Since coming to power in August 2021, the Taliban government has made a number of moves to suppress the rights of Afghan women. The latest curb it has imposed is banning women from attending the popular Band-e-Amir national park 175 kilometres west of Kabul
“Not content with depriving girls and women of education, employment, and free movement, the Taliban also want to take from them parks and sport and now even nature, as we see from this latest ban on women visiting Band-e-Amir,” Human Rights Watch’s Associate Women’s Rights Director Heather Barr says.
There's some truth to that. They have something to fight for, the men were fighting to free their own sex slaves and ban their own vices, no wonder they weren't motivated.
I’ve always wondered how a theocracy that follows it’s rules as strict as the Taliban can rationalize their terrible state and misfortune when the enemies of their god are what the religious would consider “blessed”.
As a Muslim the idea that if you're a good person you'll have a good life doesn't exist, and there's actually a hadith stating that the stronger one's belief in Allah the more Allah tests one.
Also as a Muslim, those guys are making their own rules and then following them. I seriously have no idea where in the Quran or Sunnah they found "Don't let women visit national parks".
As far as I gathered, they claimed that allowing women in national parks meant losing control over them which led to some women not wearing their required head scarf.
They cannot tolerate the slightest slight, and don't think women should have any agency in the first place, so it's a very easy decision for them to simply imprison all women in the entire country to ensure they all keep their head scarf on.
But putting restrictions and practical imprisonment onto women for their entire life with harsh punishments for disobedience is hardly unique in Afghanistan.
The entire Muslim world is full of men who like to commit human rights violations of this specific kind. And a larger group; the vast majority of Muslim men, who favor this but don't act on it much beyond voicing their support.
Religion is horrible.
Islam is currently by far the worst one.
The mild existential comfort it grants to the weak is not worth the vast array of curses it comes with.
Its pretty difficult to deny at this point that this is the Afghanistan that the fathers and brothers of Afghan women wanted for their wives, daughters and sisters. For good or ill, the Afghan people were not locked in place by the status quo at the point that the US coalition left.
The entire pre-war system was dismantled, USAID spent billions building schools, water treatment plants, roads etc. and the local people blew them up. The people basically started from scratch and chose to build back the same thing from before the war, let their oppressors walk back into Kabul. There's nothing anyone can do about that from the outside. Maybe in a thousand years Afghanistan will change, but I doubt it.
The people living in afghanistan are the ones being victimized by the taliban. They do have supporters obviously, but to say that all men living in afghanistan are okay with what's happening is ridiculous.
If America was violently overtaken by gun-toting religious maniacs, would it be fair to say "Oh well some of them voted for it! Their fault!"
@storksforlegs@raccoona_nongrata That’s essentially what a lot of people elsewhere in the US say about those of us who live in states run by gun-toting religious maniacs. (For the record, about 40% of us did not vote for this.)
I'm referring more to the fact that the west spent two decades there trying to train Afghan soldiers to defend against the Taliban, we equipped them with weapons tools, spent billions on infrastructure. And after all that literally only a handful of people even bothered to resist when the Taliban came in. There is no underground resistance, no sabotage of the Taliban's rule etc. There are no real signs of any will to resistance, so what else are we to make of that besides this is the way the majority wants it?
If the US were taken over by the far right, and then that fascist government dislodged by a European coalition it is very likely that there would be a strong effort by a lot of Americans to seize on that disruption because right-wing fascism is not a popular ideology here despite their outsized influence.
There are many victims of the Taliban, I'm not denying that, it's more that if the majority of people do nothing how can it be said that Afghan's care about those victims? And if Afghan's can't bring themselves to care enough to fight, and outsiders already spent twenty years there trying to do something different, what can the west do besides help people escape?
To be fair it must be remembered that the Taliban had (and still have) some of the best PR out there since they were fighting a foreign invader. That tends to make you popular.