The Arab Spring and "the War on Terror"

[PussEKatt]

The Taliban are 100% in charge now,so.............

[OutByEaster?]

1 hour ago, PussEKatt said:

The Taliban are 100% in charge now,so.............

Maybe we can get a trade deal.

 

[chrisp65]

Get Liz Truss over there to talk pork.

 

[fightoffyour]

On 31/08/2021 at 07:32, Mozzavfc said:

No muslims don't class prayers as music

I guess they can still listen to Nickelback as well

[bickster]

3 hours ago, chrisp65 said:

Get Liz Truss over there to talk pork.

 

She's that f***ing dumb she would as well

[tonyh29]

On 30/08/2021 at 23:11, Davkaus said:

If anyone was daft enough to think that some of the talk coming out of the Taliban suggesting that they might be a bit more moderate might actually be a glimmer of hope for he country

I've got BBC World news on at the moment and there is some apologist for the Taliban saying along the lines of , its one death and people die all the time and who is to say it was Taliban sanctioned and you shouldn't judge the whole government without knowing all the facts 

he basically batted every question the presenter put to him along the same lines

 

 

[chrisp65]

49 minutes ago, tonyh29 said:

I've got BBC World news on at the moment and there is some apologist for the Taliban saying along the lines of , its one death and people die all the time and who is to say it was Taliban sanctioned and you shouldn't judge the whole government without knowing all the facts 

he basically batted every question the presenter put to him along the same lines

 

 

To be fair there have been people on here arguing ‘they would have died anyway’ when discussing 130,000 covid deaths.

[LondonLax]

8 hours ago, chrisp65 said:

To be fair there have been people on here arguing ‘they would have died anyway’ when discussing 130,000 covid deaths.

Well technically they are correct 

[Rugeley Villa]

They certainly won’t change their beliefs. What you’ll see is a slightly more diplomatic Taliban and also opposition governments showing a bit more tolerance for actually dealing with the Taliban . Talks , meetings etc. The Taliban know they have to play the game and it’s in their best interests. That’s what I think anyway .

[OutByEaster?]

Qatar have reached out and are helping the Taliban establish their infrastructures.

Heartwarming stuff from the World Cup hosts.

 

[sne]

1 minute ago, OutByEaster? said:

Qatar have reached out and are helping the Taliban establish their infrastructures.

Heartwarming stuff from the World Cup hosts.

 

As well as China and Pakistan as open allies. Unless they do something really stupid that forces one of the superpowers to act they should be safe in power for the foreseeable future.

But u never know.

[Davkaus]

8 minutes ago, OutByEaster? said:

Qatar have reached out and are helping the Taliban establish their infrastructures.

Heartwarming stuff from the World Cup hosts.

 

It's not too late for Afghanistan 2030.

[PussEKatt]

That will never do.If you get shot for singing then they might have people on the sidelines with Ak47s watching for supporters that celebrate goals ?!

[El Zen]

18 hours ago, PussEKatt said:

That will never do.If you get shot for singing then they might have people on the sidelines with Ak47s watching for supporters that celebrate goals ?!

I’m not sure this is conceptually that far removed from Qatar 2022. 

[sne]

21 hours ago, PussEKatt said:

That will never do.If you get shot for singing then they might have people on the sidelines with Ak47s watching for supporters that celebrate goals ?!

This is the way to celebrate apparently

 

[HanoiVillan]

This is fantastic:

It's absolutely worth reading, and provides some much needed historical and geographical perspective to the withdrawal and to women's rights in Afghanista. You should read the whole thing, but I've put some excerpts in the spoiler tags (because long):

Spoiler

• On a previous attempt to bring women's rights to rural Afghanistan:

'In 1979, when Shakira was an infant, Communists seized power in Kabul and tried to launch a female-literacy program in Helmand—a province the size of West Virginia, with few girls’ schools. Tribal elders and landlords refused. In the villagers’ retelling, the traditional way of life in Sangin was smashed overnight, because outsiders insisted on bringing women’s rights to the valley. “Our culture could not accept sending their girls outside to school,” Shakira recalled. “It was this way before my father’s time, before my grandfather’s time.” When the authorities began forcing girls to attend classes at gunpoint, a rebellion erupted, led by armed men calling themselves the mujahideen. In their first operation, they kidnapped all the schoolteachers in the valley, many of whom supported girls’ education, and slit their throats. The next day, the government arrested tribal elders and landlords on the suspicion that they were bankrolling the mujahideen. These community leaders were never seen again.

