The Taliban appear to have shut down the women’s affairs ministry and replaced it with a department that once enforced strict religious doctrines.
On Friday, the sign at the ministry was removed, and a sign for the ministry of virtue and vice put in its place.
Videos on social media showed women employees outside the offices, urging the Taliban to let them return to work.
During the Taliban rule in the 1990s, the ministry forced strict Islamic rules and harsh restrictions on women.
If only our “experts” had listened to his prophetic warnings.
Many Western observers “have ignored the very real accomplishments and popular acceptance of the Taliban government in Afghanistan,” then-CIA analyst Michael Scheuer wrote anonymously in 2002. His previously-analyzed book, Through Our Enemies’ Eyes: Osama bin Laden, Radical Islam, and the Future of America, contains sobering analysis, which foresaw the failure of American-led nation-building efforts in Afghanistan 20 years later.
Scheuer had focused on Afghanistan while tracking Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden as head of the CIA’s Bin Laden Unit in the years before and after September 11, 2001. Although since his 2004 retirement from the CIA he has exposed himself as an anti-Israel, conspiracy-mongering crank, his 2002 writings about attempts to liberalize Afghanistan were highly thought-provoking. Already at the time he had criticized that the “Afghan war, then, is an opportunity for social work of international scope, not an opportunity to destroy al Qaeda.”
An absolute crank but he read Afghanistan right.
When I think about the West’s project to liberate Afghan women, my mind conjures a line from T.S. Eliot: “The last temptation is the greatest treason/to do the right deed for the wrong reason.” In Afghanistan, we engaged in a twenty-year, deliciously self-righteous, tragically ill-designed mission best expressed by flipping that sentence.
We did the wrong thing, perhaps for the right reason. We wanted to develop that country and rescue Afghan women. Their lives were hellish, girls banned from school, women forbidden to leave their homes except in the company of a male guardian, vigilantes beating them with sticks if their burqa was too short. We wanted them to enjoy the pleasures of modernity and live full, happy lives.
Start rubbing the Malala Totem that’ll fix it!
The Biden administration is preventing the rescue of persecuted Christian minorities from the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, where they face certain and likely gruesome death.
This information surfaced on August 26, during an interview between Glenn Beck and Tucker Carlson on Fox News. Through his charity, the Nazarene Fund, Beck had chartered planes to airlift 5,100 Christians out of Afghanistan and into neighboring nations. Before long, however, U.S. officials intervened and prevented the escape of a group of 500 Christians, mostly women and children, who were ordered outside of Kabul airport’s protected area: “I have pictures of them pleading to get back through the gate,” Beck continued
Afghan power always stems from the poppy fields
In his 2015 documentary Bitter Lake, the filmmaker Adam Curtis observes that Afghanistan’s opium poppies grow in a “wonderland of vegetation and power”. Amid the conspiratorial hyperbole that characterises much of his work, it is a striking phrase — but also a perceptive one. The poppy is integral to modern Afghanistan because of its relationship to both vegetation (and the communities it sustains) and the exercise of raw power: two of the main forces which drive Afghan politics.
Understand this imperishable fact and it becomes clear how the country fell so quickly to the Taliban over recent weeks.
As we bear the humiliation of Biden’s surrender, remember: the United States has the power to affect whatever it wishes…. It is only a question of political will. Deadlines, such as the artificial August 31st withdrawal from Afghanistan, mean absolutely nothing if we do not wish it.
Even rendered inoperable, equipment now in the hands of the Taliban will yield troves of information about how the U.S. builds weapons and uses them.
And it’s not just the Taliban – it’s anyone they sell them to, also.
h/t Mauser98
“The current assessment probably, conservatively, is one to two years for al-Qaeda to build some capability to at least threaten the homeland,” Lieutenant General Scott Berrier, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, said at an intelligence conference on Tuesday.
“I think that the Taliban winning the war in Afghanistan, and then the way our exit happened, has absolutely inspired jihadists all over the world,” Morell said, Fox News reported.
Former President Obama and Michelle Obama, former President George. W. Bush and Laura Bush, and former President Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will serve as honorary co-chairs for the effort called Welcome.US.
They smell cash.
Even before the suicide bombings outside the Kabul airport on Thursday evening, the US media was acting with rare unanimity. For the first time in memory, US media organs across the ideological and political spectrum have been united in the view that US President Joe Biden fomented a strategic disaster for the US and its allies with his incompetent leadership of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. Some compare it to the 1961 Bay of Pigs; others to Saigon in 1975; others to the US embassy in Tehran in 1979. Whatever the analogy, the bottom line is the same: Biden’s surrender to the Taliban has already entered the pantheon of American post-war defeats.
A major row broke out between leaders of the Taliban over the make-up of the group’s new government in Afghanistan, senior Taliban officials told the BBC.
In the memo, which sought to track how misinformation impacted the protestors crashing Trudeau’s campaign events, researchers noted that Canada’s media heavily featured the anti-Trudeau protests in their election reporting at the cost of other election issues.
So far, the main losers in Afghanistan disaster, apart from the US and the Free World, are the people of Afghanistan, especially those who helped the US and found themselves betrayed, and the women who for 20 years, thanks to the US and its allies, had for the first time known freedom.
