In Afghanistan, the struggle for basic rights for women continues to be a struggle for life itself. Today officials confirmed that 160 were poisoned in what is viewed as another attack by Muslim extremists. Last month, 170 schoolgirls and three teachers were poisoned. Muslim extremists oppose the education of women and the Karzai Administration, while supporting such education, has been accused of rolling back on the gains of women and girls following the fall of the Taliban. These “men of God” continue to believe that killing or maiming little girls pleases Allah and makes them spiritually pure, including throwing acid in the faces of little girls. Fortunately, there is no word of deaths yet and many children have been released from the hospital.
The Taliban has called for the closing of schools in the area. Controlling schools means controlling the minds of the populace. In a less common attack on boys, nearly 400 boys at a school in Khost province were recently poisoned. That brings the total to about 750 children poisoned in these areas in a few weeks.
The latest case involved the spraying of a toxic material in the classroom used by the girls at the Aahan Dara Girls School in Taluqan, the provincial capital. The Taliban leadership insist that it was a frame up by the government which poisoned the girls to “defame” the group.
It seems likely that these dangers to children, particularly girls, will increase with the resumption of control of the country by the corrupt and ineffectual Karzai government. The thought of women and girls being placed again under the medieval conditions of the Taliban is frightening. Watching the violence against women and girls only serves to reaffirm the doubts of what we have accomplished after over 3000 deaths of military personnel, hundreds of thousands of dead civilians, and hundreds of billions of dollars of funding in the country. The Taliban is still in control of many areas and the Karzai government is yielding to greater and greater demands of extreme faith-based repression.
Source: CNN
MM- Holy crap, I mostly agree with you. I’m either getting sick, or sick of hearing stories like this. That’s why I argued (as effectivley as an E4 can argue anything, which is, uh, awesomely nil) that we shouldn’t have gone in there in the first place. Then I was writing about limiting our targets. Then when the military still wasn’t paying attention to me (ooh, shocker!) I wrote about cutting our losses and getting the F out before we turned that country into a hell zone. But what would I know?
BK – it was intended to be demeaning, though I can’t figure out how to make it as demeaning as the poisoners & their crew.
See, its self correcting! You kill the girls & the next generation will produce fewer of your kind. That was part of my point also
leejcaroll
Maybe a draft is an answer – that, and we demand that we raise taxes to pay for them. And just to start things off, I know a family with five handsome and strong sons (however, this time women will not be exempt) who should be the first to sign up as their dad marches us off into the next place we need to bomb back to the stone age. And this time missionary work will not provide an exemption.
Frankly,
Some of your language is demeaning and dehumanizing (see excerpt below). That’s what makes it easier for the warmongers to do successful recruiting.
“But my take on it is like my take on the practice of aborting female fetuses; you go right ahead and do that, do it a lot, do it as much as you can. Come see me in 20 years when you have no more broodmares for your demented society.”
China tried it and now there are no wives for their sons.
Curious the draft was terrible, I was in college when they were doing the lottery and still remember the look on my friend’s face when he was given the number 3. It was the only time he was glad the school psychologist had decided he was a latent homosexual, and that kept him out, at least while he was in school. (I don;t know what happened to him after college.)
By the same token if we had a draft the people would be in the streets again because it is everyone’s child, nephew, brother, husband, fiance, friend (and sister, niece, wife) who would be in harm’s way of already being in the war or, potentially, on their way there.
Shano, one of the reasons the Taliban destroyed the poppy crop was that they had a huge supply of heroin & wanted to drive the price up for their own benefit. It is the only cash crop they have for export. Interestingly enough the local medium of exchange is often marijuana. It is unusual to see a backyard garden without a stand of “hemp”.
I don’t mean to make light of the situation. This is horrible and it needs to end (but really there is nothing we in the West are going to do to make it end now). But my take on it is like my take on the practice of aborting female fetuses; you go right ahead and do that, do it a lot, do it as much as you can. Come see me in 20 years when you have no more broodmares for your demented society. Thats heartless and ignore the very real suffering being inflicted but until someone can show me a way we can actually end the abuse I don’t see an alternative.
