#kabul afghan forces

[arakkne]

Gender apartheid: oppression of women should be made a crime against humanity – feminist academic explains why

Published July 15th, 2014, written by Penelope Andrews

"Crimes against humanity are occurring with impunity around the globe; from Myanmar to Sudan, Ukraine and elsewhere. And yet, unlike international treaties for the crimes of genocide, torture, apartheid and forced disappearances, there isn’t a treaty specific to crimes against humanity.

That lack is now being remedied.

The International Law Commission, a UN expert body, has submitted draft articles for a treaty to the UN’s Sixth Committee. This is the main forum for considering legal questions in the UN General Assembly. The intention is to give countries more legal tools to hold accountable those who commit crimes against humanity. It is expected that the treaty process will conclude in October 2024.

The new treaty may include special protection for women.

We believe good journalism is good for democracy and necessary for it.

A group of women activists is lobbying the committee to consider including in the treaty a new definition aimed at protecting women against all forms of oppression. They are advocating for a definition of this discrimination as “gender apartheid”. The idea is that it would track the definition of racial apartheid by replacing the word “race” with “gender”.

Apartheid (Afrikaans for “apartness”) policies were codified in South Africa between 1948 and 1954. The ideology divided South Africans on the basis of race in all spheres of life.

The lobbyists argue that the international community responded comprehensively to racial apartheid after the Apartheid Convention made it a crime in 1973. This forced the South African apartheid state to be held accountable for the crime. It also imposed an obligation on UN member states to eradicate the institutionalised systematic oppression and domination of black South Africans.

Read more: Ordinary white South Africans and apartheid – bound to a racist system they helped prop up

As an academic who has researched and written extensively on racial and gender equality, I fully support broadening the definition of the crime of apartheid to include gender. I believe this is necessary given the persistence and ubiquity of structural discrimination and violence against women in the world.

I first made a case for this in my 2012 book From Cape Town to Kabul: Rethinking Strategies for Pursuing Women’s Human Rights. I argued that when one reads the Apartheid Convention closely, and substitutes “gender” for “race”, the situation of Afghan women, in particular, is identical to the plight of black South Africans under apartheid.

I argued that thinking about constructing a genuine alternative to the realities of women’s lives in Afghanistan was to consider the way the international community confronted the eradication of apartheid in South Africa. It would enable a structured global approach responsive to the institutionalised systems of domination and oppression of women, girls and the LGBTQI+ community.

Codifying “gender apartheid” could go much further than protecting Afghan women and girls.

Great progress has been made in the pursuit of gender equality and in stemming gender-based violence. I believe that codifying gender apartheid under international law is an essential component of that continued progress.

It could offer significant relief to many victims and survivors who otherwise would not be entitled to adequate recourse from the international community and from states. It could also lead to a more effective and concerted international response to gender-based oppression.

Fighting gender apartheid

The crime of gender apartheid stands out as unique and pernicious in intent and consequence. It is what legal scholar Patricia Williams has referred to as “spirit murder”. That is a system of dehumanisation, erasure, oppression, domination and persecution.

Read more: Students on the frontline: South Africa and the US share a history of protest against white supremacy

The Taliban’s ever deepening and institutionalised oppression of Afghan women and girls is the most vivid illustration of the case.

Multiple UN experts, member states and Afghan women’s rights defenders have warned of the deteriorating situation of women and girls in Afghanistan. The concerns became more pronounced after the UN Deputy Secretary-General Amina J. Mohammed on 12 January 2023 warned the international community that in Afghanistan,

unprecedented, systemic attacks on women’s and girls’ rights and the flouting of international obligations are creating gender-based apartheid.

A sign in Johannesburg in 1948 saying 'non-European' people are not allowed to use a lift reserved for Europeans (whites).

