Of course he did! The Taliban government won’t accept the American Dollar.
/s because of course they will just as soon as we need them to fight a proxy war for us
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Quite literally, in some cases. Remember the anti-Franco sentiment? Freedom fries, and people pouring French wine in the toilet. I was taking a French class at the time, taught by a native…Franciscan? And he would bring in the paper each day and talk about the inaccuracies of what we were being told.
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Francophobia never died – it just seems to have shifted from the more generic “lol surrender monkey” kind to fear mongering about brown people.
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Yeah. I remember the cancel culture they had too. Not as pervasive as the old blacklist, but still had ramifications.
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This is what scares me the most. How are these women who grew up without the Taliban going to be able to adapt to live under sharia law. There is no way this ends well.
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No, and that is not what I said, by any stretch of the imagination. What I said is that the culture they live in and it’s institutions have normalized corruption and unfairness. There is no rule-of-law that the average person can turn to in order to hold the corrupt and unfair accountable. And it typically has always been that way. The average person in that culture knows “that’s just the way the world works”. It’s all they’ve ever known. They know that to get anything government related done (such as things like getting a permit or license for something) you need to throw in a little extra something or do a favor for bureaucrat handling it, or if you run into some legal problem, a few greased palms can make problems go away. That’s the way the world around them has always done things. They don’t expect to be treated “fairly” or “equally” by their institutions or the people running them, because they never have been. They may hear stories about how things are “different” in some other countries, but it’s just stories that they probably don’t really believe (and for sure, the US presence and actions there has not done a lot to change that)
They know that their institutions, and the people running them, cannot be trusted to make their lives better, so they are (for good reason) not particularly invested in fighting to save or support those institutions.
People will fight to support things that will make their lives better (or which they at least believe will make their lives better). But they will not fight to support things that don’t.
Before a western-style rule-of-law society can come into being, there needs to be a critical number of people who believe it can work and who are willing to fight for it. Right now, there simply are not enough people who believe all our “freedom” stories. They have never lived under a society like that, and are not willing to fight to support the corrupt bureaucrats and leaders they’ve always had to deal with.
Mind you, most “western” cultures have a fair amount of corruption as well, and some have been slipping away from rule-of-law into authoritarianism and fascism, or are in danger of doing so (the US included).
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It’s certainly possible that this is 100% true as reported, but given the source I’d want more evidence before putting too much faith in this reporting.
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Watch the Secretary of State say Afghanistan can’t fall from ‘Friday to Monday’
(Speaking at a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing in June.)
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I mean… Have you looked around America lately?
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Hope you are right.
Well, THAT’s a relief!
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More to the point did we look at American run Afghanistan? The Taliban were always seen as less corrupt than other regimes that have recently run Afghanistan.
That very much includes the US running it.
ETA
I saw on another thread a brave journalist from CNN (I mean she seems to be so fucking brave I can’t imagine it) saying that perhaps that the real measure of the feeling is those that aren’t on the streets and don’t feel capable of expressing themselves. Where was that level of critical thinking when the western media ran gushing stories about a rent a crowd toppling a statue in Iraq? An eerily quiet and deserted scene bar the imported rent a crowd?
And I was going to put this in the arseholes gallery but it’s for here.
A fucking hundred refugees? The fuck is that? UK is taking 20,000, pro rata that’s 1,400 or so. Same as the cases for today. We took money to prop up a failing regional airport allowing the US to use it as a staging post for sending out troops. Own it conservatives. You took the blood money. Take the refugees.
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Every bit of physical security apparatus we have in Afghanistan is now the Taliban’s to play with.
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Only thing I can say is: did that make a blind bit of difference in Vietnam? I mean, only thing I can think of is when Cambodia fucked with Vietnam the Pol pot regime got fucked really quickly in return. Not an expert by any means but maybe it’s not to be too worried about. Afghanistan is not going to invade the US with those anyway. Not going to invade their neighbours if their wealth depends on it either.
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Or 1/3 of one football stadium.
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Agreed. I was referring to cameras, sensors of all types, systems and networks. It’s all there for the taking. Lots of tech.
Probably much of which could be picked up at trade shows etc but everything is wired and ready to use. Some of the stuff is most likely on the export ban list somewhere.
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I’d criticise if I was in a position to. But I’m not
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