, US invades, tries to set up their own government, pulls out, Taliban quickly takes back over
Yeah, but if you go back to the 80s it doesn’t make sense to say we bombed them so much that the Taliban was a better option than Western values. Unless the USSR is being counted as part of the West.
I was just pointing out that the Taliban was already in charge when the US started wrecking up the place, so they aren’t really a response to the US occupation. More a return to the status quo of the 90s.
Which is not to say that the US is blameless. I have a good enough handle on the situation to remember when the Taliban were the good guys in a Bond movie. But I’m not going to claim to be an expert on the region.
I think they were saying that the US funded the Taliban to fight the USSR (aka. “commies”)
Reread and try again little buddy. The US is directly and solely responsible for the Taliban existence because the commies were somehow worse to the US. Try reading your own articles if you’re going to be snippy while defending the indefensible US.
Watch your back. You might hurt it contorting that much to make every world problem the US’s fault.
As if this religion (and many others, yes) didn’t always have this problem.
It’s weird seeing bigotry normalized to the point you people think what you just said is an okay thing to say.
Sorry. It’s not okay to oppress women (or anyone else). Don’t give a fuck what any religion says.
That’s nice dear. We were having a different conversation, but I guess with Biden and Trump as examples you were just having a presidential moment.
There was a lot wrong in Afghanistan but it wasn’t the use of force. The people there absolutely wanted a chance to get out from under the Taliban. Bush fucked it from the beginning though, trying to give them the world’s most corrupt western style government, lying about reports of the Taliban resurging, and letting the DEA loose on their cash crops. You could easily see just how badly the country wanted the Taliban back with the massive waves of people fleeing them. We failed them badly, but not in the way you guys think.
The impression I’ve always gotten (and I’m sure no political guru or social scientist or anything of the sort) isn’t so much that the country overall prefers the Taliban as much as most of them just don’t really give a rat’s ass about the country as a whole or who’s claiming to be in charge of it at any given time, they don’t have a strong sense of national identity, they care for more about their tribe or village than anything going on outside of it. American, Russian, Taliban, doesn’t really matter too much to them, when the guys with better guns roll into town, you pay them lip service until they go away then continue right on doing things more or less the same way you have for the last 2000 years.
It does happen that the Taliban probably aligns with their traditional values more closely than the other people who have tried ruling it as a unified country over the years, but day-to-day, they’re still probably mostly only going to the Taliban when they need something from them and deferring to village elders or local warlords or whoever for everything else.
There’s variation I’m sure, those in cities probably have a stronger sense of what a country is and what it has to offer in the modern world than those in rural areas, but it’s a largely rural country, almost 75% of them are living in rural areas and some of them are super rural where some of them have probably never even seen a city.
If we had installed a tribal council with a few elected positions to counterbalance it; not let the DEA burn cash crops, (buy it and give it to the pharma companies); and installed basic corruption controls, (including among our own reporting lines); the Taliban would never have been allowed back into the country. They were the best alternative in 1991 and remain so in the people’s eyes. They have been ripped apart by fighting since the late 1970’s, they’re tired and want the peace more than they want rights. They would have taken both if we had been even halfway competent and not hellbent on creating USA II: The Middle Eastening.
They didn’t go back to the taliban because they wanted to.
Iran, Pakistan, Russia and China were supporting the taliban, and gave them what they needed to take the country back. We didn’t focus on cleaning up Afghanistan because our moron in chief threw all our resources at Iraq because it had oil, so we lost twice over.
Nobody wanted the taliban back except Pakistan and China, Pakistan because they consider the taliban to be ‘useful’ allies against India, and China because the taliban made them lucrative resource deals: https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics/International-relations/Afghanistan-turmoil/Afghanistan-s-6.5bn-mine-deals-with-China-others-dig-up-questions