If That Girl Picks Up a Book – Kill Her
Words fail me. Human garbage. Rock bottom.
Suspected Taliban militants have beheaded a headteacher in central Afghanistan, the latest in a string of gruesome attacks on teachers working in schools where girls are taught. Armed men burst into the home of Malim Abdul Habib in Qalat, the capital of restive Zabul province, on Tuesday night. They dragged him into a courtyard and forced his family to watch as they cut off his head, said Ali Khel, a local government spokesman…Hundreds of students attended his funeral yesterday. “Only the Taliban are against our girls being educated,” Mr Khel said.
Well there – that’s why they’re human garbage. They dedicate their lives to preventing girls from getting an education – what a noble goal! What a splendid way for grown men to spend their time – zipping around the countryside with guns murdering teachers who have the gall to teach girls – and making the family watch is a pretty touch, too.
The Taliban insurgency has taken a brutal twist in the past year with militants avoiding shoot-outs with American troops – which they usually lose – in favour of targeted assassinations of teachers, aid workers and pro-government clerics. Last month gunmen pulled a teacher in Helmand province from his classroom and shot him at the school gate after he ignored orders to stop teaching girls. The violent tactics, which are concentrated in the southern provinces where a British-led Nato force is due to assume control next spring, appear to be working. Nabi Khushal, the director of education in Zabul, told the Associated Press that 100 of the province’s 170 registered schools had been closed over the past two years, mostly in remote areas, due to deteriorating security. Only 8% of the pupils are girls, he said.
100 out of 170. Well how nice. One of the poorest countries on earth, and the schools are closing because men who hate all females are killing people. Spiffy. It’s enough to make you sick.
Surely one can be excused such a brief lapse, considering that we have gotten used to other religions not making education of females a capital offense.
What a complete and abject failure going into Afghanistan was. I had hoped for so much better following 9/11; it would appear I now even have to eat humble pie in front of my anti-war pals who also condemned the Afghanistan thing. Invading Afghanistan, I was CONVINCED could do no more harm than good. BTW Does anyone have the numbers on how much international ‘help’ remains on the ground there, for ‘rebuilding’ ? I suspect it’s hideously low… presumably now the ‘threat’ has been neutralised.
Nick,
I don’t think you need to be abject. Would it really be better if the Taliban were still in power, able to enforce the closure of 100% of schools for girls rather than just some of them, using all the powers of the state? What you should be saying to your anti-war pals is ‘Are these really the kind of people you wanted to remain in power? And why would you wish a regime on Afghanistan that you couldn’t bear to live under yourself?’
Stand firm.
More or less what Harry said. And if this were a Terminator-style movie (or Camelot, come to think of it), rather than real life, even if the Taliban regained full control of the country, the fade-out would be on that one little girl who’d had the chance to learn something in that brief window of freedom and would one day do something with it despite all the tyranny.
What is going on right now in the heads of those girls whose teacher’s was removed for trying to rescue them from ignorance?
Harry – fair enough, although I get the feeling all too often that the eye has been taken off the ball with Afghanistan, and will remain so until the NATO coalition is replaced by (deep breath) UN – I get the sinking feeling that the US merely wishes to maintain a tactical presence rather than usher in a stable democracy (too much resource being sucked into Iraq)… meantime the origins of this current situation remain unpalatable to other major economies such as France, China, Russia so they choose, smugly, cynically to ignore it, while their powerplays go on elsewhere. So – just tell me we aren’t going to quietly abandon these poor b@stards ??
Nick – I’m also worried about whether the resources are being committed to improving the situation in Afghanistan, given the resource stretch in Iraq. I think it’s worth pointing out though that the resource constraints are political rather than economic – that is, the US (and British) governments are worried about a major commitment precisely because they fear the political opposition. So they feel the need to show that the troop presence will be winding down soon.
The implication of this is that it’s precisely the anti-war agitation that’s at least partly responsible for there not being enough troops in place to stop this kind of atrocity happening. Logically, there should be more troops there to deal with this terrorism, not less. Something else to point out to your pals.
