Two years under Taliban rule in Afghanistan: ‘I never thought the world would forget about us so quickly’
Two years under Taliban rule in Afghanistan: ‘I never thought the world would forget about us so quickly’
Those who left and those who could not flee speak of a country in ruins and decry the world’s apathy towards the humanitarian crisis and the lack of rights, mainly for women, which a UN report describes as ‘gender apartheid’
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At some point, the people of Afghanistan should be able to take control of their own country. How can a vast majority of the people sit there and let a tiny percentage dictate the lives and rules for everyone? Kick the Taliban out of your country.
The problem is that the Taliban have popular support. The media don't want to report it, but this is a society where public life has always been under the purview of men, it's a largely Muslim country, very rural, and the alternative power centers there are chock full of child molesters and corrupt individuals. The Taliban, despite their strong ideological position, has a lot going for them. They're not taking bribes to sell out their values. They're capable of maintaining stability. Even if people disagree with some or other things about them, theyre better than the alternatives. Fact is, they're in power there because they're the only organization capable of holding power there.
it’s a largely Muslim country
Pretty much all the Abrahmic religions do this shit when they're in power...
I wouldn't have pointed it out, because it's kind of like saying the sky is blue. But from the rest of your comment it seems like you legitimately think it's just Muslims., And not that entire religious family
It's not just Muslims that are fundamentalist extremists. But of every major religion, Islam has the highest rate of that kind of extremism. There are plenty of Christian countries which are socially progressive and endorse modern sensibilities. No Muslim countries are.
I have a dear friend of mine who is a religious minority in Egypt (she's a Copt). The paranoia that she and her parents have when interacting with Muslims is saddening, because of how it's been justified. Her church has lost several members to religious violence, and she's lived through a suicide bombing which happened at that church and targeted Christians.
I'm not saying there aren't Christian extremists. There are. But the Muslim extremist problem is an order of magnitude larger within that faith.
Judge individual Muslims for their own beliefs. But there is no Christian version of the Taliban state or ISIS. And Islam is to blame for the actions of its extremist adherents writ large. It desperately needs a religious reformation, but instead, the Saudis are still chopping the heads off of people who offend their religious police.
Feels like a geopolitical issue more than a religious issue.
It’s not just Muslims that are fundamentalist extremists. But of every major religion, Islam has the highest rate of that kind of extremism
Not really...
There's over 1.7 billion Muslims in the world, that's a lot of people.
But there is no Christian version of the Taliban state or ISIS
So basically you're saying we can just ignore all the countries where they're trying to do it, just ignore them till their in power?
Nah, I don't see how that helps anyone except Christian extremists.
I'm not saying we should ignore anything. I'm saying we shouldn't ignore the extremely high rate of extremism within Islam.
But if you want to prove me wrong, point to a single Muslim country where apostasy and homosexuality are socially accepted
I’m saying we shouldn’t ignore the extremely high rate of extremism within Islam.
And I'm saying you don't seem to understand how large a number 1.7 billion is...
But if you want to prove me wrong, point to a single Muslim country where apostasy and homosexuality are socially accepted
Lebanon
Can you name a country where the Christian majority do that?
They're openly against LGBT because "the Bible says so" and they claim they have to follow it.
The Bible also says if anyone even starts questioning if they should still be Christian, then they need to be executed to prevent the spread.
So they might not say it, but they're all about it, or just lying hypocrites who are making the personal choice to harass people who are LGBT.
Lebanon isn't a Muslim nation. It has a significant Muslim plurality. And homosexuality is de facto illegal there AND extremely socially unacceptable, with 85% of Lebanese people saying it should be "rejected by society."
Give me a Muslim nation where homosexuality and apostasy are both legal and socially acceptable.
Lebanon isn’t a Muslim nation. It has a significant Muslim plurality
By that logic there's no "Christian country" to compare them too, and your point makes even less sense.
I'll be honest tho, I didn't think you'd last this long without openly being full of shit
Congrats? You made it two whole comments
That's what I thought.
There's not a single fucking Muslim country where I wouldn't face dramatic persecution as an apostate or my gay friends for loving who they do.
No, dip shit. Lebanon is 48% Muslim. That's a plurality. It's 45% Christian, 5% Druze, and the rest minor groups.
A "Muslim country" is one which has a dominant majority Muslim population for the purposes of this conversation. That describes dozens of nations. Show me one of them where it's legal and acceptable to be gay and an apostate.
PS even if I pretended Lebanon was a Muslim nation it still wouldn't pass that test
Since you edited your post after I replied like a dirty little liar, here's a second reply.