Apartheid signage in Johannesburg in March 1948. AFP via Getty Images

In September 2023, UN Women executive director Sima Bahous called on member states to support an intergovernmental process to codify gender apartheid under international law. She said that

the tools the international community has at its disposal were not created to respond to mass, state-sponsored gender oppression. This systematic and planned assault on women’s rights is foundational to the Taliban’s vision of state and society and it must be named, defined, and proscribed in our global norms, so that we can respond appropriately.

Why the argument holds water

One question that needs answering is whether apartheid can be separated from its association with South Africa. Can we think of apartheid as a crime against humanity that can be removed from its racial context?

The evidence from Afghanistan, for example, suggests the answer is a resounding “yes”.

There is a precedent for this. The crime of genocide originated as a term to describe the crimes in Nazi-occupied Europe in the second world war. It was then applied to genocides that occurred elsewhere in the world, like Rwanda, Cambodia and Sudan. In the same way apartheid ought not to be confined to its racial origins.

Read more: South Africa’s genocide case against Israel is the country's proudest foreign policy moment in three decades

International opponents of racial apartheid played a significant role in bolstering South African anti-apartheid activists. In the same way the backing of the global community is crucial to advancing gender justice and women’s human rights. It is particularly necessary to support frontline defenders of women’s human rights who challenge gender apartheid at great risk to themselves.

As the government of Malta noted in its 2023 written comments on the Draft Crimes Against Humanity Convention:

[t]he codification of the crime of gender apartheid will enable victims and survivors – present and future – to hold perpetrators to account for the totality of crimes committed by systematized oppression which the crime of gender persecution alone cannot and does not capture.

This view ought to be widely endorsed by the international community."

[afghanbarbie]

The sex-based apartheid against women in Afghanistan cannot be reduced to, "Afghan men saw Afghan women enjoying freedom and got mad, so they established extremist religious governments to stop it." I am really tired of seeing this misconception and oversimplification spread around by leftists, liberals and feminists – it's racist, and simply not fucking true.

The majority of Afghans want a secular government and for the oppression of women to end. The Taliban represent a minority of Afghanistan's people. The deterioration of Afghan society – in particular, women's rights and freedoms – directly results from decades of foreign intervention, imperialism and occupation. Afghans did not destroy Afghanistan, the United States did, and the USSR paved the way for them to do so.

Had Afghanistan never been treated like a pawn in the games played by imperialistic powers, had we not been reduced to resources, strategic importance and a tool for weakening the enemy, extremism would have never come to power.

An overview of Afghanistan's recent history:

The USSR wanted to incorporate Afghanistan into Soviet Central Asia and did so by sabotaging indigenous Afghan communist movements and replacing our leaders with those loyal to the USSR. The United States began funding and training Islamic extremists – the Mujahideen – to fight against the Soviet influence and subsequent invasion, and to help the CIA suppress any indigenous Afghan leftist movements. Those Mujahideen won the war, and then spent the next decade fighting for absolute control over Afghanistan.

During that time period, known as the Afghan Civil War, the Mujahideen became warlords, each enforcing their own laws on the regions they controlled. Kabul was nearly destroyed, and the chaos, destruction and death was largely ignored by the United States despite being the ones who caused and empowered it. This civil war era created the perfect, unstable environment needed to give a fringe but strong group like the Taliban a chance to rise to power. And after two decades of war, a singular entity taking control and bringing 'peace' was enticing to all Afghans, even if their views were objectively more extreme than what we had been enduring up to that point.

When the United States invaded Afghanistan in 2001, they allied with the same warlords that had been destroying our country the decade prior and whom they had rallied against the Soviets – these are the people that made up the Northern Alliance. The 'good guys' that America gave us were rapists, pillagers, and violent extremists, no better than the Taliban. And that's not even mentioning the horrible atrocities and war crimes committed by American forces themselves.

