Thursday, July 8, 2021
Tuesday, July 6, 2021
Muslim scum are afraid of women.
Aware of its harsh rule, the Taliban is trying to rebrand itself as capable as the U.S. finishes its withdrawal from Afghanistan. But the evidence is to the contrary.
The insurgents are pressing a ruthless, land-grabbing offensive across the country; an assassination campaign against government and security workers continues; there is little effort at peace talks; and women are being forced out of public-facing roles, and girls out of schools. There is fear that worse is on the horizon.
Back in the U.S., an unlikely coalition of veterans, many of whom have clashed bitterly over the years, supports President Biden’s decision to withdraw.
Tuesday, June 29, 2021
Afghanistan will always be a fucked up country because it's infested with Muslim morons. For the United States it's been a waste of money and a waste of lives. Biden has decided to get out. It's about time.
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Thursday, May 27, 2021
Muslim scum are afraid of women.
"What I care about are the Afghani women and girls. They are already seeing the few fundamental rights they gained while the U.S. propped up the country's government quickly disappear again. Once the last U.S. troops are out, all Afghani women will once again be treated worse than farm animals, with no access to education, health care, or even a meaningful ability to walk outside their homes without being threatened by the religious police if an inch of their skin happens to show outside their burqas."
Afghanistan will always be a shithole country because it's infested with Muslim scum. When the Americans leave the women will be treated like farm animals. Children, especially girls, will never learn anything.
New York Times
BREAKING NEWS |
A wave of Afghan military surrenders to the Taliban is picking up speed in rural areas as American troops withdraw. |
Thursday, May 27, 2021 10:55 AM EST |
Since May 1, at least 26 outposts and bases in just four provinces in Afghanistan have surrendered, according to village elders and government officials. With morale diving as American troops leave, and the Taliban seizing on each surrender as a propaganda victory, each collapse feeds the next. |
Sunday, May 9, 2021
Cowardly Muslims like to kill women, children, and babies. I'm not making this up. Muslim scum are disgusting.
Afghan families have been burying their children who were killed in explosions outside a secondary school in the capital, Kabul, on Saturday.
More than 60 people, mostly girls, are now known to have died in the attack that hit students as they left class.
No-one has admitted carrying out the attack in Dasht-e-Barchi, an area often hit by Sunni Islamist militants.
The Afghan government blamed Taliban militants for the attack, but the group denied involvement.
The exact target for Saturday's bloodshed is unclear. The blasts come against a backdrop of rising violence as the US looks to withdraw all its troops from Afghanistan by 11 September.
The neighbourhood in western Kabul where the blasts occurred is home to many from the Hazara minority community, who are of Mongolian and Central Asian descent and are mainly Shia Muslims.
Almost exactly a year ago, a maternity unit at the local hospital was attacked, leaving 24 women, children and babies dead.
Saturday, May 8, 2021
Muslims like to kill little girls.
New York Times
BREAKING NEWS |
An explosion in Afghanistan killed at least 20 people and wounded dozens more, many of them students from a nearby girls school, an official said. |
Saturday, May 8, 2021 10:38 AM EST |
No group has claimed responsibility for the attack, and the number of wounded and dead is likely to increase. The blast comes as rights groups and others have raised fears that the looming American troop withdrawal will endanger women if the Taliban widen their grip over parts of the country, given the oppressive rules they enforced under their regime in the 1990s. |
Sunday, May 2, 2021
Muslim morons like to blow themselves up. The stupid, it burns.
A deadly blast rocked Afghanistan as U.S. troops started to leave.
A suicide bomber blew up a truck in Logar province on Friday night, killing at least 27 people. If the blast was the work of the Taliban, as the Afghan government asserts, it would be the most overt signal yet that a peace deal reached by the Trump administration is off.
The blast occurred just before a May 1 deadline agreed to last year by the Taliban and U.S. officials to end the 20-year U.S. military presence in Afghanistan. That plan was scrapped when President Biden shifted the withdrawal to Sept. 11, but it’s unclear whether the blast was retaliation for that extension. U.S. troops have already started to leave the country, and American bases are being dismantled.
Sunday, April 25, 2021
The Taliban are afraid of women.
Opinion
I Met a Taliban Leader and Lost Hope for My Country
Afghan women know the cost of the wars started by men, and we will continue to suffer after American forces withdraw.
By Farahnaz Forotan
Ms. Forotan is an Afghan journalist who fled her country after her life was threatened.
