The Taliban’s announcement that it is resuming publicly stoning women to death has been enabled by the international community’s silence, human rights groups have said.
Safia Arefi, a lawyer and head of the Afghan human rights organisation Women’s Window of Hope, said the announcement had condemned Afghan women to return to the darkest days of Taliban rule in the 1990s.
“With this announcement by the Taliban leader, a new chapter of private punishments has begun and Afghan women are experiencing the depths of loneliness,” Arefi said.
“Now, no one is standing beside them to save them from Taliban punishments. The international community has chosen to remain silent in the face of these violations of women’s rights.”
wow who would have thought
Conservatism is a deadly, contagious social disease that destroys entire cultures.
In Afghanistan, we can see the natural, final stage of conservatism. This is what the future holds for any country that cannot offer sufficient resistance to this disease.
Well, 20 years and what have we learned:
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If you invade a nation with no solid national identity that prefers tribal identity, you’re going to have to stay to build that national identity.
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To build that national identity you’ll need to stay until a whole generation has gone through the new way of life you have made: born, went to school, got a job, got married, had some kids, grew old, and died. The new way of life needs to be the only way of life in living memory.
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So you’re talking about a minimum of 100 years of occupation.
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If you pull out too soon because back home the appetite for a foreign deployment has wained, don’t get surprised when the old way comes back.
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Guerrilla fighting is super effective in the long run.
Great post. I’ll just quibble with one word. It took 20 years to re-learn what most of our ancestors knew well. It isn’t enough to occupy a country. If you want to replace an ancient tribal culture, you have to remove that culture’s elites, colonize and farm the land with your own citizens more or less permanently, put down any resistance violently, and then support the colony until it finally assimilates the existing population or is assimilated by it. All of the ancient empires did that when they could, Europe did it during the age of colonization where feasible. The Arabs did it during the Islamic conquest. China has done it throughout their long history. Russia is the largest country on Earth because it colonized all of the indigenous cultures from the Ural Mountains to the Pacific Ocean during the conquest of Siberia. The Soviet Empire tried to do it to Eastern Europe too with their Russification programs, but weren’t able to stay long enough because the Soviet Empire was destroyed after only 45 years.
The US was never going to colonize Afghanistan. It was folly to believe that Afghanistan was going to adopt western values in a mere 20 years of occupation.
That sounds like you announcing you cured HIV by simply shooting the infected. It might be true in one sense but even if that worked the cure is worse than the disease.
I really don’t want any country involved in genocide
Traditional values
Horror from those of us who aren’t going to get stoned to death.
Terror from those who are.
Important to understand the distinction between these emotions.
