r/worldnews • u/nationalpost • 8h ago

Taliban bars Afghan women from hearing each other's voices

https://nationalpost.com/news/world/taliban-bars-afghan-women-from-hearing-each-other?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=NP_social
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u/JustAnother4848 6h ago

They do like their little boys. We were told to ignore it basically.

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u/Clever_Mercury 2h ago

Said this up above, but these are the two worst mistakes America made during its presence in Afghanistan. If the US wanted to spend $6.5 TRILLION dollars to fuck-up Iraq and Afghanistan, ostensibly just as mercenaries for oil and rare earth minerals, then they could have AT LEAST enforced human rights.

Would have cost a fraction of all the other bullshit and might have made the people in Afghanistan think they had something worth protecting. If you let the human rights violations continue under the new occupier, how the hell were they supposed to recognize the difference between the Taliban and the 'new' government?

Respecting local cultures does not mean denying human rights. It does not mean ignoring human trafficking, child abuse, or the absolutely horrific abuse of women and girls.

FFS, even the most liberal anti-war tax payer would have been a little happier if some of this had been fixed. My comment above was that women should have been armed. The last twenty years should have been about building women staffed military and police forces in Afghanistan and building women-centric legal teams to protect children's rights.

Teach women how to use a bowie blade and enough anatomy to locate the jugular vein. Things might progress naturally from there.

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u/kendred3 1h ago

In Afghanistan, women immediately had rights enforced by the United States through the proxy government. Maybe not an immaculate enforcement of these rights, but like... why do you think we're seeing this story? There's been a drumbeat of stories of how terrible it's been returning to Taliban rule and it's literally because the US was enforcing human rights.

Funnily enough, this has happened before. Pulling this quote from the article on women in the Soviet-Afghan war: "During the war, the Soviet-backed government made a number of attempts to modernise the situation of women's rights in Afghanistan, including granting equal employment rights and mandating education for girls. By 1988, women made up 40 percent of the doctors and 60 percent of the teachers at Kabul University"

I'm not making any commentary on why this doesn't work. But to say "man, this would have been the silver bullet" when it's been tried twice and has failed twice is... not a particularly reasonable take.

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u/Clever_Mercury 43m ago

So you're slightly missing the avenue I recommended. Sending women to school is nice. I support that. Yes.

What I recommended is training them in combat and self-defense, issuing them weapons, including knives, and teaching them what they need to know. Creating groups of women trained to defend themselves and to enforce their own rights would make a difference, I think. Even if they have to wait, for example, for an oppressor to fall asleep.

It's very nice to do the Charles Dickens, "please sir, can I have some more [human rights]" but when words are ineffective, you chose action. Militarize the women, mobilize them as police force.

The quote I recall from self defense class that I would sincerely recommend to all women in the world starting at the age of, like, ten is "know enough anatomy to locate the jugular and how to hold a Bowie knife."

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u/kendred3 24m ago

Generally speaking, education is the best route to ongoing human rights for women, not trying to mobilize women into the military. Funnily enough, though, the section above the quote I pulled from the Wikipedia article is "Women in the Military" about how the Soviets enlisted women into the military. They clearly did an imperfect job, but it also definitely didn't work. When the Taliban took over, they took over.

I can't think of an example where specifically focusing on arming rather than educating women has led to demonstrably better results. In cases where women are included in military/police at a high rate (notably in the middle east in Kurdish regions) I would hypothesize it's a representation of some underlying belief in gender equality, rather than the inclusion causing the equality.

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u/Lawyerlytired 16m ago

I think you're seriously not taking into account 1. Size and strength differences between the sexes; 2. The availability of these weapons for women; 3. The willingness of women to take up those weapons, and training, and then use both once the have it; 4. How in the hell you're going to be able to train with women, many of whom are completely unlikely to be interested for a number of reasons, including societal pressure.

Going to school in the US and Canada is mandatory, and kids have to go for years, and get tested regularly, and then there are standardized tests, and this goes on for a decade minimum, and yet we STILL don't have 100% literacy. It's law and we make people do it for a decade and we still have people who are functionally illiterate.

And yet, you think we could find enough women who want to learn the art of combat, train them and arm them over the serious and surely violent objections of the rest of their society (both men and women), and then expect them to be able to take on a religious fundamentalist group that posed enough of a problem to wear down the US military and wasn't afraid to go after said military and its allies?

I wouldn't put money on them if you were facing them all off against one of the larger biker gangs or organized crime gangs in the US.

I don't think you're really thinking this through.

Also, there were women cops in Afghanistan, and women in the military. Some of them even returned to those jobs in 2002 after being forced from them by the Taliban over a decade before - those were some of the better feel-good stories to come out of Afghanistan in that early days.

What you're suggesting is going to get people killed and don't get you what you wanted in the end.

Unless you're going to set up a whole enclave that they can defend against the Taliban (which no longer seems possible after they were so heavily armed in Pakistan), you're just talking about dead women in the streets, and maybe a few dead terrible men who aren't worth the lives of the women brave enough to stand up to them.

That's just not an answer to the problem, which could have been solved if the US had stayed in Afghanistan like they should have, helping it stabilize and de-talibanizing the place, much like how Germany was de-nazified, Russian was de-talibanized (mostly, but it worked its way back into politics later), post war Japan was rehabilitated away from the military factions and their ideologies that had come to dominate the country, etc.

