"President Obama speaks of an Afghanistan that can't hurt the United States, rather than a shining city on the hill, even as he commits this country to a new surge and many more years of war.
(Is the man nuts, or does he just do a good job of repeating bullshit propaganda. Afghanistan "hurt" the United States? Is Obama -- that smart, smart, man -- truly an idiot?)
But in a society so steeped in a contrary tradition, is it up to us to tell Afghans what customs they can or can't keep? Is the goal of westernizing Afghanistan sustainable? Is it realistic? Is it worth dying for?"
Or more appropriately, is it WORTH KILLING INNOCENT PEOPLE FOR??
And WHAT BUSINESS is their society to us???
HOW WOULD YOU LIKE IT if some Muslim came over here, killed a bunch of your fellow citizens and possibly even family members (abducting and torturing others), and then told you it was progress?
Furthermore, The Boston Globe Knows the Truth About Iran and The Boston Globe Knows About "Al-CIA-Duh"
How disingenuous to find this on the ops page then.
"Westernizing Afghanistan" by H.D.S. Greenway | March 31, 2009
NEARLY 30 years ago I was taken to a refugee camp on Pakistan's Northwest frontier called "Kerala." It was named after an Afghan village whence most of the refugees had come.
The Kerala refugees had a terrible tale to tell. It was an oft-told tale in the camps in those days, a story of treachery and death before America's Afghan war, before the Russians, in a time of near civil war between the Communist-leaning government in Kabul and the tradition-bound countryside.
An informer had told the Kabul government that the village was hiding insurgents, and when the government forces with their Russian advisers came many of the men of the village were lined up and shot. It was April 1979. Most of the villagers fled across the border to Pakistan.
The Kerala incident interested me because of what the refugees said about their grievances against their government. What they objected to most was the government trying to force reforms on them - reforms such as secular institutions that the villagers saw as a threat to religion, and the education of girls.
I thought to myself, how ironic. The Communists are trying to modernize the country much as we might do, but the people resist sudden change. I wrote in my notes: "The lesson seems to be, whether you are a Communist or the Shah of Iran, you force reforms and modernization down the throats of traditional and deeply religious peasants only at your peril."
America's ally, the Shah, soon fell, and with it his "white revolution" of modernization. And when the Communists' red revolution in Afghanistan began to fail, the Soviets invaded to keep their allies in power. But the Soviets failed as well.
Yeah, overthrowing the democratically-elected government of Iran in favor of the oil interests of the British and installing the Iranian Saddam -- killer of hundreds of thousands -- and his Savak is called "modernization."
Three decades have passed since then, and today it is the United States, not the Soviet Union, that is bogged down fighting Afghans who have a different vision of how society should be organized.
Can we please come home?
One of the crowning achievements of Western civilization has been the emancipation and empowerment of women. It has been slow, but once gained nobody in the western world would argue against equality for women.
That's why we lead the world in domestic violence, right? What I have to say here is that I am simply sick and tired of the Muslim-hating, Zionists agenda-pusher bashing that same old drum of war-justifying propaganda with the arrogant self-aggrandizing self-adulation.
AHEM!!!!!
I'm so offended by the AmeriKan MSM and its bullshit!
See: How I Came to Love the Veil
And consider this:
"They sat in one girl’s home telling their story, their faces uncovered only because no man was present. But when Mohammed Matloob, the father of one of the girls, walked into the room, the other three quickly pulled their head scarves over their faces. His daughter, Nagina, 16, ordered him to leave the room, which he did, with a surprised shrug."
Aren't the children beautiful?
Tomas Munita for The New York Times Hameeda Sarfraz, in the dark burqa, teaches Islamic religious lessons to children in her village, about 50 miles north of Islamabad, Pakistan.
More: 'Worse than the Taliban' - new law rolls back rights for Afghan women
That does it!!! Oh, what LIES we have been told about Muslims by our Muslim-hating Zionist AmeriKan MSM, Americans!!!!!!
Honestly, I'm tired of the MSM lying? Aren't you, AmeriKa?
Also see: I Don't Want to Kill Them Anymore
The Children of Afghanistan
The Uncomfortable Others
He Doesn't Like You
Photos of the Forgotten
But what about countries that don't share western values?
