Bowing Down to the Taliban

They dont need IMF austerity when Taliban are on the job. Women in Afghanistan today enjoy fewer rights than they did in the 1960's! They must be praising Allah today for General Zia and his quiet American and Saudi friends of the 1980s.

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Khalil Mullah begins his daily radio show on FM 91, a Taliban radio station, at about 8 p.m. The residents of the snow-covered plateau listen to Khalil's religious broadcast to hear the names he reads at the end. Acting as both judge and prosecutor, he announces the names of those required to appear before the Taliban's Sharia count -- and of those who have already been sentenced.

DER SPIEGEL

Map: The Swat Valley

The bodies of these unfortunate residents can be found the next morning on the market square in Mingora. The corpses are hanging by their legs, their heads cut off and placed onto the soles of their feet as a final form of disgrace for the dead. A note under each body reads: "The same penalty will await those who dare to remove or bury these spies and traitors."

I guess it's safe to say that an all secular public school system is out of the question for those people.

Bowing to the Taliban is one way to put it.  A bit less embarassing than "your army getting its ass kicked just outside your capital".  As the Star article on the same subject noted, if Pakistan can't defeat the Taliban in their own back yard, with their own fairly well trained, disciplined, and pretty tough little army, how the hell are the Afghans supposed to defeat them.  This wasn't the more remote border areas where the army has never held sway anyway, this was a Pakistani upper class resort area a couple of hours drive from Islamabad.

Just more evidence that we Canadians should be the hell out of there. 

BTW, google some images of Swat Valley.  It's really beautiful.

The thread title sucks and is typical bs from sven

M. Spector wrote:

The Sultan of Swat must be turning in his grave. 

Hey, look at the bottom of the Spiegel story:

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Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan

My investigative faculties are as ruthless as ever.

jacki-mo wrote:

The worst period for Afganistan was under Taliban rule. All the more reason for Canada to send more troops in.

We should be sending troops into Pakistan. All of them. Now. Nip this Sharia stuff in the bud, I say. Otherwise we'll be fighting the terrorists in our shopping malls. 

Fidel] <p>[quote wrote:

Khalil Mullah begins his daily radio show on FM 91, a Taliban radio station, at about 8 p.m. The residents of the snow-covered plateau listen to Khalil's religious broadcast to hear the names he reads at the end. Acting as both judge and prosecutor, he announces the names of those required to appear before the Taliban's Sharia count -- and of those who have already been sentenced.

 

"Hey everybody, 'Khalil in the Mourning', here on FM 91. We've got the Khyber Pass Traffic Report in a moment, but right now, it's time for 'The 'Phrase That Slays'.  Who's gonna be the Doomed Seventh Caller?"

_________________________________________________________________________________________________ Our Demands Most Moderate are/ We Only Want The World! -James Connolly

Which you Republicans knew when you were cheering Reagan for ARMING them.  The Taliban were never anything but repressive misogynistic maniacs and to people like you, that was "freedom fighting" in the Eighties.  You have no right to be sanctimonius about them now when your wing of our country gave them guns in the crunch.  We should never have overthrown the pre-Taliban Afghan government.  If it had survived, no Afghan woman would ever have been denied an education or medical care.  And no crowd of innocent bystanders would ever have been beaten with a wire whip.  But none of that mattered as much as your precious freaking Cold War.

_________________________________________________________________________________________________ Our Demands Most Moderate are/ We Only Want The World! -James Connolly

Sven wrote:

So, you are familiar with the Unified Theory of Babble!

_____________________________Theored __________

[b]Eleutherophobics of the World...Unite!!![/b]

I prefer Unified Theory Against the Confused.

UTAC!

Kindrid wrote:

The Taliban is from another generation than the Mujahedeen that fought the Soviets. There is no connection.  You could just as well say the Northern Alliance grew out of the US support of the anti-Soviet resistance in Afghanistan. Of course, if the Soviets just left Afghanistanalone in the first place there would not be the problems that exist today. And it would have saved millions of lives.

fool

Kindrid wrote:

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fool

 Wow, that was intelligent.