The thing that frightens me is that totalitarians, from Hitler to al-Quaeda, have always boasted that democracies simply haven’t got the stomach for a long fight, and that they’ll always cave in when the body-count gets too high. Hitler was wrong, and I hope his modern counterparts are too, but I’m not sure.
One more thing – sorry this post is a bit long – your pals seem to be pulling the standard ‘anti’ trick, that is blaming everything bad that happens post-occupation on the Americans, even if done by the people the Americans were fighting against. Don’t fall for it. Murder is the fault of the murderers.
“the ant-war agitators opposed to Iraq would have had loads more troops available to try and clear up the mess left in Afghanistan.”
Only if they’d supported the Afghan invasion but not Iraq. I have every respect for someone who takes that view (i.e. that we should have concentrated resources on getting Afghanistan right and that Iraq overstretched us) but that isn’t the line peddled by most anti-war protestors. Most regard the US as the real enemy and (apparently) positively prefer the Taliban.
I’m not Norman Johnson and my name really is Harry. The reason we can’t blame the invasion for the Taliban attacks on schools and murder of teachers is that they didn’t just start doing it after the invasion (just as the Ba’athists didn’t just start murdering Shi’ites and other opponents after the Iraq war). As I pointed out earlier, they were already doing it before – only more thoroughly because they were unopposed and were using the power of the state.
If the surviving Nazis after 1945 had developed terrorist groups that murdered concentration camp survivors in order to (in their terms) finish the job, would we really had said that it proved that the war and allied occupation were wrong? Surely it would have been seen, rightly, as one more piece of evidence showing why we were right to fight the Nazis – and we would have demanded tougher action to deal with the remnants.
“Only if they’d supported the Afghan invasion but not Iraq. I have every respect for someone who takes that view (i.e. that we should have concentrated resources on getting Afghanistan right and that Iraq overstretched us) but that isn’t the line peddled by most anti-war protestors.”
I don’t know about ‘most’, but it is actually quite a widespread sentiment. I’m certainly not convinced that the majority in the UK opposed the Afghan invasion, yet the majority seems to have opposed the Iraq war – suggesting a sizeable number that was in favour of the former, but not the latter.
And the position makes perfect sense, invade Afghanistan to get rid of Al Qaeda (yes, remember the actual reason we went in), don’t invade Iraq because it presented no threat.
Even those that opposed the Afghan war have a rather potent get out. Most of them opposed it (by which i mean not the militant, we must oppose any US war because it is imperialist, component – although they have a similar, if factually misguided sentiment) because it was motivated by a desire to get Osama Bin Laden, and generally blow the shit out of someone for September the 11th. The anti-war types quite rightly reasoned that this approach would not have much planning for what was going to happen to the Afghans in the aftermath – particularly as the US chose to fight it largely as a proxy war via the Northern Alliance and other warlords. Remember that humanitarian grounds were one of the reasons given (mostly in the UK by Blair) for invading Iraq, not Afghanistan (and rather predictably so given US involvement in helping to bring the Taliban state about).
So the anti-war types could quite rightly claim that the mess is to some extent the responsibility of the US for not executing the war with due care and attention, and that they had predicted this in the first place, and thus opposed it.
There are still a lot of what we might call leftist interventionists around, and they may well have supported a quite different war if it had been offered. But that is not the war we got. To then blame our complete lack of troops on the ground on the anti-war sentiment, when we never intended those troops to be on the ground in the first place is breathtaking hypocrisy. The responsibility for these deaths lies at least partly with those that decided that a nice war-lite attack on a shitty little country would be a bit of a laff, with no concern for the consequences on the poor buggers that live there – hence arial bombardment with cluster munitions and refusal to risk the lives of US servicemen.
You can make a purely pragmatic argument that Afghanistan is, or will be, better in the long run with the war – and that no better war was going to happen. But these silly finger pointing pro-war left arguments are for children and David Aaranovitch.