Tanks from the Soviet Union crossed the border to shore up the Communist government—and to liberate women. Soon, Afghanistan was basically split in two. In the countryside, where young men were willing to die fighting the imposition of new ways of life—including girls’ schools and land reform—young women remained unseen. In the cities, the Soviet-backed government banned child marriage and granted women the right to choose their partners. Girls enrolled in schools and universities in record numbers, and by the early eighties women held parliamentary seats and even the office of Vice-President.'

• On America's choice of allies:

'Pazaro, a woman from a nearby village, recalled, “We didn’t have a single night of peace. Our terror had a name, and it was Amir Dado.”

The first time Shakira saw Dado, through the judas of her parents’ front gate, he was in a pickup truck, trailed by a dozen armed men, parading through the village “as if he were the President.” Dado, a wealthy fruit vender turned mujahideen commander, with a jet-black beard and a prodigious belly, had begun attacking rival strongmen even before the Soviets’ defeat. He hailed from the upper Sangin Valley, where his tribe, the Alikozais, had held vast feudal plantations for centuries. The lower valley was the home of the Ishaqzais, the poor tribe to which Shakira belonged. Shakira watched as Dado’s men went from door to door, demanding a “tax” and searching homes. A few weeks later, the gunmen returned, ransacking her family’s living room while she cowered in a corner. Never before had strangers violated the sanctity of her home, and she felt as if she’d been stripped naked and thrown into the street.

By the early nineties, the Communist government of Afghanistan, now bereft of Soviet support, was crumbling. In 1992, Lashkar Gah fell to a faction of mujahideen. Shakira had an uncle living there, a Communist with little time for the mosque and a weakness for Pashtun tunes. He’d recently married a young woman, Sana, who’d escaped a forced betrothal to a man four times her age. The pair had started a new life in Little Moscow, a Lashkar Gah neighborhood that Sana called “the land where women have freedom”—but, when the mujahideen took over, they were forced to flee to Pan Killay.

Shakira was tending the cows one evening when Dado’s men surrounded her with guns. “Where’s your uncle?” one of them shouted. The fighters stormed into the house—followed by Sana’s spurned fiancé. “She’s the one!” he said. The gunmen dragged Sana away. When Shakira’s other uncles tried to intervene, they were arrested. The next day, Sana’s husband turned himself in to Dado’s forces, begging to be taken in her place. Both were sent to the strongman’s religious court and sentenced to death.

[...]

One night in 2003, Shakira was jolted awake by the voices of strange men. She rushed to cover herself. When she ran to the living room, she saw, with panic, the muzzles of rifles being pointed at her. The men were larger than she’d ever seen, and they were in uniform. These are the Americans, she realized, in awe. Some Afghans were with them, scrawny men with Kalashnikovs and checkered scarves. A man with an enormous beard was barking orders: Amir Dado.

[...]

Nearly every person Shakira knew had a story about Dado. Once, his fighters demanded that two young men either pay a tax or join his private militia, which he maintained despite holding his official post. When they refused, his fighters beat them to death, stringing their bodies up from a tree. A villager recalled, “We went to cut them down, and they had been sliced open, their stomachs coming out.” In another village, Dado’s forces went from house to house, executing people suspected of being Taliban; an elderly scholar who’d never belonged to the movement was shot dead.

Shakira was bewildered by the Americans’ choice of allies. “Was this their plan?” she asked me. “Did they come to bring peace, or did they have other aims?”'

[...]

In March, 2003, U.S. soldiers visited Sangin’s governor—Dado’s brother—to discuss refurbishing a school and a health clinic. Upon leaving, their convoy came under fire, and Staff Sergeant Jacob Frazier and Sergeant Orlando Morales became the first American combat fatalities in Helmand. U.S. personnel suspected that the culprit was not the Taliban but Dado—a suspicion confirmed to me by one of the warlord’s former commanders, who said that his boss had engineered the attack to keep the Americans reliant on him. Nonetheless, when Dado’s forces claimed to have nabbed the true assassin—an ex-Taliban conscript named Mullah Jalil—the Americans dispatched Jalil to Guantánamo. Unaccountably, this happened despite the fact that, according to Jalil’s classified Guantánamo file, U.S. officials knew that Jalil had been fingered merely to “cover for” the fact that Dado’s forces had been “involved with the ambush.”