April 21, 2021
As men continue to bicker over the future and control of Afghanistan, I have already lost my home and my country. I worked in Kabul as a television journalist for 12 years, and finally left in November after threats to my life.
I know how the Taliban plan to shape the future of my country, and their vision of my country has no space for me.
For what turned out to be one of my last assignments, I traveled from Kabul to Doha, Qatar, in October to report on the negotiations between the Afghan government and the Taliban. Like many Afghans, I was somewhat hopeful that the talks might help end the long, pitiless war in our country.
In Doha, I had the opportunity to interview members of the Taliban negotiating team at the conference hall where the talks were being held. The experience reinforced my sense that postwar Afghanistan, dominated by the Taliban, was bound to be a bleak place for Afghan women.
The incident that crystallized that dreadful feeling was my interview with Suhail Shaheen, the spokesman for the Taliban. I approached Mr. Shaheen for an interview in a room full of people. Like many young women in Kabul, I do not wear a head scarf. He couldn’t hide his disdain at my presence and set about to ignore me. I didn’t budge. I refused to be invisible and continued pointing my phone camera at him while asking my questions.
Afghan women live with a sense of being invisible. In our workplaces or in meetings like this one, our voices go unheard, our existence barely registered. Our presence in any public space is celebrated as gender equality in and outside Afghanistan, but all we experience in daily life is inequality and discrimination. It filled me with rage.
My encounter with Mr. Shaheen filled me with terror. When he finally answered one of my questions, his eyes moved in every direction but mine: He examined the walls, the carpet on the floor, the chairs, the door. He couldn’t look at me, even while I stood in front of him. It was as if he saw me as an embodiment of sin and evil. I felt unsafe, even in a room full of people, thousands of miles away from Afghanistan.
The Taliban’s notions of religion, politics and governance are based on a combination of a very orthodox interpretation of Islam, Shariah and tribal values. The “Emirate” they established in Afghanistan in the 1990s, which they are now seeking to establish again, barred women and girls from most jobs and forbade us to continue our education at schools and colleges, turning us into prisoners in our homes.
The Taliban see their Islamic government as duty bound to safeguard Muslim society from corruption and moral decadence, which they blame on the presence of women in public spaces, including universities and offices. They want to reduce us to bearing children.
The wars that men started and fought in Afghanistan have disproportionately devastated the lives of women. Yet the compositions of the peace delegations from Afghanistan reveal that women are barely considered as worthy of having a say. It is this knowledge and the memory of the Taliban rule in the 1990s that make me fear for the future of Afghan women.
My pessimism proved correct. On Nov. 9, a few weeks after I returned to Kabul from Doha, I received a call informing me that my name was on “the hit list.” Several journalists and rights activists were assassinated in October. Some more were killed in November.
About 200 female journalists in Afghanistan stopped going to work, and 50 journalists, including 15 female journalists, had to leave Afghanistan. According to Nai, a nonprofit group that supports Afghan journalists, of the 1,900 female journalists who were working in the country in January 2020, about 200 had left the profession by November. After I received the call about the threat to me, I made the extremely painful decision to leave my family and my country and seek safety elsewhere.
In November, gunmen attacked Kabul University and killed at least 21 students; it was not clear who was responsible. Fear and confusion took over Kabul. All we could be certain of is that the killings of journalists and civil society activists were deliberate and organized.
The Afghan authorities are not competent to investigate and prove culpability, the Taliban have denied they are responsible for these killings, and no one knows whether “the hit list” really exists or who created it. Yet the Taliban’s enmity toward the media is no secret. In 2016, the Taliban threatened to kill Afghan journalists if they continued their “unfair coverage” of the group. They carried out their threat and killed seven journalists working for Tolo TV.
The Taliban have a long history of using assassinations to heighten the sense of insecurity among the people. The inability of the Afghan government and security forces to stop such attacks exposes their failures.
The Taliban have come close to achieving their goals through the use of force and military supremacy. After the United States concluded it couldn’t win the war in Afghanistan, even after two decades of fighting the Taliban, it entered into negotiations with them last year. That decision offered the Taliban greater legitimacy than they had ever enjoyed.
The rights and status of Afghan women, their access to education and employment, and the creation of a relatively free media have become symbols of what is possible in Afghanistan. With the United States and its allies changing the goal posts, those freedoms are now imperiled.
I believe an important factor in changing American calculations regarding Afghanistan was the failure of governance and the widespread corruption in the Afghan government, its institutions and the broader Kabul elite. Afghans need to be introspective about our own failures. We need to talk about how to avoid yet more violence and to protect the rights and dignity of all Afghan citizens, men and women.
