[opendoor]

Originally Posted by Itse

Eehhh...

I mostly don't want to get into this discussion, but this is just nonsense.

The Taleban are no more stone age as the US backed government are. They're just Afghans (mostly), no more or less backwards than anyone else there.

They're a lot more religious and conservative, about equally violent and much less corrupt. There are very good practical reasons why tons of people in Afghanistan currently prefer the Taleban over the previously-US-backed government as their rulers. Taleban for example has a reputation for having the best judges in the country, and being the only group who offer legitimate justice for poor people in their grievance.

The above is just one of those things we here don't like to talk about. We talk of Taleban as some sort of outside menace over the locals "we've" been protecting, when in reality "we've" just been supporting a local puppet leader over another local group who are mostly just terrible in different ways... and women's rights has never had any room in making the decision about who we're backing.

The US has backed every major faction in Afghanistan at some point or another, and whoever has their backing also always gets the propaganda treatment as being the "lesser evil" while the opposition is painted as barely human. This is just fantasy.

The US has also backed the Northern Alliance, which is primarily a collection of local warlords who's preferred vision for Afghanistan could be described as a feudal state with them as local kings, and that vision has no more room for women in power than the Talebans. All sides have committed massacres and atrocities in the now 40+ years of warfare in the country. One of my favorite Northern Alliance anecdotes is them executing people by locking them in shipping containers and leaving the container in the desert sun.

The US even funded Taleban before the invasion, as they were seen as a potentially stabilizing force who would make it possible for oil to flow uninterrupted.

People really shouldn't be buying into the image of Talebans as some sort of barbarian horde, because it just makes understanding what's going on in Afghanistan impossible.

Once you genuinely internalize that tons of people in Afghanistan genuinely consider the US backed government as worse than Taleban AND that they have absolutely valid reasons for that view, you have a chance at understanding what's going on there.

There's big news that demonstrators have been shot in one place, but no coverage of the demonstrators in Kabul for example who were allowed to demonstrate in peace.

It's also really unclear what the new Taleban rule is going to look like. The Taleban in 2001 were among other things an ethnically pashtun military force, while the Taleban in 2021 is a multiethnic group. They have allowed the use of the current Afghanistan tricolor flag as the country's flag (it's independence day there right now) instead of demanding people use the Taleban flag like in 2001. Does this mean that things are going to be less bad? Impossible to say, but it looks like it's going to be different at least in the short term.

Yeah, one only needs to look at the rampant bacha bazi in the among US-backed Afghan officers and police to see an example of that:

In his last phone call home, Lance Cpl. Gregory Buckley Jr. told his father what was troubling him: From his bunk in southern Afghanistan, he could hear Afghan police officers sexually abusing boys they had brought to the base.“At night we can hear them screaming, but we’re not allowed to do anything about it,” the Marine’s father, Gregory Buckley Sr., recalled his son telling him before he was shot to death at the base in 2012. He urged his son to tell his superiors. “My son said that his officers told him to look the other way because it’s their culture.”

In September 2011, an Afghan woman, visibly bruised, showed up at an American base with her son, who was limping. One of the Afghan police commanders in the area, Abdul Rahman, had abducted the boy and forced him to become a sex slave, chained to his bed, the woman explained. When she sought her son’s return, she herself was beaten. Her son had eventually been released, but she was afraid it would happen again, she told the Americans on the base.
She explained that because “her son was such a good-looking kid, he was a status symbol” coveted by local commanders, recalled Mr. Quinn, who did not speak to the woman directly but was told about her visit when he returned to the base from a mission later that day.


So Captain Quinn summoned Abdul Rahman and confronted him about what he had done. The police commander acknowledged that it was true, but brushed it off. When the American officer began to lecture about “how you are held to a higher standard if you are working with U.S. forces, and people expect more of you,” the commander began to laugh.

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/21/w...e-of-boys.html