Afganistan was a fairly liberal and well-educated country until, I gather, the US and the USSR used them as pawns for a hot outbreak of the cold war... and when we were done using their country and factions as a game board, the taliban took over.
From Frontline: "Taliban government banned most forms of entertainment, from music to television to kite flying, and dealt with crime via public executions, stonings and amputations. Government officials in the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice monitored the streets. Women were forced to wear full-body burqas in public and were prohibited from working, attending school past the age of eight or visiting male doctors without a male chaperone [and much worse atrocities, as I recall]... In 1999, the United Nations imposed sanctions on Afghanistan to force the Taliban to hand over Saudi-born terrorist Osama bin Laden, who stood accused of orchestrating the deadly 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. The Taliban refused, calling Bin Laden "a guest" in Afghanistan. "
The idiocy is that we didn't put all our resources into cleaning up our old mess in Afganistan, getting them stable and pulling out the crazies, in the first place. Instead... Iraq? Seriously? WTF. And just like an infection with under-powered antibiotics, picking at it ineffectually just made it worse... made it easier for the crazies to keep recruiting people from all around europe, kept things unstable. etc. And now, the taliban has recovered happily and keeps getting within arms reach of taking over pakistan... which has nuclear weapons.
We've screwed them both up yes. But they're very different problems.
I agree with you about the emergency responders, though.
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2010-09-12 07:44 pm (UTC)Afganistan was a fairly liberal and well-educated country until, I gather, the US and the USSR used them as pawns for a hot outbreak of the cold war... and when we were done using their country and factions as a game board, the taliban took over.
From Frontline:
"Taliban government banned most forms of entertainment, from music to television to kite flying, and dealt with crime via public executions, stonings and amputations. Government officials in the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice monitored the streets. Women were forced to wear full-body burqas in public and were prohibited from working, attending school past the age of eight or visiting male doctors without a male chaperone [and much worse atrocities, as I recall]... In 1999, the United Nations imposed sanctions on Afghanistan to force the Taliban to hand over Saudi-born terrorist Osama bin Laden, who stood accused of orchestrating the deadly 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. The Taliban refused, calling Bin Laden "a guest" in Afghanistan. "
The idiocy is that we didn't put all our resources into cleaning up our old mess in Afganistan, getting them stable and pulling out the crazies, in the first place. Instead... Iraq? Seriously? WTF. And just like an infection with under-powered antibiotics, picking at it ineffectually just made it worse... made it easier for the crazies to keep recruiting people from all around europe, kept things unstable. etc. And now, the taliban has recovered happily and keeps getting within arms reach of taking over pakistan... which has nuclear weapons.
We've screwed them both up yes. But they're very different problems.
I agree with you about the emergency responders, though.