I am now in the United States. I am safe but longing for my home, wondering about the future of my country and my family. I can’t shake off the despair and the sense that Afghanistan has been abandoned by the world. We might lose most of what we have gained in the past two decades if the Taliban return to power. The future looks bleak, but Afghanistan can’t afford to stop trying to find a better way to move forward.
Farahnaz Forotan is an Afghan journalist. This essay was translated by Aziz Hakimi from the Dari.
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A version of this article appears in print on April 22, 2021, Section A, Page 25 of the New York edition with the headline: I Lost Hope for Afghanistan. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
Friday, April 16, 2021
At War: The end of the United States’ Forever War. New York Times. April 16, 2021.
The End of the United States’ Forever War |
 | Reporter |
Dear Reader, |
Wesley Morgan’s recently released book about the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan, “The Hardest Place: The American Military Adrift in Afghanistan’s Pech Valley,” is unique in its completeness. Arguably, it is the closest any book about the American war in Afghanistan has come to capturing what transpired in a slice of territory occupied by U.S. forces. |
It is especially relevant now, in the wake of President Biden’s announcement that all American troops will withdraw from the country by September. Books like Morgan’s will serve as the epitaphs for the failures of the American military in its two-decade-long war. |
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Thousands of troops passed through the Pech in Afghanistan’s violent east, where famous documentaries and films were born and the Korengal Valley turned practically into a household name. The soldiers there built and tore down outposts. Went on hundreds of patrols. Fought and died. Morgan, a military affairs reporter, documents it all from the beginning to the end, a herculean task in a conflict that has gone on for so long, and with characters who continuously rotated in and out every few months. These men and women all left their own marks on a military strategy that was never understood or clearly defined. |
Morgan spoke with The Times about the book and what he thinks comes next in the Pech after the United States leaves Afghanistan. |
What was the main event that spurred you to write the book? |
I first went to the Pech in 2010 — when I was a freelancer and I was still in college — for an embed with a battalion from the 101st Airborne Division. That visit just got me obsessed. It was my fourth reporting trip to the wars, and I think the 12th battalion I’d embedded with in a combat situation, but the fighting in the Pech was just so different, with the amount of artillery being fired, the restrictive terrain, the gunfights and how outrageous the terrain was. |
And at these little outposts, like COP Michigan at the mouth of the Korengal, which was the most frequently and heavily attacked outpost in eastern Afghanistan at the time, nobody really knew when or why they’d been built, even though it had just been a few years earlier. |
Initially it was for a senior thesis project that I turned in a decade ago — I helped break the news of the imminent U.S. pullout from the Pech in 2011 in a story for this paper with C. J. Chivers and Alissa Rubin because I stumbled onto the information while doing that thesis research. And then later it was for this book, as I kept going back to Afghanistan and U.S. troops got sucked back into the Pech. |
What kind of feedback has the book gotten so far? |
The first thing that struck me was how many of the reviews were being written by military veterans. Then what blew me away was a pair of reviews, both by Afghanistan infantry veterans, in two publications that both cover war but with drastically different audiences, and the reviews had quite a bit in common. And a big part of what they had in common was a sense of bitterness over how a lot of heroic fighting had been built on really shaky foundations in terms of the intelligence and assumptions and decisions that led us into these valleys, and grief over how casualties had mounted as military units continually reinvented the wheel and kept flying back up to the same villages in the same valleys to go looking for firefights year after year, without a lot of knowledge being passed down or absorbed. |
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What happens after the U.S. completely withdraws from Afghanistan? |
I think in the Pech and its tributaries, we’re already well into the post-withdrawal phase. It’s been this way at a bunch of points in the story: The U.S. embraced the counterinsurgency outpost in the Pech a couple of years before it did in other places like Kandahar and Helmand. And then when the surge was underway in those places, the battalion I first visited in the Pech was saying, “This isn’t working, time to leave,” and they did — only for them to get sucked back out there and have to reopen some of the bases, as would wind up happening in a lot of parts of Afghanistan a few years later during Trump’s mini surge. |
So I think for the Pech and its tributaries, the post-2021 future is already happening. The government and the Taliban are fighting each other, but they’re also observing truces with each other and finding ways to accommodate one another on governance and especially on fighting ISIS, which is their mutual enemy. |
