Prevention of vice and promotion of virtue
Girls don’t need education, any more than stoves or cribs or sex dolls need education. Female people are tools for the use of men; you don’t send your tools to high school.
The Taliban have effectively banned girls from secondary education in Afghanistan, by ordering high schools to re-open only for boys.
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In a further sign that the recently announced Taliban government is tightening restrictions on women, the former ministry of women’s affairs building in Kabul has been handed over to the newly re-established ministry for the prevention of vice and promotion of virtue.
This was the group’s feared enforcer in the 1990s, charged with beating women who violated bars on everything from going out in public without a male guardian to an obsessively prescriptive dress code that even forbade high heels.
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However, the Taliban are now in charge of a capital, and a country, very different from the war-battered city they took over in 1996. They are likely to face strong pushback from women, including older students, and the many Afghan fathers and brothers who want the women in their families to get an education.
“The population they have given themselves the challenge of trying to rule has doubled in size and expectations have gone sky-high compared to the 1990s. We can anticipate there will be reactions and maybe the Taliban will be forced to backpedal or consider some differences,” said Prof Michael Semple from the Mitchell Institute of Global Peace, Security and Justice.
Religious fanatics seldom backpedal.
Didn’t Machiavelli write something about there being different rules when conquering a land of people who were used to being free? As I recall, he said all the inhabitants must be slaughtered, as it was not possible to get free people to bend meekly for the yoke.
All they have to do is paint the yoke in rainbow sparkles, and make their whips and sticks pink and baby blue.
What’s the Venn diagram of TRAs and Taliban apologists? A circle?
This is hardly surprising. I think the whole brutal farce of this 20-year war, which was undertaken for revenge and not for the liberation of women or any other splendidly moral end, was summed up in the destruction by drone of Zemari Ahmadi and nine members of his family, including probably seven children – an attack that was in revenge for the attack by Isis Khorasan on people outside the airport at Kabul. Zemari Ahmadi worked for Nutrition and Education International, ‘a nongovernment organisation that distributes food to Afghan civilians’ (The Guardian). One wonders how many more such ‘incidents’ and ‘horrible mistakes’ there were over those twenty years. There have certainly been a great many, and not only in Afghanistan.
There was, over the twenty years, the usual condescending Western talk about the West’s ‘civilising’ mission, but little effort was put into any such mission, or in understanding the country — it was easier to hand out dosh to the kleptocrats who were put in charge in Kabul, and whose writ never run very far outside it. Diawl! (Welsh for ‘the devil!’)
Via Jesse Singal, this article is a heartbreaking account of the *actual* war as it was fought, or at least some of the brutal highlights that Tim rightly supposes must exist. The occupation was brutal and bloody, and the client state we attempted to install was filled with pedophiles and drug-smugglers and rife with the rankest kind of corruption imaginable; it was a gangster state that terrorised the populace even more than the Taliban had. In the meantime, the West used Afghanistan as a wealth-transfer program from the general coffers to military contractors and mercenaries and think-tankers, and all the while nobody really seemed to give too much of a shit except for maybe Rachel Maddow every once in awhile.
If anything is true, it is true that freedom cannot be imposed from the outside. Especially not by a distant corrupt bureaucracy which turns a blind eye to the gangsters and child rapists it has installed to deliver that freedom. The fate of Afghan society, and especially women and girls within it, is a goddamned crying shame and a crime against humanity. But if Afghan society and Afghan women want to be free, they will need to fight for it, and sacrifice their principles and even many of their lives, and they will need to win. We cannot do it for them.
It only takes the slightest bit of perspective shift to understand this, too. If another country came in and tried to liberate the United States, would we welcome them? No, not really. We may comply, but only as long as necessary until they tired of the whole affair and left.
I read too much Zinn, but hearing Dubya proclaim that the ‘Terrorists hate us for our freedoms,’ especially rankles in retrospect. They hate us because we don’t respect their freedoms. Terrorism doesn’t arise ex-nihilo, it has antecedents. Ours and the British interests in Afghanistan are based on economic exploitatin, just as they were in Cuba and the Philippines, and Central America, and pretty much everywhere we have our World Police bases.
Afghanistan sure as shit *needs* civilizing but that Ghandi quote “What do you think of Western civilization?” “I think it would be a good idea,” seems apt.