[...] the United Nations began agitating for Dado’s removal. The U.S. repeatedly blocked the effort, and a guide for the U.S. Marine Corps argued that although Dado was “far from being a Jeffersonian Democrat” his form of rough justice was “the time-tested solution for controlling rebellious Pashtuns.”'

• A 'double tap' air strike:

'Sometimes, even fleeing did not guarantee safety. During one battle, Abdul Salam, an uncle of Shakira’s husband, took refuge in a friend’s home. After the fighting ended, he visited a mosque to offer prayers. A few Taliban were there, too. A coalition air strike killed almost everyone inside. The next day, mourners gathered for funerals; a second strike killed a dozen more people. Among the bodies returned to Pan Killay were those of Abdul Salam, his cousin, and his three nephews, aged six to fifteen.'

• The toll of coalition forces on this one woman's acquaintances:

'There was Muhammad, a fifteen-year-old cousin: he was killed by a buzzbuzzak, a drone, while riding his motorcycle through the village with a friend. “That sound was everywhere,” Shakira recalled. “When we heard it, the children would start to cry, and I could not console them.”

Muhammad Wali, an adult cousin: Villagers were instructed by coalition forces to stay indoors for three days as they conducted an operation, but after the second day drinking water had been depleted and Wali was forced to venture out. He was shot.

Khan Muhammad, a seven-year-old cousin: His family was fleeing a clash by car when it mistakenly neared a coalition position; the car was strafed, killing him.

Bor Agha, a twelve-year-old cousin: He was taking an evening walk when he was killed by fire from an Afghan National Police base. The next morning, his father visited the base, in shock and looking for answers, and was told that the boy had been warned before not to stray near the installation. “Their commander gave the order to target him,” his father recalled.

Amanullah, a sixteen-year-old cousin: He was working the land when he was targeted by an Afghan Army sniper. No one provided an explanation, and the family was too afraid to approach the Army base and ask.

Ahmed, an adult cousin: After a long day in the fields, he was headed home, carrying a hot plate, when he was struck down by coalition forces. The family believes that the foreigners mistook the hot plate for an I.E.D.

Niamatullah, Ahmed’s brother: He was harvesting opium when a firefight broke out nearby; as he tried to flee, he was gunned down by a buzzbuzzak.

Gul Ahmed, an uncle of Shakira’s husband: He wanted to get a head start on his day, so he asked his sons to bring his breakfast to the fields. When they arrived, they found his body. Witnesses said that he’d encountered a coalition patrol. The soldiers “left him here, like an animal,” Shakira said.

Entire branches of Shakira’s family tree, from the uncles who used to tell her stories to the cousins who played with her in the caves, vanished. In all, she lost sixteen family members. I wondered if it was the same for other families in Pan Killay. I sampled a dozen households at random in the village, and made similar inquiries in other villages, to insure that Pan Killay was no outlier. For each family, I documented the names of the dead, cross-checking cases with death certificates and eyewitness testimony. On average, I found, each family lost ten to twelve civilians in what locals call the American War.'

• Then some more violence in 2019:

'But in 2019, as the U.S. was holding talks with Taliban leaders in Doha, Qatar, the Afghan government and American forces moved jointly on Sangin one last time. That January, they launched perhaps the most devastating assault that the valley witnessed in the entire war. Shakira and other villagers fled for the desert, but not everyone could escape. Ahmed Noor Mohammad, who owned a pay-phone business, decided to wait to evacuate, because his twin sons were ill. His family went to bed to the sound of distant artillery. That night, an American bomb slammed into the room where the twin boys were sleeping, killing them. A second bomb hit an adjacent room, killing Mohammad’s father and many others, eight of them children.

The next day, at the funeral, another air strike killed six mourners. In a nearby village, a gunship struck down three children. The following day, four more children were shot dead. Elsewhere in Sangin, an air strike hit an Islamic school, killing a child. A week later, twelve guests at a wedding were killed in an air raid.

After the bombing, Mohammad’s brother travelled to Kandahar to report the massacres to the United Nations and to the Afghan government. When no justice was forthcoming, he joined the Taliban.'

