Five years after his last visit, our correspondent finds the Taliban back in charge of their spiritual home - and girls attacked with acid simply for attending schoolThere is a little girl in the Meir Wais hospital with livid scars and dead skin across her face, an obscene map of brown and pink tissue. Then there is another girl, a beautiful child, Khorea Horay, grimacing in pain, her leg amputated, her life destroyed after her foot was torn to pieces. In another ward, two girls lie on their backs, a tent above their limbs. One has lost an arm, another - a 16-year-old - a leg. Then there is the grim young man with the beard, also in the darkest pain, who looks at me with suspicion and puzzlement. He has a bullet wound in the abdomen, a great incision sutured up after the doctors found it infected. Two other young men, also bearded, cowled in brown "patu" shawls, sit beside this suffering warrior. They, too, stare at me as if I am a visitor from Mars. Perhaps that's what I am in Kandahar. Better to be a Martian than a Westerner in a city which in all but name has fallen to the Taliban.The black turbans are everywhere. So are the blue burkhas which we Westerners confidently - stupidly - believed would vanish from Afghan society. But the Taliban insist they were not responsible for throwing acid in the face of the little girl in the second-floor ward at Meir Wais hospital. You know what she is thinking. You know what her parents are thinking. Who will marry this girl now, with her patchwork face of pain? Four men on a motorcycle threw acid at her and 13 of her friends on their way to school. Four were brought here, two dispatched immediately to the eye department. The Taliban deny any involvement. But they would, wouldn't they?
There is a little girl in the Meir Wais hospital with livid scars and dead skin across her face, an obscene map of brown and pink tissue. Then there is another girl, a beautiful child, Khorea Horay, grimacing in pain, her leg amputated, her life destroyed after her foot was torn to pieces. In another ward, two girls lie on their backs, a tent above their limbs. One has lost an arm, another - a 16-year-old - a leg.
Then there is the grim young man with the beard, also in the darkest pain, who looks at me with suspicion and puzzlement. He has a bullet wound in the abdomen, a great incision sutured up after the doctors found it infected. Two other young men, also bearded, cowled in brown "patu" shawls, sit beside this suffering warrior. They, too, stare at me as if I am a visitor from Mars. Perhaps that's what I am in Kandahar. Better to be a Martian than a Westerner in a city which in all but name has fallen to the Taliban.
The black turbans are everywhere. So are the blue burkhas which we Westerners confidently - stupidly - believed would vanish from Afghan society. But the Taliban insist they were not responsible for throwing acid in the face of the little girl in the second-floor ward at Meir Wais hospital. You know what she is thinking. You know what her parents are thinking. Who will marry this girl now, with her patchwork face of pain? Four men on a motorcycle threw acid at her and 13 of her friends on their way to school. Four were brought here, two dispatched immediately to the eye department. The Taliban deny any involvement. But they would, wouldn't they?
I don't know what that might be but it does seem a strange denial. keep to the Fen Causeway
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.