So, no, Afghan men did not collectively wake up one day and decide that women had too much freedom and rush to establish an extremist government overnight. No, this is not to excuse the misogyny of men in our society – the extremists had to already exist for Americans to fund and arm them against the Soviets – but rather to redirect the bulk of this racist blame to the actual culprits. The religious extremism and sex-based apartheid would not be oppressing and murdering us today if they hadn't been funded and supported by the United States of America thirty years ago. And despite all the abuses and restrictions, many Afghan women prefer the Taliban's current government to another American occupation. I felt safer walking in Taliban-controlled Kabul than I did being 'randomly searched' (sexually assaulted) by American military police in my village as a child.

Imperialism is inextricably linked with patriarchal violence and women's oppression. You cannot talk about the deterioration of Afghanistan without talking about the true cause of said decline: The United States of America. Americans of all political views, including leftists and feminists, are guilty of reducing or outright ignoring Western responsibility for female oppression in the Global South, finding it much easier to place all blame on the foreign brown man or our supposedly backwards, savage cultures, when the most responsibility belongs with Western governments and their meddling games that forced the most violent misogynists among us into power.

(Most of this information comes from my own experience living as an Afghan Hazara woman in Afghanistan, but Bleeding Afghanistan: Washington, Warlords and the Propaganda of Silence covers this in much more detail. If you want more on the Soviet-Afghan war and Afghanistan's socialist history, Revolutionary Afghanistan is an English-language source from a more leftist perspective)

[sgtgrunt0331-3]

A U.S. Marine with Special Purpose Marine Air-Ground Task Force-Crisis Response-Central Command (SPMAGTF-CR-CC) carries and helps to calm an Afghan infant, during the evacuation at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, Afghanistan on August 21, 2021.

There is no better friend, no worse enemy than a United States Marine.

(Photo by Sgt. Samuel Ruiz)

[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]

by Jake Wallis Simons

The Gray Lady even contrasted the two incidents in a way that painted the American atrocity favourably while casting Israeli intentions in doubt. The Kabul attack, it said, ‘came after a suicide bombing killed at least 182 people, including 13 American troops, during the frantic American withdrawal from the country. Under acute pressure to avert another attack, the US military believed it was tracking a terrorist who might imminently detonate another bomb. Instead, it killed an Afghan aid worker and nine members of his family.’

The Gaza strike, however, ‘adds fuel to accusations that Israel has bombed indiscriminately’, the New York Times said, pre-empting the results of the independent investigation with breathless speculation and a healthy dose of ‘confirmation bias’ of its own. The assumption could not be clearer: whereas the Americans were acting out of panic and confusion, the Israelis were either acting out of disregard for human life or straightforward bloodlust.

Civilian deaths, including those of aid workers, are a tragic reality of modern warfare. Sixty-two humanitarian workers lost their lives in combat zones last year. Although they were mostly killed at the hands of autocratic regimes and militias, during wartime they are also the casualties of democracies, including Britain.

During the Libyan civil war in 2011, when David Cameron had his hands on the joystick, 13 people were killed by a NATO airstrike, including an ambulance driver, three nurses and some friendly troops. (He did not, surprisingly, subject his own government to the type of rhetoric that he has recently been levelling at the Israelis over the mistaken Gaza strike.) That same week, NATO wiped out a family near Ajdabiya in the north of the country. This year, even the Danish military was forced to admit that its aerial assault had claimed the lives of 14 Libyan civilians.

The difference between attitudes towards most Western armed forces and the Israelis could not be sharper. According to the UN, the average combatant-to-civilian death ratio in war around the world is one to nine. When Britain, America and our allies battled Islamic State in Mosul in 2016-17, we achieved a much more respectable rate of about one to 2.5. In Gaza, Israel has done better still, reaching about one to 1.5, and possibly even less.

[zvaigzdelasas]

[VoiceOfAmerica is US State Media]

Hameed's name was widely featured in local media for his alleged involvement in national politics and influence on journalists during his tenure as the ISI chief.