• Some thoughts on the situation of women:

'Until recently, the Kabul that Sadat fled often felt like a different country, even a different century, from Sangin. The capital had become a city of hillside lights, shimmering wedding halls, and neon billboards that was joyously crowded with women: mothers browsed markets, girls walked in pairs from school, police officers patrolled in hijabs, office workers carried designer handbags. The gains these women experienced during the American War—and have now lost—are staggering, and hard to fathom when considered against the austere hamlets of Helmand: the Afghan parliament had a proportion of women similar to that of the U.S. Congress, and about a quarter of university students were female. Thousands of women in Kabul are understandably terrified that the Taliban have not evolved. In late August, I spoke by phone to a dermatologist who was bunkered in her home. She has studied in multiple countries, and runs a large clinic employing a dozen women. “I’ve worked too hard to get here,” she told me. “I studied too long, I made my own business, I created my own clinic. This was my life’s dream.” She had not stepped outdoors in two weeks.

The Taliban takeover has restored order to the conservative countryside while plunging the comparatively liberal streets of Kabul into fear and hopelessness. This reversal of fates brings to light the unspoken premise of the past two decades: if U.S. troops kept battling the Taliban in the countryside, then life in the cities could blossom. This may have been a sustainable project—the Taliban were unable to capture cities in the face of U.S. airpower. But was it just? Can the rights of one community depend, in perpetuity, on the deprivation of rights in another? In Sangin, whenever I brought up the question of gender, village women reacted with derision. “They are giving rights to Kabul women, and they are killing women here,” Pazaro said. “Is this justice?” Marzia, from Pan Killay, told me, “This is not ‘women’s rights’ when you are killing us, killing our brothers, killing our fathers.” Khalida, from a nearby village, said, “The Americans did not bring us any rights. They just came, fought, killed, and left.”

The women in Helmand disagree among themselves about what rights they should have. Some yearn for the old village rules to crumble—they wish to visit the market or to picnic by the canal without sparking innuendo or worse. Others cling to more traditional interpretations. “Women and men aren’t equal,” Shakira told me. “They are each made by God, and they each have their own role, their own strengths that the other doesn’t have.” More than once, as her husband lay in an opium stupor, she fantasized about leaving him. Yet Nilofar is coming of age, and a divorce could cast shame on the family, harming her prospects. Through friends, Shakira hears stories of dissolute cities filled with broken marriages and prostitution. “Too much freedom is dangerous, because people won’t know the limits,” she said.

All the women I met in Sangin, though, seemed to agree that their rights, whatever they might entail, cannot flow from the barrel of a gun—and that Afghan communities themselves must improve the conditions of women. Some villagers believe that they possess a powerful cultural resource to wage that struggle: Islam itself. “The Taliban are saying women cannot go outside, but there is actually no Islamic rule like this,” Pazaro told me. “As long as we are covered, we should be allowed.” I asked a leading Helmandi Taliban scholar where in Islam was it stipulated that women cannot go to the market or attend school. He admitted, somewhat chagrined, that this was not an actual Islamic injunction. “It’s the culture in the village, not Islam,” he said. “The people there have these beliefs about women, and we follow them.” Just as Islam offers fairer templates for marriage, divorce, and inheritance than many tribal and village norms, these women hope to marshal their faith—the shared language across their country’s many divides—to carve out greater freedoms.'

 

We keep seeing 'women's rights' in Afghanistan through a narrow lens - what can they wear? Can they go to school or run a business? - without even considering whether a woman would or could ever feel free if her brothers and sons and uncles are dying in airstrikes. It's not that the former isn't important, but that by the constant death and destruction in the countryside, we drove Afghans to prioritise the latter. Something to consider, perhaps, for those who wanted to continue the war in the name of women's rights.

[sne]

Absolutely massive Taliban flag painted on the wall outside the former US embassy in Kabul along with the words "We defeated America"

This whole fiasco will be a political nightmare for Biden and somehow Trump and the Republicans will try and paint themselves as innocent in it.

 

[Davkaus]

On 30/08/2021 at 15:54, BrownsVillan said:

Americans miss ISIS-K, kill a bunch of children.
 

 

 

On 30/08/2021 at 20:58, Davkaus said:

The associates of the victims claim they were innocent. The US claims that they were loading explosives into the car. There were explosions after the missile hit the car from the explosives the occupants had loaded in, according to the US anyway.

Two completely contradictory stories. One could prove their version of events by releasing the video, we'll see if they do.

An update on this. They just couldn't help themselves but commit another war crime on the way out.

Perhaps when Americans reflect on 9/11, and remember the losses of that tragedy, they could reflect on the atrocities their nation went on to commit in its name. 

 

 

[sne]

 

[ml1dch]

 

Everyone remember how the conflict in Afghanistan is now over? Thank goodness that all got completely sorted out, once and for all.