Gulam - I went back and reread my comments and realize more is missing. I must have not copied it completely, since I went over in characters.

Afghanistan had a GDP of $148 per person living in 1970. In 2006 that jumped to an outstanding $322 per person. I am sure they were living the Miller High Life back then. Looks more like, again you were on the nice tour of Afghanistan. Totally missing the poverty. Those numbers are per year. Figure the average person living in the city, made more. How happy were the people in the country living on $7 or less/month?

Poets in Herat out number american cities poets? That is your flawed estimation. A lot of Americans write poetry. As a hobby or something to exercise the mind. My brother and daughter write poems. Just a crazy statement.

Friday Mosque in Herat teaches? How to think? No! Science? no! Quran? Yes. Knowledge? No! Debate? No! Gave women the right to their children in a divorce? Hmmm I suspect women do not have permission to divorce. Isnt that true? The man can, and only if he doesnt lie about her fidelity, would she live.

You think the towers were a conspiracy? That we blew up our buildings, killing our people? This proves your an idiot. Seek help.

You deny that Islam, Alla and the prophet Mohammed says it is OK to kill any non-believer? Infidel? I mean really, that is the reason why the plague of Islam is so strong in the middle east. The people have to believe or die. Disagree…be killed.

Remember any boy can beat a woman. A real man knows it is wrong.

Gulam - Part 1

You are no expert. In fact if you traveled there in the 70’s and during the Taliban. I would say you saw a tourists version of Afghanistan. You see only what you want. I did not take me 5 sec. to find this.

Elizabeth Rubin wrote in an October 22, 2006, New York Times article titled In the land of the Taliban:

  To find out how the opium trade works and how it’s related to the Taliban’s rise, I spent the afternoon with an Afghan who told me his name was Razzaq. He is a medium-level smuggler in his late 20’s… He moved and spoke with the confident ease of a well-protected man. “The whole country is in our services”, he told me, “all the way to Turkey.” This wasn’t bravado. From Mazar-i-Sharif, in northern Afghanistan, he brings opium in the form of a gooey paste, packaged in bricks. From Badakhshan in the northeast, he brings crystal - a sugary substance made from heroin. And from Jalalabad, in the east on the road to Peshawar, he brings pure heroin. All of this goes through Baramcha, an unmanned border town in Helmand near Pakistan. Sometimes he pays off the national soldiers to use their vehicles, he said. Sometimes the national policemen. Or he hides it well, and if there is a tough checkpoint, he calls ahead and pays them off. “The soldiers get 2,000 afghanis a month, and I give them 100,000”, he explained with an angelic smile. “So even if I had a human head in my car, they’d let me go.” It’s not hard to see why Razzaq is so successful. He has a certain charm and looks like the modest tailor he once was, not a man steeped in illegal business. . . . . . . Should he ever run into a problem in Afghanistan, he told me, “I simply make a phone call. And my voice is known to ministers, of course. They are in my network. Every network has a big man supporting them in the government.” The Interior Ministry’s director of counter narcotics in Kabul had told me the same thing. Anyway, if the smugglers have problems on the ground, they say, they just pay the Taliban to destroy the enemy commanders.

Here is the link.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_production_in_Afghanistan

Gulam - Part 2

Since you did not state 70’s I was not assuming you were going to go back almost 4 decades. Just looking at above, you can see you know very little of what was really happening in Afghanistan on your visits all over Afghanistan. Which obviously brings into question anything you state about it too. So the whole drug dealing follows the American Army is false.

It was determined we were not there to fight drugs. Yes they burned some poppy fields, but their main mission was Al-Qaeda.

Your whole thing about whorehouses wife swapping sounds like propaganda. Prostitution has been on this planet in all corners since the beginnings of civilization. Not just for Americans.

I am no red neck, but calling me one is preferred to being a Muslim or any other religious nut job. Aa a Muslim is 1000x worse than a red neck. Red necks drink beer and watch nascar. Muslims want to kill, or will kill to promote their false beliefs. Muslims beat their female property like an abused dog. Muslims have no will to learn anything other than their precious quran. Anything else would be blasphemy and subject to a good stoning.

