Do you think granting more liberal asylum rules will help the girls in this article if we just pack up and leave Afghanistan?
I don't mean to reduce your argument to that one point, but this is precisely the story which makes it hard for me to accept the "We have no business there" position re: Afghanistan and, to a lesser degree, Pakistan.
No doubt this debate has been hashed out a thousand times already, probably at ET more than once as well. (Please send me the link[s] if so.)
But what are the criteria do we apply to decide when to intervene militarily in a foreign country, aside from self-defense?
-- feasibility? -- type of injustice -- scale of injustice? -- economic cost? -- distance?
We intervened in Kosovo. We did not intervene in Rwanda or Darfur, and we did not intervene in Afghanistan until we had a "self-defense" pretext.
And now that we are already there in Afghanistan, we are clamoring to abandon the country despite the high likelihood that horrific injustices will increase in the resulting vacuum.
Again, no need to re-tread arguments if they have been made here. If so, please just point me to the diary or thread. Truth unfolds in time through a communal process.
DoDo's take Migeru's take Don't fight forces, use them R. Buckminster Fuller.
A particularly annoying species of Afrobollocks is the use made in opinion journalism of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. I've written about this before - basically, for purposes of editorialising all one needs to know is that "nobody intervened and therefore hundreds of thousands of people were killed". The Rwanda Gambit is played by someone wishing to add a sprinkling of moral gravitas to whatever point they want to make, usually about the United Nations being tragically inadequate to the modern world because of its failure to endorse the bombing of a current enemy. It's irritating bullshit, and is not rendered any less so by the fact that Paul Kagame is all too inclined to play the same game at the drop of a hat. ... I've made this point about Turquoise before but it's important so I'm making it again. There is a really annoying tendency among the pro-intervention lobby to pretend it didn't happen and that "there was no intervention in Rwanda". There was an intervention in Rwanda, it was Turquoise and it made things worse. It was a somewhat politically motivated, terribly badly planned and wholly counterproductive exercise. Or in other words, the normal kind. Using the example of Rwanda as a data point in favour of unilateral intervention requires you to have a theory about why Turquoise can be considered as irrelevant or sui generis. Without that (or even worse, to make rhetorical use of Rwanda without mentioning Turquoise at all) is a particularly toxic strain of Afrobollocks.
...
I've made this point about Turquoise before but it's important so I'm making it again. There is a really annoying tendency among the pro-intervention lobby to pretend it didn't happen and that "there was no intervention in Rwanda". There was an intervention in Rwanda, it was Turquoise and it made things worse. It was a somewhat politically motivated, terribly badly planned and wholly counterproductive exercise. Or in other words, the normal kind. Using the example of Rwanda as a data point in favour of unilateral intervention requires you to have a theory about why Turquoise can be considered as irrelevant or sui generis. Without that (or even worse, to make rhetorical use of Rwanda without mentioning Turquoise at all) is a particularly toxic strain of Afrobollocks.