I give up on trying to mess with the “strike” HTML. I think in the future I’ll just stick with the either/or “slash” instead.
America has already spent ten years and hundreds of billions of dollars educating Afghan women and training Afghan
banditssecurity forces. Americans spent almost ten years in Iraq doing the same with Iraqiwidowswomen and Iraqideath squads security forces. Yet as military historian Martin Van Crevald has said somewhere: “The only thing Americans can train Iraqis to do is how to kill Americans. How stupid can they be?” Ditto for Afghanistan.Whatever America once claimed it wanted to do in Afghanistan, it has not done it. Now, with such exhaustive evidence of venality, corruption, and incompetence on display, no one in their right mind would suppose that Americans plan to get any better at educating anyone, least of all themselves.
Pretty pathetic when Americans have to hide behind Afghan women in order to justify their own vast moral emptiness in laying further waste to such an impoverished country. Rudyard Kipling knew a thing or two about the Graveyard of Empires:
When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains
And the women come out to cut up what remains
Then roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
And go to your gawd like a soldier
and
It does not pay for the Christian White
To hustle the Asian brown
For the Christian riles and the Asian smiles
And weareth the Christian down.
At the end of the fight lies a tombstone white
With the name of the late deceased
Its epitaph drear: “a fool lies here
Who tried to hustle the East”
Time to pull the plug on the Afghan Hustle and start educating American boys and girls instead. They really need it if they don’t want to end up as easily browbeaten as their parents.
Americans can keep Afghan women safe from poisoning by the Taliban by
(1) first bombing them for attending weddings and funerals.
(2) first shooting them during night raids of baby-naming ceremonies and then digging the bullets out of their bodies to cover up the crime while blaming the Taliban for an “honor killing.”
(3) first raping them so that Afghan men consider them already poisoned.
(4) first just killing them by mistake — as “collateral damage” — and then calling in an air-strike to obliterate the evidence.
(5) first giving any Afghan woman who wants one a green card and all-expenses paid relocation to the United States.
The choices Americans make here will show to what degree Americans really care about what happens to Afghan women who may want to attend schools.
Curious:
I suppose so much is up for opinion as to whether success is measurable in Afghanistan, especially with the information fed to us over here by all sides of the opinion nonogon but I still believe the situation is better than it was under complete taliban control.
Conerning your post about the insult you believe I had conveyed in assigning a cost to the war. Trust me it was nothing futher from my intention to afront any of our or our allies’ personnel. If I gave that impression I offer my apology. The intent of what I had neglected to convey it seems was that many people here only look at the war in terms of dollar amounts, divorcing or at least distancing themselves from the human tragedy that unfolds and continues to miserate. My intent was to show the for those people who only look at it in terms of dollar cost, since the cost of whomever suffering “over there” is not of concern that from that rather heatless perspective they hopefully would conclude that $200 is hopefully at least worthwhile to end the suffering. That is, if dollars is what motivates them.
Would I go over to Syria to fight. I would go if I was physically able but would I allow a Son or Daughter to do so. Candidly, I do not have children, just a wife. I would not object to a child going over there to help out. About 6 or 7 years ago, I was recruited to go to Iraq to train Iraqi police officers, I would have taken the job but my wife was so heartbroken about me going I did not go. Her father was a Korea and Vietnam veteran Marine and saw as a brat what it was like to see her dad go off to war and come back differently. She’s in her 50’s now so it was at probably the worst age to see this for her back then. I know many vets from these two theaters the most striking example of what you refer to the long term effects was a woman who rented an apartment of mine who signed up for the Army in a medical capacity and after AIT she went straight to the green zone outside Baghdad. After a few years of this, she returned home. I saw her outside when I was maintaining the property and she came up and talked. While to many outside people would think things were all good with her, I could see the continual underlying stress and heartbreak she carried around. It was more than the 1000 yard stare, it was as if the very moment she tipped into the pathways to crying, that is the very beginning of the cycle before it becomes obvious to others, it was always present with her. I could tell that every few minutes within her waking day was often haunted by a reflection on what she had witnessed over there and then followed by a race of rationalization trying to make sense of it all. It was heartbreaking.
