Be human
Making lists.
https://twitter.com/Amie_FR/status/1427236192186208260
https://twitter.com/CombatJourno/status/1427278390118256640
For one last day?
I'm hopelessly stuck in Kabul with my wife and child.
Like myself, hundreds of other journalists are also stuck here.
I have an 11—months old daughter.
Please pray for her safety.
— Mustafa מוסטפא (@CombatJourno) August 15, 2021
Asking for an interview is part of our job and there is nothing wrong with it. But it becomes a bit insensitive when you ignore someone is trying with life to protect his infant daughter and wife against Taliban.
That interview can line him up for execution.
Be human.
— Mustafa מוסטפא (@CombatJourno) August 16, 2021
On second thought, screw that. Humans being human is exactly the problem. Don’t be human. The less human the better.
It’s comprehensively awful. Twenty years propping up a fake state to see it fall apart like tissue paper in the rain.
It looks like the Taliban are going to let us get our folks out and then as soon as we’re entirely gone the killings will start. They don’t want to risk shooting at someone who might shoot back.
Oh, God, the athletic stadiums to be used as killing fields. It’s a nightmare to contemplate. All in the name of a merciful Allah.
Papito: What really matters, though, is the connected and the corrupt companies made their billions. “War is a Racket”
Just think about what that trillion dollars could have paid for? It also represents a twenty year period in which even as nasty a piece of work as the Taliban could have evolved. Islamic history is full of examples of fervid fanatics slowly softening over time.
Over time? What time would that be exactly? They haven’t evolved in the past 14 centuries so why would they have done so over the past 20 years?
14 centuries even doesn’t seem long enough… there’s nothing in Islam that requires the Taliban to be as nasty as they are (though I’m sure they’ve gotten some ideas); they’re probably more or less the same barbarians as they were when they frustrated Alexander’s ambitions.
That is not entirely true or fair, Ophelia. There have been multiple examples of Islamic states that were relatively “evolved” and civilized. Moorish Spain was arguably more civilized than the Christian states that replaced it?
Heck…I don’t want to sound like an advocate for the religion of peace (har), but…
Plus, one cannot deny the reality that the United States in its various wars for FREEDUMB has caused far more death and destruction in the last fifty years than the Taliban could even dream of. Vietnam alone…
Is Mullah Omar really a bigger barbarian than Dick Cheney or General Curtis LeMay?
Evolved and civilized according to whom? Did anyone ask the women? Were any women free to say?
Not that I’m disputing that some Islamic states were decidedly better than some Christian ones according to various metrics, but I am disputing that we can take that as a reason to think the Taliban will mellow.
Plus of course the Taliban, like everyone else, doesn’t really have time to mellow. The forest fires and heat waves and tundra meltings and droughts and crop failures and floods and collapse of coastal cities are going to win that fight.
Re: #9: Probably not. My main point is 20 years of incompetent and brutal occupation certainly didn’t help things very much.
Re: #10. Yep. I was hoping I was old enough that I would miss it. :(
Well I’m not generally a big fan of Western imperialism yadda yadda, but the reality still is that those 20 years did make a big difference in the lives of a generation of female people…who now have to see all that vanish in a blink.
Can we bring back the communists? They were better than anything we installed during those 20 years.