Can I name a Christian majority country where being gay is generally acceptable, being an apostate is generally acceptable, and both are legal? Yeah. Canada, the US, Australia, Spain, the UK, France, Germany, etc, etc, etc.
Technically this is your third reply to me since I started ignoring you...
I guess youre as good at math as logic homie.
Hey just an fyi, because you don't seem to be aware - a fairly large part of ignoring someone is, well, ignoring them.
Still can't come up with an example country, eh?
are you lobotomized?
I said Muslim once. The rest of my comment is about Afghanistan.
They really don't. Israel is a Jewish country and women are allowed to go to school or university.
There's countless Christian countries and that shit happens nowhere.
You're confusing a country where a majority of citizens are Christian with countries who are lead by Christian leaders...
I can't think of a single equivalent than the Vatican, and if you're acting like that's a great government...
We probably dont agree on what makes a government good.
The statement was that this happens with all abrahamitic religions in power.
You're confusing a country where a majority of citizens are Christian with countries who are lead by Christian leaders..
I'm not, it's just the closest to the stated premise.
I can't think of a single equivalent than the Vatican, and if you're acting like that's a great government...
Same. But then I doesn't make sense to make that statement in the first place about the other religions.
Because there's zero evidence to back it up.
It reminds me of Iraq right before 9/11 happened.. ye they had a piece of shit dictator Sadam; absolutely. But they wasn't being bombed to smithereens. And in the mess of war in Iraq the ISIS were able to fuck shit up n grow , even growing into syria, Afghanistan n maybe other countries...
How can a vast majority of the people sit there and let a tiny percentage dictate the lives and rules for everyone?
As an American looking at American policy right now...that's ironic.
Yeah but they're extremists and terrorists who want to control all aspects of the media, stop women from having rights over their bodies and return to their place in society serving men, criminalize everything that goes against their religious beliefs and restrict voting and democracy to preserve their 'values', carry guns with them everywhere and fanatically praise their leaders.
Err, there's some differences somewhere I'm sure..
No shit. The second we left they fell apart. No resistance.
As far as I'm concerned we should only help those that help themselves, like Ukraine is doing. Afghanistan has always been Taliban simps. Those women know where their men sleep and have knives ffs.
I suppose the devil they know is better than the one they don’t know.
Yeah, we should only help white people right?
This is a great message for the world, we'll help you, as long as you're white
Bro, you went so far that you actually became racist yourself. You literally said: “Do help themselves” == “white” “Don’t help themselves” == “not white”
You are pushing the american stereotype for “lazy immigrants”
Thats kinda cringe tbh.
"Talking about the dynamics of racism is racist." I'll let MLK know.
Nah. Thats not racist. Stating that countries primarily populated by non-whites are somehow too weak or lazy to fight for themselves, however, is definitely pretty racist.
This particular country that we're actually discussing was indeed too lazy to fight for itself and gave up within 2 weeks after decades of being occupied.
EDIT: And that's if you don't consider this the wishes of the country itself. To a large extent, I think the Taliban have popular support within the country and I wouldn't be surprised if there were Taliban sympathizers or supporters within the ranks of the military.
Where did you see that? They were pointing out that the person they responded to made the very implication you're accusing them of making.
That user who suggested we 'help' is either malicious or ignorant. Because help doesn't mean we release the reserves of money we've stolen from the Afghans. It means invade them again, whether she means it or not.
The best thing we can do now is let the Afghans be sovereign and no longer interfere (which won't happen). You can expect nothing good socially from there, as the Americans helped the Taliban defeat local progressive and secular forces in the 70s. All we can hope for is for them to eventually stand up on their own two feet.
Anyone who whines about the plight of Afghan women is either doing propaganda or is misled. Afghan women have children too btw - children that are starving - have Biden release the reserves.
This is a much more nuanced approach that I can work with. I don't think that there's nothing we can do, but I can at least understand that perspective. We've done a shit ton of damage to the region over the last 50 years, and if the people had access to self determination, I'm sure that they'd prefer no US government intervention after the last 20 years. The new "insurgency" that was born out of more progressive elements of the old government have a chance to bring some positive peace if they win. The problem I had was the implication from others that the Afghan people are helpless and therefore not worth supporting.
That's cool. My peice had to said, because the rightwing types were benefitting from the silence or disagreement of people like myself who want no more intervention.
Sorry I must have missed that in the above posts. When did anyone mention race?