The general gained global attention when journalists captured his presence on camera in the lobby of a Kabul hotel shortly after the Taliban regained control of Afghanistan in August 2021 as the U.S.-led Western forces withdrew following nearly two decades of involvement in the Afghan war.

During their presence in Afghanistan, Washington and allied nations had persistently accused the ISI of providing sanctuaries and covertly enabling Taliban leaders to orchestrate insurgent attacks from Pakistan against international forces on the Afghan side of the border.

Hameed was believed to be close to former Prime Minister Imran Khan, who appointed him to lead the ISI when he was prime minister.[...]

In the run-up to the vote [to depose Khan], the deposed prime minister’s aides reported that he developed disputes with the military over whether Hameed should be retained as the ISI chief, as Khan desired.

12 Aug 24

[nocternalrandomness]

An Afghan Air Force A-29 attack aircraft over Kabul, Afghanistan, Aug. 14, 2015

[simply-ivanka]

Kamala Harris on the Afghanistan Withdrawal

Three years later, she calls Biden’s decision ‘courageous and right.’

By The Editorial Board Wall Street Journal

Kamala Harris is working hard to hide her policy views from the public, but now and then she opens a window on her worldview, and it isn’t reassuring. One example came Monday on the third anniversary of the terrorist bombing at the Kabul airport that killed 13 Americans trying to defend the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.

The Vice President praised the dead servicemen and women. “Today and everyday, I mourn and honor them,” she said in a statement.

But if she has any regrets about President Biden’s policy, she isn’t sharing them. “As I have said,” Ms. Harris noted, “President Biden made the courageous and right decision to end America’s longest war.”

It’s good to know what she thinks, but it doesn’t reflect well on her judgment as a potential Commander in Chief. The withdrawal decision was arguably the worst of Mr. Biden’s Presidency, as he ignored the advice of nearly all of his advisers that a date-certain, total retreat would likely result in the collapse of the Afghan government and a Taliban takeover. Keeping a few thousand troops in support of the Afghan forces could have prevented the catastrophe and its consequences.

Listen to retired Marine Gen. Kenneth McKenzie, who was in charge of Central Command at the time of the Afghan fiasco, speaking recently on the School of War podcast:

Host Aaron MacLean: “What do you think the consequences are broadly of the collapse and us not being there?”

Gen. McKenzie: “Well, I think on several levels, I think [Vladimir] Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was directly driven by this. I think the Chinese were emboldened as a result of it. I think that more operationally, I think ISIS-K flourishes now in Afghanistan. The attack in Moscow just a few months ago is only a sign of things to come.

“Our ability to actually look into Afghanistan, understand what goes on in Afghanistan, is such a small percentage of what it used to be that it is effectively zero. So we predicted these things will happen, these things are happening. Our ability to, again, apply leverage here is quite limited.”

Mr. Biden was indeed warned about all of this—and so was Ms. Harris if she was in the White House Situation Room as she likes to say she has been for all of this Administration’s major security decisions. The needless deaths of those 13 Americans were the worst result, but the withdrawal also marked the end of Mr. Biden’s ability to deter adversaries around the world.

That Ms. Harris now embraces this failure suggests more of the same ahead if she wins in November.

Appeared in the August 27, 2024, print edition as 'Kamala on the Afghan Withdrawal'.

[deadpresidents]

Random question, but something I've wondered for the last few years: concerning Afghanistan, should the US have considered leaving a few thousand troops in Kabul indefinitely while withdrawing troops from the rest of the country?

It seems like the capital city would've been relatively easy for American troops to defend, and their presence there could have blocked the Taliban from fully returning to power. A singular focus on protecting Kabul might've been one way to prevent the worst possible outcome.

When President Trump left office and President Biden was inaugurated in January 2021, there were only 2,500 American troops left in Afghanistan. The Trump Administration had made a deal with the Taliban to withdraw all American troops by May 2021, and Biden pushed that back by a few months, but if the U.S. wanted to defend Kabul we almost certainly would have had to commit to another surge of American troops and that simply wasn't going to happen. It would have required a bigger fight against the Taliban because we would have been pulling out of the deal that the Trump Administration negotiated and the Taliban was already in the process of rapidly regaining control of the country by that time.