Well, PM, coming from a different angle, I wish I could find some credibility in the Respect Party. It would help a great deal if most of the virulently anti-US posers who – be honest – get most of the airtime/bandwidth on this issue weren’t busy getting behind that useless self regarding tosser Galloway wouldn’t it ? The realpolitic here is that most of the UK thoght Kossovo, Sierra Leone were morally correct interventions, and most of the uk also viewed 9/11 as a form of genocide. Most of the UK also thought attacking Iraq was risky and muddled, but also most of the UK thought that it was a good idea to get rid of that genocidal bastard Hussein. Make up for our parents’ mistakes. A few didn’t. Bob Marshall-Andrews, Galloway and a few others were quite up for stalinist dictators like Milosovich and Hussein, who they viewed as inevitable outcomes of evil Washington mandarins, and, well let’s be honest, were stolid underdogs who they admired. Well sorry mate but these bastards did more to dismay me about the left than Robin Cook’s (hence Blair’s) poorly broadcasted ‘ethical element’ foreign policy. I find it hard to stomach the finger pointing in any direction frankly, but elements of the left have always been so dishoneset and hypocritical about dictatorships that aren’t US funded that it ruins the argument. And so it goes on ad infinitum.
“I wish I could find some credibility in the Respect Party…I find it hard to stomach the finger pointing in any direction frankly, but elements of the left have always been so dishoneset and hypocritical about dictatorships that aren’t US funded that it ruins the argument. And so it goes on ad infinitum.”
I’m not focusing on the elements of the right that like going to war cos the big bombs is fun and kills filthy rag heads, or the elements that like going to war cos it funds arms sales – so why do we need to focus on the extremists on the left? That is why the argument is so unproductive, no one is prepared to admit that the other side has a point, and so they have to charicature and make ridiculous claims.
Pm – The whole anti-war thing HAS been hi-jacked by those loony-right-on spartists, while the priviledged plutocratsic fucks like W look on…. This is the difficulty with the fuzzy-set stuff that is our political climate. I have no doubt that dissinterested middle-class twats all over Britain, France, Germany, and possiblty even seaboard US will take their view of Iraq precisely because of the above-mentioned fools and their ilk, rather than the comlplexity of these issues. This doesn’t help anyone living under extremist Islamicist – or any other type of – despots. If only we realised what regional markets are being served by purveyors of broadhseets and other media products … I really have no beef with you.
Regards
Nick
“The whole anti-war thing HAS been hi-jacked by those loony-right-on spartists”
Well I wonder if the press hasn’t been somewhat complicit in this. Once the war was fought and ‘won’ the whole anti-war thing died down to a small core for a very good reason. ‘Troops out’ is a much less sensible position once you’ve bombed a country to bits and taken it over than is ‘don’t go to war in the first place’.
Islam is a religion of peace. Without religion, where would we get our morals? If we get rid of religion, it will be chaos, where anything goes. Do you know where YOU’RE going when you die? Accept God’s love today, or he will burn you in Hell.
Ah yes. Our loving God, who is so loving that he is eager (and it eagerness, as your own vile book tells us that only a few will be “saved”) to eternally torture the vast majority of the world’s population. So vile that he had to toture his own “son” to make some silly point.
“anonymous” (although I sincerely doubt you will hang around to read this, you coward. Where is the courage of your “faith”?) did you ever wonder why one third of the angels rebelled? Maybe because Jehovah is a fallen tyrant, the demiurge, a flawed peace of creation. The Gnostics, who your kind toruted and murdered, had it right.
(Sorry Ophelia. My last religious rant for the year).
Oops. My response was predicated more on a CHRISTIAN fundamentalist. I see we have actually a troll from the murdering warmongering paedeophile’s tribe.
Although, they both worship the same murdering thunder god, so, some of the above still applies.
My “apologies” for the “confusion.”
No, I’m more of an atheist troll trying to mock all of the religious crap I’m always hearing.
Ah. Sorry anonymous. It’s just that your statements pushed my buttons. :) I am an agnostic-gnostic who is frightened of mainstream religion, so I over-reacted with a nastier than usual post. My apologies.