How does this bode for the U.S. counterterrorism strategy in the region? |
The U.S. has kind of outsourced our counterterrorism mission against ISIS to this weird Taliban-government partnership, to the extent that in the months before the Doha deal, the Rangers were actually using Reaper strikes to help the Taliban fight ISIS. I wrote in the book that there was a Ranger targeting team that jokingly called themselves the “Taliban Air Force” because of this, and since the book came out someone told me they even had a “Taliban Air Force” sign in their ops center, which is a detail I wish I could’ve included. |
We’re going to be seeing in the months ahead whether the Taliban is willing to kind of act as our surrogate for counterterrorism like that in other parts of the country — I think where ISIS is concerned, they will, but it seems pretty clear that where Al Qaeda is concerned, they won’t. |
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity. |
Thomas Gibbons-Neff is a correspondent in the Kabul bureau and a former Marine infantryman. |
Afghan War Casualty Report: April 2021 |
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At least 147 pro-government forces and 25 civilians have been killed so far this month. [Read the casualty report.] |
We would love your feedback on this newsletter. Please email thoughts and suggestions to atwar@nytimes.com. Or invite someone to subscribe through this link. Read more from At War here, or follow us on Twitter. |
Editor’s Picks |
Here are five articles from The Times that you might have missed. |
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“As good as our intelligence and over-the-horizon capabilities are, there is no substitute for being there.” Drones, long-range bombers and spy networks will be used by the United States and Western allies in an effort to prevent Afghanistan from re-emerging as a terrorist base after American troops leave the country. [Read the article.] |
“I am so worried about my future. It seems so murky. If the Taliban take over, I lose my identity.” Many Afghans fear that without the umbrella of U.S. protection, the country will be unable to preserve its modest gains toward democracy and women’s rights. [Read the article.] |
“He’s dealing with the kiss of death from his own closest partner.” The Taliban are gaining militarily in Afghanistan, and President Ashraf Ghani’s international supporters are impatient with the stumbling peace process. [Read the article.] |
“There’s no easy answer, no victory dance, no ‘we were right and they were wrong.’” Was it worth it? After two decades of midnight watches and gut-twisting patrols, after all of the deaths and bloodshed and lost years, that is the one inescapable question among many of the 800,000 Americans who have served in Afghanistan since 2001. [Read the article.] |
“The I.S.I., with the help of America, defeated America.” Pakistan’s military stayed allied to both the Americans and Taliban. But now the country may face intensified extremism at home as a result of a perceived Taliban victory. [Read the article.] |
Wednesday, April 14, 2021
"Afghanistan’s destiny will look like it did two decades ago.” The United States doesn't care and that's a good thing. We can't fix Muslim stupidity.
Afghans Wonder ‘What About Us?’ as U.S. Troops Prepare to Withdraw
Many Afghans fear that without the umbrella of American protection, the country will be unable to preserve its modest gains toward democracy and women’s rights.
By Thomas Gibbons-Neff
April 14, 2021
KABUL, Afghanistan — A female high school student in Kabul, Afghanistan’s war-scarred capital, is worried that she won’t be allowed to graduate. A pomegranate farmer in Kandahar wonders if his orchards will ever be clear of Taliban land mines. A government soldier in Ghazni fears he will never stop fighting.
Three Afghans from disparate walks of life, now each asking the same question: What will become of me when the Americans leave?
President Biden on Wednesday vowed to withdraw all American troops by Sept. 11, 20 years after the first Americans arrived to drive out Al Qaeda following the 2001 terrorist attacks. “War in Afghanistan was never meant to be a multigenerational undertaking,” he said, speaking from the White House.
The American withdrawal would end the longest war in United States history, but it is also likely to be the start of another difficult chapter for Afghanistan’s people.
“I am so worried about my future. It seems so murky. If the Taliban take over, I lose my identity,” said Wahida Sadeqi, 17, an 11th grader at Pardis High School in Kabul. “It is about my existence. It is not about their withdrawal. I was born in 2004 and I have no idea what the Taliban did to women, but I know women were banned from everything.”
Uncertainty hangs over virtually every facet of life in Afghanistan. It is unclear what the future holds and if the fighting will ever stop. For two decades, American leaders have pledged peace, prosperity, democracy, the end of terrorism and rights for women. Few of those promises have materialized in vast areas of Afghanistan, but now even in the cities where real progress occurred, there is fear that everything will be lost when the Americans leave.
The Taliban, the extremist group that once controlled most of the country and continues to fight the government, insist that the elected president step down. Militias are increasing in prominence and power, and there is talk of civil war after the U.S. withdrawal.