Spreading the Enlightenment to all the world would be worth an ocean of blood deep enough to drown the planet Jupiter, but you can’t force it upon anyone. If they want to be savages, they will continue to be, and the anti-vaxxers, Trump cultists, gender goblins, etc are proof that the United States and what’s left of the United Kingdom are chock full of savages themselves.
#Seth ‘nobody seemed to give too much of a shit’.
No, of course they didn’t! When you no longer have a conscripted army, as in Vietnam (that taught the US government a lesson – a cynical one), and when you use drones and have troops at once calling in airpower to deal with whatever situation they might find themselves in, so that deaths are few (maimings and post-traumatic stress disorders can mostly be kept out of the news), war goes on its way as a sort of faraway background noise, a bit of distant static. I imagine a great many British people didn’t know that British troops were still in Afghanistan, even if they knew troops had been sent there twenty years ago, after which the war in Afghanistan became a forgotten sideshow to the splendid happenings in Iraq (I can’t remember the banal Pentagonian moniker the invasion was given). And if a few, or a great many, Afghan kids and other perfectly innocent people get slaughtered by misdirected drones, you can always ignore it officially so that it sort of goes away and never registers at home – though it was possible, of course, to do that during the Vietnam War, as Nick Tulse’s horrifying book, ‘Kill Anything that Moves’, makes abundantly clear. As is, alas, the case always & everywhere, people are interested in what happens to people like them, to their countrymen, and not in what happens to a people who are distant both spatially and culturally from them. This is natural and not to be altogether despised, but it results in evil as well as good, and one great evil it results in is a simple lack of interest in what is actually happening.
There is a very well-received book, ‘An Intimate War’, that has to do with the Afghan war written by Mike Martin, a visiting research fellow at the Department of War Studies, King’s College London. He studied biology at Oxford and was a British Army officer in Afghanistan. I have ordered the book, and it has not yet arrived, but here’s a brief account of it:
‘An Intimate War’ tells the story of the last thirty-four years of conflict in Helmand Province, Afghanistan as seen through the eyes of the Helmandis. In the West, this period is often defined through different lenses — the Soviet intervention, the civil war, the Taliban, and the post-2001 nation-building era. Yet, as experienced by local inhabitants, the Helmand conflict is a perennial one, involving the same individuals, families and groups, and driven by the same arguments over land, water and power. This book — based on both military and research experience in Helmand and 150 interviews in Pashto — offers a very different view of Helmand from those in the media. It demonstrates how outsiders have most often misunderstood the ongoing struggle in Helmand and how, in doing so, they have exacerbated the conflict, perpetuated it and made it more violent — precisely the opposite of what was intended when their interventions were launched. Mike Martin’s oral history of Helmand underscores the absolute imperative of understanding the highly local, personal, and non-ideological nature of internal conflict in much of the ‘third’ world.
# 7: ‘Afghanistan sure as shit *needs* civilizing’ – but, forgive me, Blood Knight, this is the attitude that is a huge problem. Supposedly enlightened Western interventions do not necessarily result in ‘civilising’ some ‘savage’ people (what is a ‘savage’ person, what is a ‘civilised’ one?). There is of course an academic debate about this, but it seems pretty clear that India, for example, was governed for the benefit of Britain, and Britain’s rise for 200 years was at least in part financed by its discouragement, to use a gentle word, of indigenous Indian industries. Who were the civilised and who the savages in the Belgian Congo, and who the savages and who the civilised in German South West Africa? And what is classed under ‘the Enlightenment’ (a far more various body of thought than is commonly assumed) is not the only body of thought in the world that is worthy of study and respect.
There’s a big difference between the post hoc justifications of the various empires used as cover for doing whatever they damn well please and a general desire for all of mankind to be uplifted. Many of the various Indian warlords weren’t savages in any case (Tipu Sultan for one) but a significant portion of their cavalry forces were. In any case the British encroachment (mostly the East India Company ’til they became a liability for the Empire) just exploited existing power struggles amongst smaller imperial states to their benefit.
It’s a game as old as humanity, the Age of Sail just changed the nature of who the players were. I think we tend to overestimate how civilized anyone actually is.