Even when he was Vice President, Joe Biden strongly believed that the United States needed to get out of Afghanistan because the only other option was to be there forever. Twenty years of training and equipping Afghan troops still hadn't resulted in a national force that could stand on its own, so Biden had argued against troop surges since the earliest days of the Obama Administration. There was no way that Biden was going to surge the number of troops once he became President, and Trump was so determined to withdraw all the troops from Afghanistan before the end of his term that his Defense Department had to beg him to pump the brakes.

Just to defend Kabul would have required much more than those 2,500 American troops left in the country on the day Biden was inaugurated. And the Afghan government of Ashraf Ghani was an unreliable partner that was corrupt and often seemed oblivious to what was actually happening throughout the country. You used the word "indefinitely" and that's exactly what Biden (and Trump, to be fair) wanted to avoid. We had already been in Afghanistan for 20 years, and things weren't heading in the right direction.

I certainly don't agree that we should have been there indefinitely. I think we probably should have bolstered the American forces in Kabul for a short and specific amount of time in order to ensure that the withdrawal was less chaotic. But it was always going to be an ugly end. There was never going to be a victory in Afghanistan, and I supported the decision to withdraw American troops. I wish we would have done a far better job at protecting the Afghan people who worked for ISAF/NATO and ended up left behind to fend for themselves as the Taliban took over once again. It's a tragedy that those final days were such a mess, but one of our leaders was going to have to make the difficult decision to definitively end the neverending war that we were never going to win, and I think history will eventually see President Biden's decisive action in a different light, much like President Ford's pardon of Richard Nixon is understood differently today.

[thalialunacy]

I don't know why, precisely, I've been getting an influx of readers to this story recently, but I'm chuffed and going to roll with it. It was my first Johnlock, posted almost exactly one year ago. 😅🎉

When the Worst Part Begins

Summary: On 15 August 2021, the Taliban took back Kabul and toppled the Afghan government, leaving many people - women especially - stranded and desperate to escape the country. This is a story in which John Watson, retired army doctor, is called in to assist.

Because it's not, actually, for Queen & Country this time, at least not further than one can stretch the idea before it becomes misshapen.

'We have people there,' Fortune had reminded him. 'Translators, informants, their families. If we leave them there--'

'Copy,' he'd said, cutting her off, not wanting to hear. Incredibly aware of what awaited anyone who has aided the western forces. 'When do we start?'

[mariacallous]

Afghan refugees who fled their country to escape from decades of war and terrorism have become the unwitting pawns in a cruel and crude political tussle between Pakistan’s government and the extremist Taliban as their once-close relationship disintegrates amid mutual recrimination.

On Oct. 3, Pakistan’s government announced that mass deportations of illegal immigrants, mostly Afghans, would start on Nov. 1. So far, at least 300,000 Afghans have already been ejected, and more than a million others face the same fate as the expulsions continue.

The bilateral fight appears to center on Kabul’s support for extremists who have wreaked havoc and killed hundreds in Pakistan over the last two years—or at least that is how Islamabad sees it, arguing that it is simply applying its own laws. The Taliban deny accusations that they are behind the uptick of terrorism in Pakistan by affiliates that they protect, train, arm, and direct.

Mass deportations are a sign that Pakistan is “putting its house in order,” said Pakistan’s caretaker minister of interior, Sarfraz Bugti. “Pakistan is the only country hosting four million refugees for the last 40 years and still hosting them,” he said via text. “Whoever wanted to stay in our country must stay legally.” Of the 300,000 Afghans already ejected, none have faced any problems upon returning, he told Foreign Policy. As the Taliban are claiming that Afghanistan is now peaceful, he said, “they should help their countrymen to settle themselves.”

