With the world’s eyes on Afghanistan, how does the Taliban represent Islam?

Tidal

Tidal

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By getting out of Afgh, America and Britain are sending the clear message that we don't give a damn what happens there from now on.
In fact I've been saying in forums for years we should wash our hands of the whole sorry mess..:)
 
W

weskrongden

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pescatarian09 said:
Does the Afghanistan debacle end the US War on Terror?

America didn’t just lose a war in Afghanistan, it may have also lost its premise for being the global policeman.

As the Taliban triumphantly walked into Kabul without firing a shot, it didn't just mark the end of the US-backed Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, who fled the country reportedly with suitcases packed with cash.

It also sounded the death knell of the grand US project to fight a 'War on Terrorism' which aimed to end the "Taliban's reign of terror" in Afghanistan and that of other like-minded groups internationally.

The so-called US "War on Terror" (WoT) spawned an attempt by Washington to export liberal democracy around the world through invasion and 'pre-emptive attacks'.

An ecosystem of think tanks emerged that viewed Muslims with suspicion creating an "Islamophobia industry," which increasingly portrayed Islam as a security threat in need of management and reform. And laws were enacted that eroded the freedoms of citizens across the globe, including the US and the UK, two chief architects of such legislation.

Following the 9/11 attacks in the US and subsequent toppling of the Taliban in Afghanistan - American attention shifted to other foes in the Middle East.

Yet even as its occupation in Iraq floundered, the Libya intervention soured, and drone strikes in Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, Syria and the Sahel region in Africa failed to achieve long term measurable outcomes and civilian deaths mounted, Afghanistan continued to underpin the original rationale for America's global WoT campaign.

The US' WoT was "flawed" from its inception, said Arif Rafiq, a scholar at the Middle East Institutes speaking to TRT World. The WoT narrative was a catch-all term to describe "networks that are transnational but ultimately rooted in local realities."

The routing of Afghan national forces in a matter of days and the local deals it struck reflected the resilience of the Taliban in a society that it ultimately understood better than the US and NATO forces.

In a recent essay, "What about the boys: A gendered analysis of the US withdrawal and Bacha Bazi in Afghanistan," the authors spoke about the Taliban's opposition against the sexual abuse of young boys as a "key factor" in the rise of the group.

Whereas the "predatory and abusive nature" of some US-backed forces towards young Afghan boys and "the lack of concern on behalf of the US military" undermined Washington's occupation of the country.

Such stories offer an insight into how an inability and unwillingness to understand local dynamics resulted in the Taliban coming back to power and the futility of a concept like the WoT.

Rafiq, however, is not optimistic that the WoT has been all together scrapped. Instead, it has been "rebranded" with covert and special operations forces leading the charge, "but the era of large-scale occupations is over," he says

Unwinding the ideological narratives that provided the steam for the WoT will prove difficult, even as the US' global standing is diminished amid a chaotic retreat from Afghanistan.


The ghosts of the mujahideen

Far removed from Afghanistan but against that backdrop, the WoT had a "devastating and lasting impact on the discourse towards Muslims," says Farid Hafez, an Austrian academic focusing on the rise of Islamophobia in Europe.

"It has created the idea that Muslims are a threat to national and global security," added Hafez, speaking to TRT World.

Counterinsurgency tactics that were finessed in Afghanistan and Iraq have been described as "liberal forms of warfare" were imported and used domestically in countries like the UK and US towards the country's native Muslim population.

A liberal form of counterinsurgency warfare is characterised as the use of "law, administration, and procedure intended to facilitate the conquest and management of intransigent populations."

The UK's domestic WoT included blanket surveillance of Muslim and state-led targeted propaganda, which blurred the lines between civilians and enemy combatants.

An inability to distinguish who the Taliban were in the civilian population in Afghanistan led policymakers in the UK to conclude that Muslims back home were also potential security threats until proven otherwise.

In his groundbreaking documentary Bitter Lake, Adam Curtis tracked the Afghan war and the impact it has had on the West.

"Afghanistan has revealed to us the emptiness and hypocrisy of many of our beliefs," said Curtis, adding that the US and the UK were "haunted by the mujahideen ghosts."

Those ghosts resulted in "Western democracies slowly destroying their very own cherished values," says Moazzam Begg, a former Guantanamo Bay detainee who was kidnapped and tortured by US forces in Afghanistan and held without charge for three years until his release in 2005.

Now an Outreach Director at CAGE, a British based human rights group, Begg says that the two-decade-long occupation of Afghanistan and the WoT "will be read in the history books as one of the biggest failures in the western world."

Guantanamo Bay, a living relic of the WoT, remains active and holds 39 people without charge, whereas 9 have died in custody. The vast majority of the 780 prisoners that have been through Guantanamo Bay were tortured by US officials, although no US official to this day has been charged.

"The abuses in secret CIA sites in Kandahar, Bagram and Guantanamo prisons were all part of the ‘shock and awe’ designed not just to terrify the prisoners but to send a message about US supremacy and military might to the Muslim world," says Begg speaking to TRT World.