They hail from the instance of the sensitive and easily triggered
blahaj
Man that place really is terrible. They claim to support safety and inclusivity, but appear perfectly happy to berate, attack, and bully others, as long as their opinions are the bad opinions.
They are liberals with paper thin corporate-friendly politics.
I don't know if he edited it but he said nothing about race. It was about fighting back
Found the racist.
Are you implying that non-whites are incapable of helping themselves?
What do you think the solution is? Indefinite US occupation? At that point wouldn't you want America to just take them over?
Has nothing to do with race. Ukraine didn't bend over for Russia instead fucking their shit up day 1. Their president didn't flee instead stayed and mocked the occupiers by showing off him and his crew were still in Kyiv.
Afghanistan? We trained them for twenty years to stand up for themselves as a independent democratic nation and threw it away the second we left. What a fucking waste. They didn't even have fucking OIL to take. Nor was Osama there, or ever was.
If Afghanistan actually gave a fuck and tried but failed my opinion would be quite different. I'd be all "remember our fallen Afghan allies" o7 n shit.
So yeah take your standard operation trolling elsewhere. I've seen this exact same talking point before it's not original, think for yourself for a goddamn change*
If you think that's the timeline of events for Afghan forces, then you don't know shit. We never trained them to use the equipment we spent trillions of dollars on. The manuals didn't even have an Arabic translation.
We apparently spent billions doing it..
Or just shuffled money around. Either way an attempt was made.
And somehow the person calling out racism is always dubbed the racist by those who refuse to acknowledge their own privilege, let alone their blatant bias. Fucking typical.
That's been the American motto since the country's independence. Huge debates about helping the french aristocracy at the start of the reign of terror, but not even a single response to the former slaves in Haiti after their revolution.
We didn’t like the Reign of Terror because it was the Reign. Of. Terror. Also bribery with the XYZ Affair turned us against the murderous revolutionaries.
We didn’t help the Haitians because of Southern Slavers were scared of that happening to them. If only it did…
Thank you for your nuanced view of history that takes continuity of causal events into account. Today I learned about the XYZ affair.
No problem, it even points out within the first few paragraphs about how the French wanted to seize our ships, adding more reason for American discontempt of the French Revolution. Kinda forgot about that bit.
I see you didn't like the earliest examples I could think of with the systemic racism in foreign affairs. How about the utter contempt from Kissinger towards PoC when he was Secretary of State? How's that African neoimperialism? Maybe you'd prefer talking about the "war" in the Philippines? Perhaps you'd like to hear about the absolute refusal for the last 120 years to make Puerto Rico a state? Maybe the US support of Nazi Germany up until 1941 is more to your liking? The genocides of Native Americans that continued into the 70s? The ongoing hypocritical genocide of latino people on our southern border? The oil wars? COINTELPRO tactics being used abroad? I have a lot of examples of racist foreign affairs from the US.
Ok buddy, you’re just saying words by now. Get off Wikipedia and get a life.
Which ones are nonsensical? I'll expand on the topic for you.
You use text-based social media and deride reading?
:(
The problem is that “the people of Afghanistan” don’t see themselves as a united people. Regional and tribal ties are far, far stronger in the region than any true sense of national identity outside of “let’s cooperate just long enough to kick these fucking foreigners out”. Immediately after that’s accomplished, the region regresses into very old-school power politics and warlord fiefdoms. This has happened twice now in the space of 50 years. The truly galling point, though, is that US leaders and officials should have known this… but there were effectively zero coherent plans to handle that aspect of the occupation.
How can a vast majority of the people sit there and let a tiny percentage dictate the lives and rules for everyone?
Is that a serious question?
The vast majority of the world lives like that...
Even in first world countries.
I'm American, and a very very tiny percentage of other Americans hold the vast amount of wealth and use it to buy the majority of both parties off so that literally no matter who wins any election, they're going to be someone that puts corporate profits over the average American.
Where do you live that's truly led by the majority?
Fun fact, the dynamic where the majority class controls the "rules" is called communism. Maybe they want us to give it a go here in the US?
A lot of the Afghanistan problem is that they have no national identity, they're a collection of tribes and warlords, so the only united group in the country is the Taliban, and the Taliban has a lot of help from Pakistan and other regional powers.
What in the racist fuck is this generalization?
Same way stuff happens in the USA... inequality n disparity keeps growing... The ruling / wealthy 🤑 class keeps consolidating wealth n we all just go on with our lives... Don't we?
I dunno, there's been quite a few large protest movements in recent decades because of this, and currently there's a large and growing labor movement.