We have followed the plight of women in Afghanistan as both the Taliban and the government roll back on advances in women’s rights after the U.S. invasion. Now another disturbing video has surfaced where dozens of men cheer as a man pumps round afer round into a woman accused of adultery. As nine shots are fired into her, the men cheer “God is Great!” in ecstatic celebration, as shown in the video accompanying the article below. Notably, this killing took place not in some far off province but the village of Qimchok to the north of Kabul.
The burqa-clad woman is shown sitting on the rocky ground as the man pointing a rifle at her from a few feet away fires the shots into her. It is not until the third shot that she actually falls over. The scene thrills the dozens of men on a hillside who cheer: “God is great!”
To make this barbaric scene complete, it turns out that two Taliban commanders had a dispute over their claims to the woman. Parwan province governor Abdul Basir Salangi said that they decided to accuse her of adultery “in order to save face.” Both of those commanders were later killed by a third Taliban commander.
The Human Rights Watch has found that nearly nine out of 10 women suffer physical, sexual, or psychological violence or forced marriage at least once in their lifetimes.
If you recall, we previously discussed how our ally Hamid Karzai has called women secondary to men and harassed efforts to create shelters for women. Yet our men and women continue to fight in this country for a legal system that denies basic rights to women and religious minorities — as well as continuing to spend billions as we close programs for lack of funding in the U.S.
Source: CNN
The situation in Afghanistan is horrible, for everyone who is there. More so for women and children.
The situation was bad before the U.S.A. blundered into Afghanistan.
The situation will be bad after the U.S.A. leaves Afghanistan.
Invasion by empire after empire will not improve things there.
The U.S.A. is there only because the U.S.A. is there. No other reason. Inertia. Over ten years, now!
No citizen of the U.S.A. has any business in that tragic little impoverished, backward country.
Murdering, killing, zapping, terminating, neutralizing the people, “winning their hearts and minds,” bribing their “leaders,” doesn’t help.
I don’t like their treatment of women. I don’t like theocracies. I don’t have to. I can’t change them. They’re many thousands of miles away.
Leave them the hell alone.
What Frankly and Mike S. said!
Disgusting story.
Fundamentalist religion is insanity incorporated.
No version of any fundamentalist faith is without barbarity. That said had I come upon these “glory to Allah” types in the aftermath of this horror, I would have little problem killing them and I’m far from a violent person. I don’t think we should be in Afghanistan, but had we never been there this type of horror would still exist. I also have no doubt that fundamentalist Christians, Hindus and Jews would also perpetrate horrors if given the chance.
EEO – you still got it wrong. I hardly blame the Marines for doing as ordered & nothing in my post suggests I blame any branch of the military. I do blame people who are so naive as to believe if we just blow the hell out of some country and install some puppet under the guise of democracy that they will suddenly become tiny USAs of freedom and behave exactly like we want them to.
Odds are they will behave more like they way they have been socialized to since childhood. We should not be surprised by this & I am hardly surprised that these guys acted exactly as their fathers & grandfathers would have acted. With the possible addition of some extra modern violence.
Not sure why you are overly sensitive about the USMC specifically. Reread the post. What I said was dropping bombs on people is not going to make them enlightened.
@Darren-No worries. And no apology is necessary. Sarcasam doesn’t always come off as well in print as it does via the spoken word…And I was definitely being sarcastic.
http://itsybitsysteps.com/16-year-old-amina-filali-who-was-forced-to-marry-her-rapist-commits-suicide/
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nothing new under the sun.
An extreme case of blame the victim. At least the perpetrators were brought to justice, albeit with minimum due process. But maybe that’s their idea of due process.
EEO Irish. I believe an apology is in order from me to you.
I re-read your post which began “Great point, “Frankly”…After reading this ” and I suspect you were using Irony / sarcasm to address another contributor’s point. If that was the case I misunderstood it and thought it was your true belief and I will be more careful next time. Sorry.
Bob-
Nice try. My post has nothing to do with “support our troops.” I too would like to see our men and women come home and think the war in Iraq (not Afghanistan) was wrong from the start. And considering the fact that I was an infantry officer in the marine corps, I probably have more of a personal stake in the idea of “bringing home the tropps” than you. I just found it odd that in a post showing fanatics murdering a woman for adultery, someone found it necessary to talk “or war of destruction.”
ps, your comment about how we “murder” civilians tells me everything I need to know about your warped view of the world.
