National park, but not for you, bitches
The Taliban continues to find new places to tell women to stay out of.
The Taliban government have banned women from visiting the Band-e-Amir national park in Bamiyan province.
Afghanistan’s acting minister of virtue and vice, Mohammad Khaled Hanafi, said women had not been observing hijab inside the park.
And therefore they will be fucking every man inside the park and nobody will know who anybody’s baby is ever again and the world will fall to pieces. Put the women in a smaller box!
Band-e-Amir is a significant tourist attraction, becoming Afghanistan’s first national park in 2009.
And now it’s not a national park any more, because half the population is told to stay out.
The Taliban have a history of implementing bans on women doing certain activities on what it insists is a temporary basis, including preventing them from attending schools in December 2022.
The ban on visiting the Band-E-Amir national park is the latest in a long list of activities that women have been prevented from doing since the Taliban returned to power in August 2021.
Most recently, the Taliban ordered hair and beauty salons in Afghanistan to shut and in mid-July stopped women from sitting the national university entrance exams.
If they can’t put women into smaller and smaller boxes what is the point of them at all? They need a purpose in life.
It’s too bad that the NATO countries, with all their wealth and power, couldn’t be bothered to construct a government in Afghanistan that wasn’t so absolutely terrible that the Taliban was seen as preferable to it.
I’m not going to assert that Afghanistan’s culture is “woke” by any means. I’m not going to say that Afghanistan’s male population (aside from the Taliban) is feminist. But it is my understanding that the extremism of the Taliban on “virtue and vice” isn’t held by the majority of the population.
It’s just that the regime installed and maintained by NATO was nothing more than a set of competing gangsters from top to bottom. With those enforcing “order” at the bottom robbing and extorting villagers who had almost nothing to begin with, and, when they weren’t doing that, they were amusing themselves with raping women and chidren.
But I suppose we can console ourselves that Biden’s seizing of Afghanistan’s currency reserves when the price of food and fertilizer has gone through the roof, will ensure that lots of Afghanistan’s women will starve to death and thereby escape the clutches of the Taliban’s misogyny.
Zealots have the advantage over all of us in absolute certainty that they are right about everything, don’t they? They never have this “are we the baddies” moment of doubt that would lead them into the errors of reason or compassion. Each day when they wake up, they have a new mission to ensure that all is going according to their will, that no little deviance is occurring anywhere within their realm.
US policy has fucked up Afghanistan since the response to the Soviet Invasion was decided to be handled by the Mujahadeen, the progenitors of these monsters. By the time the Biden administration fumbled their handling of the exit from Afghanistan, it was too late to find a good path out.
I’m just trying to figure out how anyone can reasonably expect to set up a government for another nation and think it will be a functioning democracy. I can’t think of any examples of nation-building from without that has been successful and resulted in freedom for the people who live there.
I don’t agree with C. S. Lewis about much, but he got at least one thing very right
“Theocracy is the worst of all governments. If we must have a tyrant, a robber baron is far better than an inquisitor. The baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity at some point be sated; and since he dimly knows he is doing wrong he may possibly repent. But the inquisitor who mistakes his own cruelty and lust of power and fear for the voice of Heaven will torment us infinitely because he torments us with the approval of his own conscience and his better impulses appear to him as temptations.”
Me [commenter “Me”]: I deleted your comment timestamped 5:20. Way too rude. Feel free to repeat the opinions, but without the rudeness.
The two obvious examples are post-WW2 Japan and Germany. In both cases the allies followed a path of abolishing previous government and military control structures, banning past leaders and party members from taking part in any form of governance, and providing aid for food, transport, etc. That moved on rapidly (because allied leaders on the ground saw that it was required and acted) to allowing local control to re-establish, permitting the formation of political parties, while gradually increasing local control to regional and then wider areas, and finally nationally. All this while pumping massive aide into both countries. The fact that this policy took two enemies of the allies and turned them into two of the economically strongest bulwarks of western world order over the last 80 years says a lot.
Why didn’t that work in Iraq and Afghanistan? I’m not an expert, but at a shallow level I syuspect it’s because in both those cases the US and it’s allies never really established total control, and they never poured in the kind of resource that went into Japan or West Germany. As a result much of their effort and attention was squandered on fighting and security, and a reliance on previously existing control structures and personnel gave rise to huge issues with corruption, revenge, favouritism, and waste. Japan and West Germany, although devastated post-war, had also been bonafide industrial powers with skilled and educated workforces. Iraq and Afghanistan, not so much. I’m sure that’s a shallow summary that many might take issue with, but I suspect it’s close enough to the truth.