Brooks, no you are not an expert. That is obvious. All the experts got sent packing as soon as the invasion came. I saw no large opium plots in Afghanistan in the 1970s, and I was traveling widely in the countryside then, right up to three days before the coup. Aside from US government spies whose words cannot be trusted, I never met anyone who though that opium production was a factor on the world market before the Russian invasion in 1978. I saw none there under the Taliban, and I traveled widely and alone with the Afghans all over the South.  You are probably too young to know that we were told constantly during the Vietnam War that this was one of the wicked things from which the Southeast Asians had to be liberated, one of the weapons against the world of nice people that the Communists were using. Drug dealing follows the US armed forces around the world like a lap dog, just a whore houses are always close by.  The great American experts on Afghanistan in the second half of the twenty-first century were the Duprees, and they outraged the Afghans with their hard drinking and wife swapping. Louis could hardly put together an English sentence thirty years ago with out using the expression “motherfucker,” and Nancy’s first husband was CIA Chief of Station. Most of the American academics who claim an expertise, guys like Barney Rubin, are CIA operatives.

Your attitude toward is typical red-neck American fare, but there are more good poets in Herat today than in any comparable American city. When the great Friday Mosque in Herat was built the city had great universities and libraries and public baths and a population five times that of any city in Europe.  Islam preserved civilization during centuries when Europe was practically illiterate, and its laws gave women property rights and rights to children after divorce that were destroyed when Europeans like Napoleon came in with their laws. You my friend are an ignorant barbarian who has turned his world over to his women and his Jewish bankers; your entire world is crumbling and will soon be lying flat when the dollar collapses. The Afghans then will have had the honor of bringing down the Great Satin. Like the Mongols you have destroyed much and built little that will last. Yes, the Mongols brought the printing press, but they also brought the plague. For an American to talk about Muslim domination is a hoot, given the doomed antics that the Americans are up to now with their empire.

You are against religion you say, a real scientist now doubt. Well, believing that three major skyscrapers fell perfectly into their footprint after two were hit by airplanes, accepting that kind of myth, that requires a leap of faith far greater than any religion demands. Walking on water is easier to explain, and few sensible Christians have taken that literally for generations anyway. You my friend are an ignorant bafoon blowing off steam about people you do not understand, but you are in good company. A democracy gets exactly the government that it deserves, and yours is stealing you blind and acting the murderous monster all around the world.

Gulam - While I am not an expert, how far back are you going to say this was a great country. It seems economically opium was main export. After that you have rugs. Illegal drug trade for a country doing so well? I would disagree they were doing anything positive. The comment of beautiful is stretching it too. Unless you like desert,rock, with gray and brown for colors. Anything worth seeing the Taliban blew up. Peaceful? Hmmm…what religion dominates Afghanistan? Islam is not peaceful any where. It is a cult bent on death or dominance of any non believer. Where were the camps to train the terrorists? In peaceful Islamic Afghanistan.

Those fine women textile workers…did you talk to them? The fact that you use Joy with Afghanistan is humorous. Islam lets women have joy? Women are property in Islam, not allowed to wander the streets alone, covered head to toe in black cloth(I bet they love the choice in color too), unable to get properly educated(that affects the ability to earn a living), pawned off at an early age into marriage(I am sure those girls at 9 or earlier appreciate getting raped)(Islam has legalized pedophilia). Sharia Law is another winner for the women. Nothing like getting raped by a stranger then getting stoned for causing it. Those are not aberrations or extremes to Islam, those are main stream Muslims. If you do believe me, there are plenty of videos out there where Muslims from all over the world say death to any non believer. Just like the Swat Valley 17 yr old girl, did she get a vote for Sharia law? Is she happy with it now? So maybe you should rethink the whole happy little country thing. Women are slaves there, pretty plain and simple. Give them a taste of freedom and ask them what they want.

While I am against all religions, I feel Islam is evil. All religions are bad, they bring nothing but the acceptance of ignorance. Islam is the worst.