To a certain extent I know what it is like to be involved in things like this. I entered LE at an early age, 16 years old as a cadet. Probably too young by some accounts. 5 months or so in a deputy who was one of my training officers died in a diving accident. The funeral was the first one I attended at that stage. It was not what I thought I was getting into then.
Over the course of many years until 2010 I had attended probably a dozen other LEO funerals in Washington. It took until probably the 8th before the lump im my throat finally went away and when it did I actually felt guilty it wasn’t there. Then one of my worst fears happened.
I had just stated getting ready to go to work when a friend (from another agency) called me and said heard over the radio a civilian found a patrol car wrecked out at a highway intersection I was working a differential shift so I came in later than the rest of the crew did. The radio traffic was not good and was pretty bad. I was one of the last to get there. And I will tell you it is horrible thing to see one of your friends on the ground and his broken up patrol car on its top next to him. That is why I cannot even begin to imagine what it must be like to see this happen every few weeks or more for our guys and gals over there.
After consoling one of the other deputies who took it pretty hard, the undersheriff later came by and asked me to return to my district. I will say I was a bit angered at first by this, but he later told me we had to get bback to our calls. He was right, but I’ll tell you that was one anguishing night to have worked afterwards. We couldn’t do our job any differently or treat anyone else any different because of what happened. We just had to carry on for lack of a better word. The people who called for our services needed us because their issue was just as important to them as John was to me. We would still have our own private time later to grieve.
So to a small degree that is what I go through to have (before I retired) served as a law enforcement officer. It is a microcosm of what goes on with our military and of higher scale what the leaders of our country face when deciding to sacrifice for the greater good of humanity. As a LEO I could not just go home after clearing the accident scene like other jobs might allow, Neither can our soldiers, neither can their family, and neither can to a larger extent any goverment that chooses not to allow tyrrany to prevail. We don’t just walk away, because nobody else will do what is right even though the alternative is even worse for everyone. And those who have served in one capacity or another who see this daily know this all to well.
Thank you for your comments and critique, glad to have you with us Curious.
Darren Smith
I have read your comments and feel that you are a really nice guy and sincere in your care for the women and children of Afghanistan. But I strongly disagree with you.
First, I don’t think we are even close to having the Afghanis take control and I don’t think our guys are in any position to judge. How much do they understand about that country? Can they even speak the language? Reverse positions for a moment and transport a tribal chief (who speaks no English) over here. Would you rely on him to forecast our elections and explain how Congress works? What was it – a month ago – when our guys burned some Korans and commited some other “misdeeds”? Those events undercut my confidence in their judgement. And the generals…well they will always tell you they are just about to get it under control.
And your price tag on the war is insulting to the men and women who go over there. Damn! 50% of them need lots of help, many long=term, when they come back – if they come back. Yeah, I get it. You mean that’s the cost for us that stay at home and do nothing and not a price tag for their lives, but you’ve undershot it by quite a bit and no mother, father, wife, husband, son or daughter of a serviceman is going to be interested in hearing that argument.
Who else will do it? You’re right, no one. And who will do Syria? Will you or your son fight for those babies who took a bullet to the brain? Who will do the Congo, Dafur, Sudan? And what are the chances that we may decide that we need a “few good men” for Iran?
It’s their country, it’s their culture, it’s their religion, it’s their government. We’ve tried for ten years. As did the Russians and Brits before us. 5,000 (or 50,000) Americans from Des Moines are not going to achieve a “cultural revolution”. All we begat was that miserable Karzi. And schoolgirls being poisoned. Aren’t we terrific.
It’s a little off topic but something to keep in mind before following the MIC/politicians into war… I saw a pretty interesting YouTube this weekend. It was recorded in ’08 at a Young Republicans convention. The participants were asked about how they felt about the Iraq war. Oh, they thought it was just the right thing to do. They were all in their early twenties and they looked great in their blazers, white shirts and ties. They were then asked if they were planning on joining the service. Not one of them had any such plans.
Mespo,
Great link. It is amazing how the Constitution is the answer to most questions.