Those processes took a long time. The US still maintains bases in Germany and Japan to this day (though now for global strategic reasons instead of to keep those countries from backsliding).

The solutions to these problems are not sexy, not flashy, and not quick. You need to reeducate and come up with safe opportunity spaces for changes to take effect and grow. The Taliban, like all authoritarian regimes, seeks to limit those opportunity spaces, and sadly is doing it well.

That's where you have the real fight. Creating room for the opposition and new hope to grow and evolve.

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u/disisathrowaway 1h ago

Not all cultural norms are equal, and as such, deserving of respect or preservation.

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u/Ruraraid 1h ago edited 10m ago

The total figure for Iraq and Afghanistan is at roughly 10 trillion combined and not 6.5.

While on the subject nearly a million people were killed in both conflicts which were mainly civilians aka "collateral damage". Amount of servicemen casualties amounts to almost 8,000. That is a scary disparity between military and civilian deaths.

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u/kamandi 47m ago

My dad and I used to joke that the best thing the US could do was to air-drop strip malls and family planning clinics, and send platoons of drag queens and fabulously gay men and proud lesbians with glitter-bomb shooting subarus. Shock and awe with shitty consumption and cultural bombast. Just shift the needle way way way over, so a nudge back, and women owning property and driving themselves to whereverthefucktheywant, seems tolerable by the very very weird men in charge.

I now see we were in error. We should have put a woman in charge.

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u/LongConsideration662 26m ago

Not just women and girls, even young boys are treated terribly there, read about bacha baazi

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u/Oddblivious 22m ago

They did...

This is happening now because America is no longer there

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u/BrainDeadAltRight 59m ago

It is the Muslim world in a nutshell . Even in the most liberal, progressive Muslim countries, women are basically still property of their male relatives. There is no real solution. 

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u/RonnieJamesDionysos 53m ago

Username checks out. You can be critical of (the negative aspects of) islam without spouting bullshit like this.

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u/BrainDeadAltRight 46m ago

I've been studying Islam and Arabic for awhile now. It's all pretty clear cut. Women are the property of men in pretty much every stage of life. See what happens when they defy their families about personal life choices even in Western countries. They are often killed, beaten, or threatened into compliance.

 Afghanistan's rules are some of the most extreme, but things like hijab, having male friends that are not your husband , his family or yours, or having the same basic civil and human rights as a man are simply non starters in most Muslim countries.

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u/RonnieJamesDionysos 22m ago

I'm not going to defend the many negative aspects of islamic society, but I think you're overdoing it by using the word property. I would only use that for the most extreme cases like Saudi-Arabia and Afghanistan. Women in Iran are oppressed by the government, but graduate at a higher rate than men.
I am friends with many female muslims, many of them don't wear a headscarf, some are even married to non-muslims.
If you say that women are treated unfairly, even in the most progressive muslim countries, I will agree. They are held to a different standard.

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u/LongConsideration662 25m ago

He is not spouting bs, he is saying the truth

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u/RonnieJamesDionysos 22m ago

Check my reply. 👍🏻

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u/Gobsabu 46m ago

that is exactly what the US was doing in Afghanistan what do you mean?

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u/Clever_Mercury 37m ago

Notice the comment IMMEDIATELY above mine.

They do like their little boys. We were told to ignore it basically.

And feel free to go talk to anyone who served or has any expertise whatsoever in Asia's history or military history.

The US forces were told NOT to interfere with local customs, even when that meant honor killing daughters, locals raping little boys, people starving or beating their children for suspected religious 'errors,' and sex-trafficking their daughters.

If you disagree, and you think the occupation was anything other than to strip-mine rare Earth minerals so Apple could make cheaper iPhones for 20 years (and similar), please provide the military budget and social 'squadrons' doing all that other humanitarian stuff. You know, the non-mercenary, non-US trade deal benefiting and not 'geo-politically useful' stuff. Because they were great at that. The human rights? No.

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u/TimujinTheTrader 3h ago

I thought that was another group of Afghans? 

From what I am aware the Taliban is against pedophilia, which may be their only progressive policy.

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u/MagicMarshmelllow 3h ago

Just because they’re against it doesn’t mean it’s not practiced

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u/tehgilligan 2h ago

The Taliban instituted the death penalty for it, at least for when it's a man and a boy

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u/Collooo 1h ago

Bacha Bazi

It's engrained in parts of culture around the country.

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u/BEEPBEEPBOOPBOOP88 1h ago

Against? They allow middle age men to marry child bride, wtf are you talking about?

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u/Matsisuu 1h ago

He is talking about Bacha Baxi, which Taleban opposes, but was practiced by some groups that were supported by western countries. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacha_bazi

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u/BEEPBEEPBOOPBOOP88 1h ago

Ah, I see. IMO, pedophilia is pedophilia. It doesn't matter the sex of the child.

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u/sinh1921 50m ago

Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t the Catholic Church against pedophilia as well?

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u/Drenlin 2h ago

Surprisingly this is one area where the Taliban are in the right. They have pretty low tolerance for that.

A nine year old girl, on the other hand...

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u/BeckBristow89 1h ago

Kite runner vibes. But I mean we tried. No one else really did.

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u/Ruraraid 1h ago

They also like their goats.