In an ironic twist, one of the Taliban commanders to give a victory speech in the presidential palace in Kabul vacated by the now-former President Ghani claims to have been a prisoner in Guantanamo Bay for eight years, and had been released as part of the negotiations with the Americans.
That the US occupation of Afghanistan would end in such a way is a noteworthy turning point in the WoT, if not its ultimate end.

But the ultimate legacy of the WoT, says Arif Rafiq, "is the destruction of numerous Muslim-majority countries, the loss of countless Muslim lives, and the radicalisation of European politics."

Source: TRT World
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It's time for the domestic war on terror.
 
S

saki

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...Merkel, et al are heartbroken.... :rolleyes: ...
Disbelief and betrayal: Europe reacts to Biden’s Afghanistan ‘miscalculation’
‘This does fundamental damage to the political and moral credibility of the West,’ says senior German lawmaker.

Until Sunday, Europe thought Joe Biden was an expert on foreign policy.

Now, the American president’s decision to allow Afghanistan to collapse into the arms of the Taliban has European officials worried he has unwittingly accelerated what his predecessor Donald Trump started: the degradation of the Western alliance and everything it is supposed to stand for in the world.

Across Europe, officials have reacted with a mix of disbelief and a sense of betrayal. Even those who cheered Biden’s election and believed he could ease the recent tensions in the transatlantic relationship said they regarded the withdrawal from Afghanistan as nothing short of a mistake of historic magnitude.

“I say this with a heavy heart and with horror over what is happening, but the early withdrawal was a serious and far-reaching miscalculation by the current administration,” said Norbert Röttgen, chairman of the German parliament’s foreign relations committee. “This does fundamental damage to the political and moral credibility of the West.”
www.politico.eu

Disbelief and betrayal: Europe reacts to Biden’s Afghanistan ‘miscalculation’

‘This does fundamental damage to the political and moral credibility of the West,’ says senior German lawmaker.
www.politico.eu www.politico.eu
 
elsbet

elsbet

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Stucky said:
So you support the Northern Alliance and C.I.A who paid those poor farmers a pittance so that the poorest in our own communities can get hooked on Heroin and all the while making war lords and elitists batshit rich.

Maybe you need to give more thought on how 'decriminalising' drugs should work.

Btw i'm Scottish and just recently we told Bo and co that we were going to open safe drug injecting facilities with or without their approval...now that i applaud....it's just a shame all those junkies in your community will have to die alone anywhere and everywhere.

But hey who cares so long as they're helping the poor Afghani farmers it's all good...eh'
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Is all the opium in Afghanistan used for illegal heroin? If so, from where does the clean, pharmaceutical flavor originate?

I know we aren't relying strictly on crappy synthetic dope in the hospitals, etc... opium has its place.
 
Maes17

Maes17

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elsbet said:
You'll need to start with government.

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We should. Speaking from the US side of things. Every superior from 2001 to present should be tried and prosecuted.

What they did, the lies, the deception.
The servicemen and women who didn’t make it back or those who have been severely impacted via disability. This is an all for nothing situation.

The afghan citizens who felt a glimpse of hope. All for not.

This whole debacle isn’t just Biden or Trump. This stems all the way to 2001. To every superior taking advantage of all the yes men. Fucking government is a corrupt piece of shit trash
 
DesertRose

DesertRose

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Journeyman said:
As an aside and without wanting to downplay the seriousness of current events for those with a stake in Afghanistan, when the main stream media focus on one subject to the exclusion of all others it should get us wondering what they don't want us to focus on...
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I agree.
I think this is what they are covering up:
www.nbcnews.com

Pentagon will require Covid vaccines for members of the military by mid-September

More than 1 million members of the military are fully vaccinated and another 237,000 are partially vaccinated, according to the Defense Department.
www.nbcnews.com www.nbcnews.com
They need a compliant military to enforce covid laws.
"Biden, in a statement Monday, commended the new mandate by Austin.
"I am proud that our military women and men will continue to help lead the charge in the fight against this pandemic, as they so often do, by setting the example of keeping their fellow Americans safe," the president said."
 
J

Just following orders

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Tidal said:
Churchill said- "In war, one has neither friends nor enemies, only interests"
So why is it allegedly in Israel's interest to back ISIS?
Anybody care to try to answer with just 2 or 3 sentences?
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No response to the link above then? Typical tidal - keep kicking the subject down the road onto a new page. You’re a fraud - we all know it.

here it is again:

 
V

Vmort

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Current rulers of Afganistan are satnist. They overthrow commmunist government from within.
 
J

justjess

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weskrongden said:
Why would we want to repeat their mistakes?
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You can’t destroy a country, use its people, steal its resources and then leave them there to suffer and die. That’s what’s been wrong with america since it’s founding.

we never should have went there, we certainly shouldn’t have stayed for two decades but we did. We can’t shrug off the responsibility for the consequences of our actions NOW.
 
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