What about 'em?
In the Colonial days it was easy. Colonialism always cloaked its greed in moral values, so you just went and started up schools and civil institutions - taking up the "white burden" for your captive peoples "half devil and half child," as Rudyard Kipling put it in his poem written upon the occasion of America's acquisition of the Philippines.
It would be hard to argue that the former colonies didn't gain from what their Colonial masters brought them. India wanted desperately for the British to leave, but is better off today for the institutions the British left behind. The British didn't fare so well in Afghanistan, and the reforms they brought to India didn't extend very far west of the Khyber Pass. We are no longer in a Colonial age, and the western powers are no longer free to impose their will.
I'm sorry, but is there something like a RACIST COLONIALIST GENE that is passed down amongst the elites because THIS IS SICK!!
Yeah, COLONIALISM has done a WHOLE PILE for NATIVE PEOPLES!! Tell it to the NATIVES of the WESTERN HEMISPHERE, where 95% of the population was wiped out!!! Tell it to ALL the AFRICANS who were ENSLAVED!!! Tell it to the MILLIONS who have been SACRIFICED on the altar of COLONIALISM!!! Tell it to the CHINESE, who still feel stung from being carved up by colonialist powers and having an opium epidemic foisted upon them in its service. I suppose HITLER also left everyone better off even after he was defeated, huh?
So this is one of the great thinkers AmeriKa has to offer the world these days?
But what if you invade a country? Aren't you then responsible for it? Hasn't America a moral responsibility to nation-build in Afghanistan? Look what happened after the Soviets left and we just walked away?
Once again, MORE HALF-TRUTHS!!!
"The U.S. government was well aware of the Taliban's reactionary program, yet it chose to back their rise to power in the mid-1990s. The creation of the Taliban was "actively encouraged by the ISI and the CIA," according to Selig Harrison, an expert on U.S. relations with Asia. "The United States encouraged Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to support the Taliban, certainly right up to their advance on Kabul," adds respected journalist Ahmed Rashid. When the Taliban took power, State Department spokesperson Glyn Davies said that he saw "nothing objectionable" in the Taliban's plans to impose strict Islamic law, and Senator Hank Brown, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on the Near East and South Asia, welcomed the new regime: "The good part of what has happened is that one of the factions at last seems capable of developing a new government in Afghanistan." "The Taliban will probably develop like the Saudis. There will be Aramco [the consortium of oil companies that controlled Saudi oil], pipelines, an emir, no parliament and lots of Sharia law. We can live with that," said another U.S. diplomat in 1997."
The Bush administration had an abiding confidence that America was so powerful that it could impose democracy anywhere in the world, and the world would be better for it.
That's what he is calling the PNAC Plan?
But now, as the years drag on and westernization hasn't taken hold as we would like, there is talk of more modest goals. President Obama speaks of an Afghanistan that can't hurt the United States, rather than a shining city on the hill, even as he commits this country to a new surge and many more years of war.
But in a society so steeped in a contrary tradition, is it up to us to tell Afghans what customs they can or can't keep? Is the goal of westernizing Afghanistan sustainable? Is it realistic? Is it worth dying for? As it has always been, the clash between idealism and practicality in American foreign policy never ceases....
Pffft! Nothing like finishing the piece up with a piece of deception!
--more--"
Oh, yeah, and about the TALIBAN:
"Something of a catchall term for loosely affiliated insurgents without a singular command structure. Often, the Afghan government favors the phrase 'enemies of the state' (New York Times July 24, 2007)."
"The Taliban is growing and creating new alliances not because its sectarian religious practices have become popular, but because it is the only available umbrella for national liberation," says Pakistani historian and political commentator Tariq Ali. "As the British and the Soviets discovered to their cost in the preceding two centuries, Afghans never like being occupied."
Also see: Afghanistan's Other Government
And today, readers?
"More and more, people here look back to the era of harsh Taliban rule from 1996 to 2001, describing it as a time of security and peace."
Oh, oh, oh!!!! I'm so offended by the AmeriKan MSM and its bullshit!