“We are not a cruel state,” he said, adding: “Pakistanis are more important.”

The Taliban—who, since returning to power in August 2021, have been responsible for U.N.-documented arbitrary detentions and killings, as well forcing women and girls out of work and education—have called Pakistan’s deportations “inhumane” and “rushed.” Taliban figures have said that the billions of dollars of international aid they still receive are insufficient to deal with the country’s prior economic and humanitarian crises, let alone a mass influx of penniless refugees.

The expulsions come after earlier efforts by Pakistan, such as trade restrictions, to exert pressure on Kabul to rein in the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), the Pakistani Taliban, whose attacks on military and police present a severe security challenge to the Pakistani state. Acting Prime Minister Anwar ul-Haq Kakar said earlier this month that TTP attacks have risen by 60 percent since the Taliban regained control of Afghanistan, with 2,267 people killed.

The irony is that Pakistan bankrolled the Taliban throughout their 20-year insurgency following their ouster from power during the U.S.-led invasion in 2001. Taliban leaders found sanctuary and funding from Pakistan’s military and intelligence services. When the Taliban retook control of Afghanistan in 2021, then-Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan congratulated them, as did groups such as al Qaeda and Hamas. But rather than continuing as Islamabad’s proxy, the Taliban have reversed roles, providing safe haven for terrorist and jihadi groups, including the TTP.

“While it’s still too early to draw any conclusions on policy shifts in Islamabad, it appears that the initial excitement about the Taliban’s return to power has now turned into frustration,” said Abdullah Khenjani, a former deputy minister of peace in the previous Afghan government. “Consequently, these traditional [Pakistani state] allies of the Taliban are systematically reassessing their leverage to be prepared for potentially worse scenarios.”

Since the Taliban’s return, around 600,000 Afghans made their way into Pakistan, swelling the number of Afghan refugees in the country to an estimated 3.7 million, with 1.32 million registered with the U.N. High Commission on Refugees. Many face destitution, unable to find work or even send their children to local schools. The situation may be even worse after the deportations: Pakistan is reportedly confiscating most of the refugees’ money on the way out, leaving them in a precarious situation in a country already struggling to create jobs for its people or deal with its own humanitarian crises.

Border crossings between Pakistan and Afghanistan have been clogged in recent weeks, as many Afghan refugees preempted the police round-up and began making their way back. Media have reported that some of the undocumented Afghans were born in Pakistan, their parents having fled the uninterrupted conflict at home since the former Soviet Union invaded in 1979. Many of the births were not registered.

Meanwhile, some groups among those being expelled are especially vulnerable. Hundreds of Afghans could face retribution from the Taliban they left the country to escape. Journalists, women, civil and human rights activists, LGBTQ+ advocates, judges, police, former military and government personnel, and Shiite Hazaras have all been targeted by the Taliban, and many escaped to Pakistan, with and without official documents.

Some efforts have been made to help Afghans regarded as vulnerable to Taliban excess if they are returned. Qamar Yousafzai set up the Pakistan-Afghanistan International Federation of Journalists at the National Press Club of Pakistan, in Islamabad, to verify the identities of hundreds of Afghan journalists, issue them with ID cards, and help with housing and health care. He has also interceded for journalists detained by police for a lack of papers. Yet that might not be enough to prevent their deportation.

Amnesty International called for a “halt [to] the continued detentions, deportations, and widespread harassment of Afghan refugees.” If not, it said, “it will be denying thousands of at-risk Afghans, especially women and girls, access to safety, education and livelihood.” The UNHCR and International Organization for Migration, the U.N.’s migration agency, said the forced repatriations had “the potential to result in severe human rights violations, including the separation of families and deportation of minors.”

Once back in Afghanistan, returnees have found the going tough, arriving in a country they hardly know, without resources to restart their lives, many facing a harsh Himalayan winter in camps set up by a Taliban administration ill-equipped to provide for them.