Turnabout's fair play.

Kindrid wrote:

The Taliban is from another generation than the Mujahedeen that fought the Soviets. There is no connection. 

There is you know. The CIA-Saudi funded madrassas along the Pak-Afghanistan border region were for training Islamists for guerilla warfare and extremist religious indoctrination exported to Afghanistan and Pakistan during the 1980s and 90's. About 35000 islamists from about 40 countries went to Pakistan and Afghanistan in the 1980s to be trained for jihad against the Soviet-backed PDPA government in Kabul. Those madrassas produced jihadii terrorists for the war against the Soviets as well as for destabilization of 1990s Bosnia and Chechnya.

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You could just as well say the Northern Alliance grew out of the US support of the anti-Soviet resistance in Afghanistan.

Ahmed Shah Massoud, the "lion of pansjer", was a Tajiki mujahideen who fought against the Soviets. His half-billion dollar a year CIA funding was cutoff in 1992 after he declared war on the Taliban. The US ambassador to Afghanistan at the time suggested to Massoud that he simply surrender to the Taliban. Massoud was assassinated in 2001 and perhaps by "al Qa'eda" assassins. Massoud was being supported by SCO countries including Russia and China at that point.

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Of course, if the Soviets just left Afghanistanalone in the first place there would not be the problems that exist today. And it would have saved millions of lives.

Hodding Carter actually called for non-intervention by Soviets and all countries, and the official US version of history is that the Soviets intervened in Afghanistan first. And it's a lie. Zbignew Brzezinski has since admitted that the US was interfering in Afghanistan six months prior to the PDPA gov't in Kabul pleading for full military assistance from the Soviets. 

Afghanistan's feudal hierarchy remained undisturbed by outside influences from Stalinist Russia through to the 1970's when Marxist Afghans began organizing revolution. The monarchy was overthrown by Afghans and People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan came to power by the late 1970's. What followed was probably the first civil war in history to be instigated by a women's rights movement. In the end, ordinary Afghans fought with the PDPA government against the well funded and armed mujahideen. The secular PDPA government in Kabul actually lasted two and a half years longer than the Soviet Union. The US-backed Gulbuddin Hekmatyar rained rockets down on Kabul and Jalalabad for three more years after the fall of the PDPA, and even after he was made Prime Minister of the country. NATO countries all turned their backs to the carnage.

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And it's a lie. Zbignew Brzezinski has since admitted that the US was interfering in Afghanistan six months prior to the PDPA 

That is meaningless. What does interfering mean? Was it significant interfering? Under your mentality even the most insignificant presence by the CIA justified a Soviet coup. Since the KGB’s was far more aggressive in interfering in developing nations than the CIA, I guess the United had every right to stage coups backed by US forces in any nation with a hint of a Soviet presence.

Kindrid wrote:

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And it's a lie. Zbignew Brzezinski has since admitted that the US was interfering in Afghanistan six months prior to the PDPA 

That is meaningless. What does interfering mean?

Assassinations of Afghan Marxists and politicians, citizens, guerilla sabotage of infrastructure and so on. Basically the kind of terrorist operatinos that were typical of NATO's stay behind armies in Europe after WW II (see Daniel Ganser's book on Gladio terrorism). The CIA and ISI recruited talent the likes of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar(see 1993 WTC bombing)

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Was it significant interfering? Under your mentality even the most insignificant presence by the CIA justified a Soviet coup. Since the KGB’s was far more aggressive in interfering in developing nations than the CIA, I guess the United had every right to stage coups backed by US forces in any nation with a hint of a Soviet presence.

The KGB-FSB probably did assassinate Chechen gladios Shamil Basayev and Emir Khattab. And they received their guerilla training in the same terrorist camps as the Taliban and "al Qa'eda" commanders today. Prolly spetsnaz commandos

It's not just my "mentality" Chossudovsky is a Canadian professor of economics at Ottawa U. His website is a collection of essays researched by academics and independent news journalists from around the world. If you have a beef with those people, youll have to roll up your sleeves and do some research  yourself.