I wish we didnt go in there. It is obvious the backwards middle ages religion of Islam will always hold this crust rock of a country back.

While the US has some problems, they are in the open. Minor compared to there. People try to change things to make life better. You think Afghans happy, but when most abuse is considered normal, and not reported, how would any one know how bad it really is? Even the abused is twisted into thinking it is ok. That still does not excuse the abuse.

My little knowledge of the area is the Sufi believe in love and I would hope less of hate as seems to be the prerequisite for some others Muslims? My first insight was reading “The Gift” poems by Hafiz and a little history of his life. 

The ugly side we see may have always been, but it is nice to know their is a peaceful side also. Insightful actions by others may have added to the problems already going on in the Mideast, our government does have a disgusting way of intervening in others affairs.

Yes Dwightbaker, I have no objection to your using my words posted here. I assume that nothing posted here is copyrighted anyway and that everything here is up for grabs. For more information and photographs on Afghanistan I would suggest you go to http://www.lukepowell.com and contact the owner of that site. He know more about Afghanistan than I do, and has more experience with the people.

PSmith , I was simply stating a fact , I don’t believe I recommended anything . Gulam , while Afghanistan was without doubt far better off before being invaded by Russia and then us it has never been a bastian of civility . Which period are you refering to , when Afghanistan was run by Zahir or his cousin Daoud ? PSmith , I do have a basic understanding of both Afghanistan and islam ; I have read the Koran and studied the supporting texts , the Hadith and the Bukhari suri , I have long been interested in religion . If you want a peaceful islamic sect it would be the Sufi . My childrens live in nanny from the early ninties until they were grown and still close family friend was a young Afgan woman named Nelifar ( we called her Nilo ) who was at the time pregnant and seperated from her Samali husband . Nilo , her family ( and most Afgans ) supported the insurgent Masoud who was assasinated early on . Oh , one more point , if you remember early in the Karsi administration a plane crashed in the mountains killing three of his cabinet ministers , one was Nilos brother , he had quit his engineering job and went back to help rebuild his country , he was one of Karsi’s finance advisers , I do have an understanding of the subject thank you .

Unequal rights for men, none for women, that will all change when the Pope becomes a women; I am sure of it! Well maybe not so sure, how about when the Pope becomes a women and if the resurrection happens at the same time?

Jim Yell, your April 6 post contains truths not welcomed by many commenters on TD, but it’s good to restate them anyway. If it’s any comfort to you, the UN’s cosponsored Arab Society Reform reports (‘02 & ‘03), written by 40 Arab scholars, repeatedly cited as a problem their societies’ waste of 50% of their people, women. Though Afghanistan’s people are not Arabs, the basis for its women’s problems (apart from living in a warzone) also are rooted in Islamic law. Outsiders can’t change these problems, the change has to come from inside, and as women have little say over these matters it’s up to the Moslem males. The real reform issues are separating religious doctrine from the rest of the society so that education and modernization and development of liberal institutions that foster equality under the law have a chance to take root and flourish. (Look how long it took for women to get the vote in Western societies.) Meanwhile, there’s not much we can do except to help Moslem women who ask for it, however and wherever we can.

Before the two monsters materialistic modernism, Communism and Capitalism, invaded Afghanistan this was a beautiful, peaceful nation that exported food and extremely high quality textiles made by the women of the country. Their finest artists were women, and the place was full of joy. There were smiling people and playing children everywhere. The United States uses the rhetoric of liberation as an excuse to invade country after country. All of the UN people with extensive experience were driven out in the early months of the occupation, and ever since all of the news is drastically censored to paint this ludicrous picture of abused Afghan women and angelic American soldiers and aid workers. Ask the American women soldiers; they have been raped in recent years in record numbers by their own “buddies.” Ask about the bars and whore houses, and the hookers brought in from China; these are new to Kabul, after the US occupation. The streets of Jerusalem and Kabul were wonderfully innocent neighborhoods compared the the urban decadence of Tel Aviv and New York. More American and European women are abused and forced in to prostitution than Afghans.