Fariba Faizi, 29, is from the southwestern Afghanistan city of Farah, where she was a journalist with a private radio station. Her mother, Shirin, was a prosecutor for the Farah provincial attorney general’s office, specializing in domestic violence cases. Once the Taliban returned to power, they were both out of their jobs, since women are not permitted to work in the new Afghanistan. They also faced the possibility of detention, beating, rape, and killing.

Along with her family of 10 (parents, siblings, husband, and toddler), Faizi, now eight months pregnant with her second child, moved to Islamabad in April 2022, hoping they’d be safe enough. Once the government announced the deportations, landlords who had been renting to Afghans began to evict them; Faizi’s landlord said he wanted the house back for himself. Her family is now living with friends of Yousafzai, who also arranged charitable support to cover their living costs for six months, she said.

With no work in either Pakistan or Afghanistan, Faizi said, they faced a similar economic situation on either side of the border. In Pakistan, however, the women in the family could at least look for work, she said; their preference would be to stay in Pakistan. As it is, they remain in hiding, afraid of being detained by police and forced over the border once their visas expire.

[captain-price-unofficially]

Taliban UH-60 Blackhawk helicopter (serial No. 0-23450) of the former Afghan Air Force, Kabul International Airport, 2024

[septembriseur]

“In August 2021, the world watched with dread as the Taliban swiftly regained control of Afghanistan while U.S. forces exited the country. In those early days, it became clear that an ominous fate awaited America’s most committed Afghan allies. Women and men who fought shoulder to shoulder alongside U.S. troops were left facing inevitable retribution from the Taliban. As the challenges of the U.S.-led operation to evacuate vulnerable Afghan allies became painfully clear, it also became obvious to many of us that some of the most at-risk Afghans were likely to be left behind.

In fact, despite the large number of Afghans evacuated during the U.S. withdrawal in August 2021, a report from the Association of Wartime Allies (AWA) in February 2022, showed that of the estimated 81,000 Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) applicants in Afghanistan that had visa applications pending as of Aug. 15, 2021 — the day Kabul fell — some 78,000 were not evacuated in this effort. At least 96 percent of the SIV population remained in Afghanistan and in grave danger of reprisal by the Taliban.

…As with most government programs, the Afghan SIV program is complicated and requires oversight and maintenance. Most acutely, the program does not have an unlimited number of visas available and relies on congressional reauthorization of visas to allow America to continue to bring those left behind in Afghanistan to the safer shores of the U.S. Based on the rate of issuance, there are likely less than 7,000 visas remaining available for Afghan allies, with some 140,000+ SIV applicants waiting to receive one. At the current pace, this supply of visas will be exhausted as early as mid-August of this year.”

[sgtgrunt0331-3]

A U.S. Marine with Special Purpose Marine Air-Ground Task Force-Crisis Response-Central Command (SPMAGTF-CR-CC) carries and helps to calm an Afghan infant, during the evacuation at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, Afghanistan on August 21, 2021.

There is no better friend, no worse enemy than a United States Marine.

(Photo by: Sgt. Samuel Ruiz)

[dandelionh3art]

A history lesson to the people who are busy going off about Afghanistan. Remember what your country did!

Your government has destroyed lives! I know you don't actually care. But still!

Many Afghan interpreters and support staff were left behind when U.S. troops withdrew from Afghanistan in August 2021. These interpreters, along with their families, had worked closely with American forces over two decades, often in dangerous conditions, providing essential language skills, cultural insights, and support on the ground. Their work made them targets for the Taliban, who viewed them as collaborators with foreign forces.

The U.S. government did have the Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) program in place to help interpreters and others who assisted American operations to immigrate to the United States. However, this program faced extensive backlogs, lengthy processing times, and bureaucratic hurdles, which prevented many from securing visas in time.

When Kabul fell to the Taliban in August 2021, an emergency evacuation airlift was organized, but it was chaotic, and many who were eligible for evacuation were unable to make it to the airport or were left behind due to the sheer volume of people needing assistance.