Central Asia is Russia's backyard. Can you imagine the Soviets suppling stinger missiles and billions of dollars in aid to the FMLN rebels or Sandinistas of the 1980s? Perhaps aiding and abetting rightwing militia groups and KKK inside the US? All hell wouldve broken loose

And here is US academic Michael Parenti's short essay about [url=http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article21387.htm][color=red][b]... Afghanistan[/u][/b][/color][/url]

You wont find that point of view in Reader's Digest or MacLean's

Again, your sources are not credible. You never give sources from credible journalist but from people that have a political agenda.

Garbage in garbage out.

Fidel, thanks for all that excellent info you posted to rebut Kindrid.  Please don't spoil it by starting with personal attacks...you're one of the few in this thread who actually started with good information and didn't immediately resort to attacking people who disagreed...keep up the great work!

That said, I wouldn't waste too much time either - some people will respond without reading, and when they do read, will sidetrack you with whining about sources when they provide none for their assertions.  

It IS possible, everyone, to just ignore and post around people who do that, as opposed to resorting to personal attacks.  That just means you lose, not only the argument, but also you lose because you make the thread devolve into attacks.

Sven, your mocking tone (e.g. "the unified theory of babble" remark) will stop now, or you will be considered to be trolling.  People are explaining themselves and staying on topic, and you just come back with some stupid quip?  Quit trolling now, or get out.

No, I'm not kidding.  You know what you're doing.  Ken Burch was on topic and making a point.  You were simply dismissing his point by pretending that it was off-topic and about Cuba or whatever.

Stay on topic, quit diverting real arguments with belittling and substance-free remarks like that, or get out.

How about, "You could have made the same points without attacking me, and now I will refute your points."  Or how about, "I'm not a Republican, and now I will refute your points."

Whatever you like.  I don't like it, however, when you use a SLIGHT (and it WAS slight) attack as an excuse to belittle and put down the entire web site that has been hosting your right-wing commentary, as a way of diverting this and any other thread you participate in from the topic at hand.

If you want to discuss, then discuss.  If you just want to make snide, smug remarks implying that babblers are stupid and one-track, then really, just buzz off.  You waste my moderating time when you pull this shit and then threads devolve into off-topic bickering. 

I'm not sure if you noticed, but babble was not created to accommodate centre-right-wing shit disturbers.  I'm fine with you posting here if you're respectful and perhaps offering a point of view a little to the right of others here, because it helps people here to hone their arguments if there's someone discussing this in good faith.  But you are constantly skirting that line and it's really starting to piss me off.  And clearly you've been pissing others off for a while.

Oh for frig sakes.  Okay, let's rename this thread, "Everyone chime in about whether Sven was out of line or not." Seriously, Ghislaine, just stay out of it.  We've all wasted enough time on this as it is.

Yes, sometimes the conversation gets heated here.  Ken was making a point.  He probably could have done it without calling Sven a Republican - I have no idea if Sven is a Republican, since you can be slightly to the right of Attila the Hun and still be a member in good standing of the Democratic Party.  But really, that is no excuse for diverting the subject by implying that it's yet another example of the way babblers are stupid and one-track.

Let's move on.

I don't have a simple answer to your question, Sven(although the "Obamamessiah" thing is hopelessly lame, and it's not like your side didn't think Reagan and Dubya were the Chosen Ones, so who the hell are rightists to talk?).  It will take a lot of work, but I'm convinced that Obama can be pressed to do the right(non-interventionist)thing in Afghanistan.  While he's not Nader, it remains clear that a McCain victory(the only possible consequence of a large Nader vote) would have made all antiwar work pointless, since people like McCain can never be influenced from outside and below.   

The onus is on rank-and-file activists to take the space that has been opened and work within it.   There is reason for optimism, but also the need for tremendous effort.

_________________________________________________________________________________________________ Our Demands Most Moderate are/ We Only Want The World! -James Connolly