If American women had not doubled the work force, had stayed home where they had been for as long as anyone can remember, then we would not be involved with any of these wars, because America’s own oil supplies would still be sufficient for several decades. When women went to work, America needed elder care, child care, and fast food. The new top jobs went to the wives of white men already on top, not to black men, so the disparity between rich and poor grew greater, and these white couples could afford second homes, boats, and endless airline flights, an orgy of material excesses. Wars abroad were essential to keep ahead of exponentially rising oil demand. It was Bill and Hillary who betrayed the Afghans, turned on an ally that Americans had installed when the Afghans would not accept the American pipeline deal, and they started damning the Taliban over women’s issues. Women voting coincides with the century of the great mass murders and mass defection from the discipline of religion. It is decadence, pure and simple.

sophie, Brooks, JimC, Ozark Michael, mmadden, expat in germany—You all make the major points. Sharia is what it is, and obviously the sympathy for oppressed people is highly selective on this site—all eyes on Palestinians, forget Darfur, forget the women oppressed by Islamic law, etc. As I’m a Jew, I appreciate the reference to Judaism as also being a tribal Arbrahamic culture. The difference is that only a small fraction of Jews adhere to the orthodox practices that make women second-class citizens whereas wherever Moslem communities flourish—even those not in Moslem countries—there continues to be the pressure to keep women down. (Perhaps the fact that the Jewish culture is matrilineal has something to do with the fact that most Jewish women are considered equal to Jewish men and free minds and souls and bodies in their own right; perhaps the diversity of Jewish beliefs; perhaps the Jewish adaptation to more modern conventions ... perhaps all these leave Jewish women in a much freer condition than women under Sharia.)

It’s stupid for a culture to hold down 50% of its population for gender reasons.

But the rub is, what can we or should we do about it? We can’t go into people’s countries and cultures and demand that they change to mirror our cultural bulwarks. We can try to help women in need in those Islamic cultures we encounter, but if we want the Islamic males who run the culture to be on “our side” or “useful on demand” we will continue to be sorely disappointed. We can provide teachers and aid workers in Islamic countries and help local women start the projects and the programs they deem useful, and back them up to the extent of our power when their own people reject them.

Heard Salman Rushdie speak a few weeks ago about what it was like living in hiding, under a fatwa, in constant fear of his life. Moslem women are not all under fatwas but many of them might as well be, as they must carefully guard their behavior at all times, not pursue their ambitions, submit to being married off at ridiculously young ages, etc. But what to do?  Do-gooder “Human shields?” (Now THAT would be a feminist cause, one of the most relevant in years.)

Gulam - Well have only women vote to have rights. If they vote to be beaten, be oppressed, stoned, flogged, raped and left uneducated. I will side with you for the whole world to stay out of your criminal affairs. I have a small<smirk> inkling that the women want to be educated, have freedom to walk around unescorted, never get beat, never stoned, never flogged, never be told anything from a back woods Muslim Male.

There are brave women, as well as men, in Afghanistan fighting for their rights to education and not have acid thrown in their faces by misogynists.  It is they whom we should support.

Anarcho, i did speak about islam, but i got called a HITLER for doing so.  can you believe that?  most americans (with the blessing of the govt) don’t know sh*t about islam.  i’ll continue to speak out.

your absolutely right— media coverage favors the interest not of the women there but of the pipeline to be built.

The news is full of how we are going in and saving Afghan women, but the reality is that whore houses now operate in Kabul servicing the Western servicemen with imported prostitutes. These were not there before the American invasion. I know, I was there in 2000. Reporters have covered these new brothels, and every Afghan knows about them, and still American women rant on about the burka, a tradition centuries old that the Muslims got from the Christian Byzantines. I traveled all over southern Afghanistan under Taliban rule with the UN, and most Afghans I met were pleased as punch with the Taliban regime, whose members they rarely saw. It was the only period of safety and peace that many Afghans can remember. In the areas of the north not yet under Taliban rule in 2000, just as many women wore the burka.