Efforts to bring these individuals to safety have continued since the withdrawal. Some advocacy groups and veteran-led organizations have taken matters into their own hands, helping some interpreters escape to nearby countries or find other means of protection. However, thousands of Afghan interpreters and their families remain at risk, as they continue to face threats from the Taliban, which now controls Afghanistan.

[celluloidrainbow]

FLEE (2021) dir. Jonas Poher Rasmussen War-torn 1980s Kabul. Against the backdrop of the destructive Afghan War, violent civil conflict interrupts the carefree childhood of 11-year-old Amin, who finds himself forced to flee his home. But Amin manages to find refuge in Copenhagen as an unaccompanied minor. With his family scattered all over Europe, a now-36-year-old Amin looks back on the turbulent past and the attempts to hide his burgeoning sexuality, recounting well-hidden secrets and the pivotal events that shaped him as a person to his trusted companion. (link in title)

[lepartidelamort]

Taliban Fully Bans Women from Speaking, Showing Faces in Public

Andrew Anglin

If you thought this was the law already, that would make sense, given that it was being widely enforced already.

But apparently there were still some women in Kabul showing their faces and trying to talk to people. So the issue has been fixed. No more of that crap in Our Afghanistan, The Greatest Country on Earth.

They do not have a birthrate problem in Afghanistan. I can tell you that much. This much, my friend, I can indeed tell you: women are having kids in Afghanistan. And it’s a very poor country. Very poor. They’re recovering from a massive war. Gay retards invaded them and occupied their country for 20 years before surrendering and slipping away. It’s a poor country, ravaged by war, and yet they are having a lot of kids, because the birthrate has precisely zero to do with economics.

Someone needs to call South Korea and tell them about this. I don’t think they know about the Taliban and how women get pregnant in Afghanistan. Those gay retards in Fake Korea think the birthrate is an economic issue.

The Guardian:

New Taliban laws that prohibit women from speaking or showing their faces outside their homes have been condemned by the UN and met with horror by human rights groups. The Taliban published a host of new “vice and virtue” laws last week, approved by their supreme leader Hibatullah Akhundzada, which state that women must completely veil their bodies – including their faces – in thick clothing at all times in public to avoid leading men into temptation and vice.

Yeah, that’s something Western men don’t understand: if you don’t have to look at women all the time, you don’t feel constant sexual pressure. It is women being in public that creates all of these sexual problems for men.

We need to bring in Taliban advisors to assist us in establishing new norms in America.

We have to shut it down.

Women’s voices are also deemed to be potential instruments of vice and so will not be allowed to be heard in public under the new restrictions. Women must also not be heard singing or reading aloud, even from inside their houses.

“Whenever an adult woman leaves her home out of necessity, she is obliged to conceal her voice, face, and body,” the new laws state. Men will also be required to cover their bodies from their navels to their knees when they are outside their homes. From now on, Afghan women are also not allowed to look directly at men they are not related to by blood or marriage, and taxi drivers will be punished if they agree to drive a woman who is without a suitable male escort. Women or girls who fail to comply can be detained and punished in a manner deemed appropriate by Taliban officials charged with upholding the new laws.

The Taliban covers all bases.

They don’t let these whores in the school.

They don’t let them do anything.

Full lockdown.

That is, of course, the most obvious way to deal with the woman problem.

That said: if you just want to force women to have kids, you don’t really have to do all of that. You just have to box them in. You can’t give them options. If they have options, they are not going to choose marriage and kids (at least not until they are 28 or so, at which point they are mostly useless for these purposes).

Anything you can do to close off women’s decisions is going to change the dynamics of society that exist now, where women have the ability to make all of the bad decisions they want.

If you don’t want to lock them down, you at least have to box them in. Make it so not getting married is more difficult than getting married and the majority of these mindless hoes will just go along with the flow.