Afghans watched with cautious optimism when Mr. Biden assumed office in January. Many had hoped he would reverse the Trump administration’s rushed pledge to withdraw all U.S. troops by May after brokering a shaky peace deal with the Taliban last year.
Afghan leaders were convinced that the new American president would be a better ally, who would not immediately withdraw the troops that have helped keep the Taliban at bay and out of major cities.
Since the Afghan government and the Taliban began peace talks in Qatar late last year, fighting between them has surged, along with civilian casualties. On Wednesday, the United Nations’ mission in Afghanistan reported that in the first three months of the year there were 573 civilians killed and 1,210 wounded, a 29 percent increase over the same period in 2020. More than 40,000 civilians have been killed since the start of the war.
Over two decades, the American mission evolved from hunting terrorists to helping the government build the institutions of a functioning government, dismantle the Taliban and empower women. But the U.S. and Afghan militaries were never able to effectively destroy the Taliban, allowing the insurgents to stage a comeback.
The Taliban never recognized Afghanistan’s democratic government. And they appear closer than ever to achieving the goal of their insurgency: to return to power and establish a government based on their extremist view of Islam.
Women would be most at risk under Taliban rule. When the group controlled Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001, it banned women from taking most jobs or receiving educations and practically made them prisoners in their own homes.
“It is too early to comment on the subject. We need to know much more,” said Fatima Gailani, an Afghan government negotiator who is involved in the continuing peace talks with the Taliban. “One thing is certain: It is about time that we learn how to rely on ourselves. Women of Afghanistan are totally different now. They are a force in our country; no one can deny them their rights or status.”
Afghanistan’s shaky democracy — propped up by billions of American dollars — has given way to an educated urban class that includes women like Ms. Gailani. Many of them were born in Afghanistan in the 1990s and came of age during the U.S. occupation of the country. Now these women are journalists, part of civil society and members of government.
In the countryside, by contrast, fighting, poverty and oppression remain regular parts of life. Despite the challenges, residents found some comfort in knowing that Afghan forces, backed by the American military, were keeping the peace at least in some areas.
Haji Abdul Samad, 52, a pomegranate farmer from the Arghandab district of Kandahar Province, has been displaced from his home for two months because of the heavy fighting there.
“I am too tired of my life. We are now in a position to beg,” Mr. Samad said. “The Americans are responsible for the troubles, hardships that we are going through. Now they are going to leave with their troops, with no peace, no progress. They just want to leave their war behind.”
Fears about the future are as palpable in the presidential palace in Kabul as they are in far-flung corners of the country. And people across Afghanistan are confused about who will soon be in charge.
The Taliban have repeatedly called for President Ashraf Ghani to step down to make way for an interim government, or most likely, their own. Mr. Ghani has refused, instead pushing for elections but also opening the door to more fighting and a potential civil war. The peace talks in Qatar have faltered and the Taliban have all but backed out of proposed talks in Turkey.
“Ghani will be increasingly isolated. Power brokers see every one of his moves as designed to keep himself and his deputies at the helm,” said Torek Farhadi, an adviser to former President Hamid Karzai. “Reality is, free and fair elections are not possible in the country amid war. In fact, it could fuel more violence.”
As American troops prepare to leave and fractures form in the Afghan government, militias controlled by powerful local warlords are once more rising to prominence and attacking government forces.
The American withdrawal will undoubtedly be a massive blow to morale for the Afghan security forces, spread across the country at hundreds of checkpoints, inside bases and along violent front lines. For years, the U.S. presence has meant that American air power, if needed, was nearby. But since the Trump administration’s deal with the Taliban, those airstrikes have become much less frequent, occurring only in the most dire of situations.
Without American military support, Afghan government troops are up against a Taliban enemy who is frequently more experienced and better equipped than the average foot soldier.
The history of Afghanistan has been one of foreign invasion and withdrawal: the British in the 19th century and the Soviets in the 20th. After each invasion, the country underwent a period of infighting and civil war.
“It is not the right time to withdraw their troops,” said Major Saifuddin Azizi, a commando commander in the southeastern province of Ghazni, where fighting has been especially brutal in recent days. “It is unreasonable, hasty and a betrayal to us. It pushes Afghanistan into another civil war. Afghanistan’s destiny will look like it did two decades ago.”
Thomas Gibbons-Neff is a correspondent in the Kabul bureau and a former Marine infantryman. @tmgneff
It's about fucking time. What a waste of money and American lives. And it will all be for nothing because eventually the Taliban assholes will own the entire country. Nobody cares. Afghanistan will always be a shithole county. The stupid can't be fixed.
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