What often grates on me is the “We never should have left Afghanistan! Look at what they’re doing to women!!” folks abutting the “We need to respect their customs. These theocratic dictatorships are just like that and there’s nothing we can do” folks who turn a blind eye to all our allies on the Saudi Peninsula, the African coast, and the Indian subcontinent get up to.
You need both in order to execute a new campaign of regime change, because arms and troops have to flow through friendly bases in India or Pakistan to get to Afghanistan. But the end policy only ever seems to be “we permit you to be horrible, so long as you’re committing these horrors on our team”.
Would love for a genuine trans-national feminist movement. But when feminism is a dead letter in our friends in Japan, Poland, and Israel, how the hell is it supposed to penetrate to our enemies in Bad Korea, Afghanistan, and Cuba?
We don’t need to respect their customs. We need to respect their people, including their people’s need for emotional healthy relationships which are often in conflict with elements in their cultures that only feel entitled to dominate.
We do if we want to move military personal through their territory without resistance.
Back when Americans were occupying Afghanistan, we had a seemingly unlimited tolerance for sexual abuse of minors and narco trafficking in the state. We needed the warlords to secure territory and the drug lords to underpin the local economy, in order to contain reactionary religious ideology.
Only after we left did we rediscover our duty to Afghan civilians.
people’s need for emotional healthy relationships which are often in conflict with elements in their cultures that only feel entitled to dominate
I don’t know how else you describe detonating the world’s largest fuel bomb over Nangarhar Province, if you’re not describing it as “entitlement to dominate”.
We weren’t in Afghanistan handing out hugs and flowers. We were killing dissidents en mass in order to suppress revolt.
What often grates on me is the “We never should have left Afghanistan! Look at what they’re doing to women!!” folks abutting the “We need to respect their customs. These theocratic dictatorships are just like that and there’s nothing we can do” folks who turn a blind eye to all our allies on the Saudi Peninsula, the African coast, and the Indian subcontinent get up to.
You need both in order to execute a new campaign of regime change, because arms and troops have to flow through friendly bases in India or Pakistan to get to Afghanistan. But the end policy only ever seems to be “we permit you to be horrible, so long as you’re committing these horrors on our team”.
Would love for a genuine trans-national feminist movement. But when feminism is a dead letter in our friends in Japan, Poland, and Israel, how the hell is it supposed to penetrate to our enemies in Bad Korea, Afghanistan, and Cuba?
The fuck
We don’t need to respect their customs. We need to respect their people, including their people’s need for emotional healthy relationships which are often in conflict with elements in their cultures that only feel entitled to dominate.
We do if we want to move military personal through their territory without resistance.
Back when Americans were occupying Afghanistan, we had a seemingly unlimited tolerance for sexual abuse of minors and narco trafficking in the state. We needed the warlords to secure territory and the drug lords to underpin the local economy, in order to contain reactionary religious ideology.
Only after we left did we rediscover our duty to Afghan civilians.
I don’t know how else you describe detonating the world’s largest fuel bomb over Nangarhar Province, if you’re not describing it as “entitlement to dominate”.
We weren’t in Afghanistan handing out hugs and flowers. We were killing dissidents en mass in order to suppress revolt.
You’re describing the political reality and I get that, it’s expedient. But that doesn’t mean it is also moral.
No, not at all. But then neither is looting the Afghani Treasury and sanctioning the country into a state of national famine.