EEO Irish
I find it very insulting to our Military that you would not be upset with the gang that murdered this woman but our Marines who serve there. Have you lost your sense of reason? What would your reaction be if you were the woman about to be pumped full of lead? Would you just resign yourself to being killed because of your proffered sympathy towards the men who shot her? Yes, it is thinking such as yours that turns away from reality of these killers by allowing murderers to have license to brutality because you profess to have the moral high ground in order to foolishly attempt to elevate yourself to being the superior moral. This type of thinking just enables more murderers to spread their ways because it allows them to get away with it because you are too busy portraying them as the victim in order to further political ideals that you hold onto without doing some realistic thinking.
Have you no care of what this woman or others like her went through? And what are you willing to do about it? Nothing I would venture to say. Or is it “Well their religion is afronted because we are bad. Let them kill more women.”
How about you go over to Afghansitan and try to be friendly with these murderers, tell them all is forgiven and the US is the enemy of civilization, and you support them in all their Honor Killings. I’ll bet even after all this you will still eventually find yourself facing the business end of a AK-47. Would you have that reality here in the United States?
There is way too much emotional stone throwing amongst the fudamentalists elite . Physically stone throwing is against the law in most of the world . Jesus said it best: “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone. ” If there is a course to conquer hypocrisy in the schools it has been through literature . Spreading ideas through linguistics might help. How do Afghan academics define the word “hypocrisy” ? Too much anger and no sense of fair play defeats the purpose of being an adult , who can supposedly learn from mistakes and group bullying.
EEO Irish,
Nice try at diverting the subject of our government’s senseless wasting of lives, money, and time in Afghanistan, to “Support Our Troops!”
Murdering more Afghanis isn’t going to help their situation. Supporting the corrupt puppet Afghan government, and their partners, the Taliban, won’t help, either.
You can support the Marine Corps by getting it out of that hopeless, medieval situation.
But thanks for trying.
Afghanistan, Pakistan, … all these Stan countries bundled together. It is an insult to Stan The Man. God is not great if he lets these things happen. Perhaps there is no God. Certainly not in the stan countries.
Great point, “Frankly”…After reading this article my immediate reaction was to get angry at our military and to be outraged byour presence in Afghanistan. I definitely didn’t get angry at these thugs/religious zealots who feel their faith authorizes them to kill women. I was just pissed at the Marine Corps.
Dredd – I don’t for a minute believe the people who got us into the fuster-cluck that is Iraq thought they were spreading democracy and enlightenment. But they sold that idea to the great unwashed And a lot of people, not just the tea-baggin’ morans thought we were going to replace generations of societal norms with a few cluster bombs and GAU-8 rounds followed by some new wells a a couple of girls schools.
Somebody please explain to me why we are still in that Godforsaken place and our troops are still dying….for…what?
Headline from MSNBC:
Afghanistan did not work for the British in the 19th century, the Soviet Union in the 20th, and is not going to change for us in the 21st as their culture charges headlong into the ninth century.
Frankly 1, July 9, 2012 at 8:03 am
I would think by now we have seen enough examples to understand that we can’t just land a million troops in some country, kill a few thousand people, blow up a bunch of shit, install some friendly dilettante as PM/President/Grand Vizir and expect them to immediately become some “enlightened” industrial democracy.
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Indeed.
Perhaps that is not the reason we do these things, as two authors have indicated in agreement with you on that point:
(Myth Addiction …, quoting 1944 book). If that sounds familiar, a more modern book is also in accord:
(Making The Future, by N. Chomsky, p.87). The “accidentally blundering into their oil wells” is an oft repeated accidental blunder that enriches what one author, Steve Coll, calls “The Private Empire” that runs things from behind the scenes.
And they leave those nations worse off, not better off.
So, while as you say, we the people might “expect them to immediately become some “enlightened” industrial democracy, the powers that be really don’t put that into their calculations.
They just use propaganda to say that is what they are doing.
We’ll all feign outrage today, but get right back to policies that enable their access to weapons and money from drug sales tomorrow.
If we’re outraged for more than a day, the UN might even issue a statement……you know…..of regret or something.
I would think by now we have seen enough examples to understand that we can’t just land a million troops in some country, kill a few thousand people, blow up a bunch of shit, install some friendly dilettante as PM/President/Grand Vizir and expect them to immediately become some “enlightened” industrial democracy. Yet we are all shocked that people who have lived a certain way for thousands of years cling to those ways and, in fact, cling more fanatically as their society and infrastructure are blown to crap by our armed forces.
The army is an instrument of war and destruction it is not a tool of diplomacy and progress. Repeating this scenario again and again but expecting different results is a sign of a mental illness that we as a nation appear unwilling to admit.
The gun, one step forward…..or is it…… The Koran one step back or is it?