Gulam, unfortunately our not understanding or wanting to understand other parts of the world 9or our own) has never stopped the West or the prevailing western secular intellect, in interfering and running the gamut of cultural imperialism on the culturally different who already realise that certain boundaries are already in place to combat abuses. But the enlightened US and EU would like to have their say in everything that is no business of theirs. Middle Eastern culture has flourished for millenia.

Who are the upstarts to be preaching reform. We need more than anything to get our own house in order or watch it collapse. It is collapsing, but being propped up fraudulantly until an even bigger worldwide collapse can be put in place.  Judging from the level of intellectual arrogance on all fronts, worse things could pass than pointing fingers at supposed oppressive Afghan males or laws. We don’t have much even close to right here to dictate much of anything. In human terms, absolute power corrupts…..absolutely. It’s what we are passing through and witnessing at this moment. Where mankind trys to Lord over others with supposed supperior intellect while being corrupt in the core. May God continue to have pity on us.

What business is it of the industrialized nations to blunder in everywhere telling others what to do? What business do Americans have directing the course of the pipeline or women’ “liberation” on the other side of the world. Who are the Americans to say that their public opinion can determine the life and laws of other people whom they obviously do not understand.

Gulam , nice try . Islam is an extremely restrictive , sexually repressed religion that uses brutality to enforce its edicts . Blaming the ” jews ” doesn’t change that . Islam is simply another backward Abrahamic religion . I know , you’re going to protest I don’t understand the ” beauty ” of Islam , wrong , I’ve read the Quran , the sahih bukhari , the hadith along with the bible , the Gita , Upanishads and the Vedas so I do get it . The ” rights ” allowed by Islam for women are the right to be second class citizens , the right to be repressed by men and the right to do what they’re told by repressive clerics enforced by the threat of violence .

So here we are faced with a strange reversion to cruelty in Afghanistan. It seems inexplicable. What do the Truthdiggers come up with? Do they study where the ideas came from? No. They pretend to study. What do they come up with? the Vietnam war! the CIA! Bush! Cavemen! Decadence! and best of all, the Middle Ages!

One person finally mentions Sharia, but that is evaluated by a truthdigger as ‘balony’. yeah, ‘baloney’... I knew balony or worse was coming.
Mention Sharia again and it will be more than balony next time. So you just keep safe and quiet, mmadden.

Most interesting to me is the feminist response. The feminists can rage all they want, yes. But they will have to decide if they want to take on the real problem, which would involve risking themselves to charges of ‘eurocentrism’, ‘islamophobia’, ‘racism’, and my personal favorite… ‘fascism’. Worse than ‘baloney’ i assure you. But I doubt the liberal feminist has the stomach for being excommunicated from the temple of multiculturalism. No. Its warm and comfortable there, why would anyone risk being expelled from it?

Better for feminists to yell about how unfair cavemen are. and the CIA. oh, dont forget the Middle Ages! Rave about it all you want. For all the good it will do, which is none. For all the insight it will bring, which is even less than none.

I hope Obama is a bit smarter than you guys, but he is probably just as clueless. I heard Obama bowed to the King of Saudi Arabia this week. Like a serf.

Asserting that over-all women fare more poorly under Islam is baloney. Mohammad of all the world’s major religious teachers did more than any of the others to advance the legal position of women. When Napoleonic law came to Egypt women lost legal rights that they had had under Islamic law. There are more women forced into prostitution in the West, by far. Look at AIDS in Africa north and south. Women are far less likely to be infected in Muslim North Africa that in the South where Christianity came in such a late watered-down form that it offers the people no protection from sexually transmitted diseases.

In the USA you get to hear Jewish NPR moderators interview Jewish scholars explain why things are so bad for women in Muslim countries and why we should bomb Islamic nations. The Jews who control your press and academia have filled your heads with lies regarding Islam. The streets of the Arab Old City had old men and children moving about innocently in the evening in their pajamas, while in Tel Aviv one found flashing lights, honking cars, bars and prostitutes.

i remember in the 1980’s we had a situation in south africa.  it was apartheid.  the separation of blacks and whites.  of course the black got the pointy end of the bayonets. of course our citizens didn’t think it was right.  and we organized against it, and it was defeated.

where’s is the indignation over whats happening to women under islam?  where;s the NOW group?

you know what i think?  the action against apartheid was because it happened to men.  the lack of action against the regimes of afghanistan and saudi abaria, and iran, is the only victims are female.

if its not, then why don’t people care?

This has nothing to do with president Obama. This is Sharia law. Women are supposed to be slaves to men in the Muslim world. We really have no right to interfere with the internal affairs of a country no matter how repulsive the laws seem to be to us. I am sure in the eyes of the Muslims our tolerance of gays could be repulsive to them as well.

Liberals support human rights in some places, at some times.  The discarded, indigenous Palestinian people are a classic example.

There’s a trade-off with everything we humans do, eh, Gulam? And lots of unintended consequences. Well, this country is in decline now; no one in political office has the courage to see that, so it looks as though America is fated to continue along the primrose path to Perdition.

If America had not put its women into the work force over the last fifty years, the consumption of oil would not have risen many times over. America could have managed for many more decades longer with its own energy reserves, but doubling the work force made necessary three times as many cars, because also needed were industries for elder care, child care, and fast food. American feminism has driven an exponential increase in consumption that has made inevitable foreign wars of domination to secure the resources of others. All the new high-end jobs have gone to the wives of men who already had high-status jobs, not to black and hispanic men, further dividing rich and poor. This is old fashioned decadence folks. It always takes the form of a growing gap between rich and poor, feminism, prostitution, human sacrifice, international trade, and a rapid increase in the importance of luxury goods.

Maria, with all due respect, do American soldiers deserve to fight and die in a faraway land trying in vain to change habits and beliefs that are centuries old?

I don’t like it any better than you do, Jacks, but is it really a good idea to change the hearts of male chauvinists by shooting bullets into those hearts? Or change their minds by blowing their brains out with missiles fired by Predator drones?

Why the United States is allowing this is beyond me.  Do we honestly think allowing gender violence won’t be explosive in its blowback for the stability of that nation?  It only serves to justify the misogynistic killings of women and girls (If they don’t even deserve the most basic right of individual autonomy, they have no rights) and further entrench that country into the arms of extremists.

“Physician, heal thyself!” (Luke 4:23)

Or as the Good Lord also said, “Why do you see the mote in your brother’s eye, when you have a beam in your own eye?” (Matthew 7:3)

Just exactly why is it the business of American and Europeans to tell the Asians what to do in their own countries? There certainly are more American, Israeli, and British women who are forced, for one reason or another, be prostitutes. There were no whore houses in Kabul before the American occupation began. Arnold Toynbee, the British historian, said that half the roads in the ancient world led to Aleppo, in Syria, and the other half led to Bagram, just north of Kabul. Before the age of ships, whenever a disease emerged anywhere on the earth, if it spread widely it would travel the trade routes and pass through the caravan crossroads. Over the millennia natural selection has favored tribes near trade routes that were strict about contact with strangers and about sexual relations in general. Tribes that survived over the centuries did not pick up diseases from the caravans and pass them around. The Afghans have lived at a major crossing of the trade routes for many centuries, and with Islam, brought from the Middle East, this tendency toward sexual Puritanism has been reinforced. With twenty-first century transport systems, we all live at the crossroads of the trade routes.The arctic explorers Perry and Henson both fathered children in the wilds of northern Greenland, but Wilfred Thesiger the explorer of Arabia, never wrote of being sent off to bed with the wife of a desert sheikh. In the Arctic and on isolated islands, infrequent visitors were encouraged to contribute to the gene pool. People in remote, distant places feared inbreeding. Semites and Central Asian tribes, people who have lived for millennia near the trade routes, have traditions that protect them from social diseases. The turban of a man often covers everything but his eyes. These traditional practices are as natural an adaptation to real conditions as any in nature.