The Guardian article below is entitled “The abandonment of Afghanistan is shameful”. As usual, women and girls will be most affected by the takeover of the country by the barbaric Islamist Taliban. It makes me shudder just to think about it. These are the savages who, in 2012, shot Malala Yousafzai in the head. She was 15 years old. Her crime? Her vocal opinion on the right of girls to be educated. Her father was a schoolteacher who ran a chain of schools, for both boys and girls, in the Swat Valley, Northwest Pakistan.
Where is Malala today? After completing a high school education in Birmingham, England, she won a place at Oxford University and studied three years for a BA degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics. She graduated in 2020. Starting now in Afghanistan, all girls are forced to cover themselves with Islamic garb. Their only roles will be … well, you know what their roles will be. The word “regression” is an understatement; more like extinguishment and enslavement. And this in the year 2021.
Like rats, the Taliban came out of their caves (literally) in Pakistan and elsewhere. They are the victors in the end thanks to yet another precipitous and seemingly unplanned American “strategy”. Do we need to be reminded of previous strategic disasters? The abandonment, again and again, of the Iraqi Kurds? Colin Powell holding a fake vial of anthrax while giving a pro-war presentation to the UN Security Council in 2003? (there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq). The Bush Administration’s decision to disband the Iraqi army shortly after the fall of Saddam in 2003 which subsequently led to the making of ISIS? The Libyan intervention in 2011 which resulted in the murder of Gaddafi and hundreds of thousands of migrants coming up from all over Africa to pass through the henceforth unprotected Libya to make their way to Europe in tiny, overcrowded boats? You can thank Sarkozy, Hillary Clinton, Obama and David Cameron for that.
Just like all the other interventions and hasty pull-outs committed by the U.S. in the past, there will be dire consequences from this Afghanistan action. Why? Because the Taliban is a fanatical Islamist ideology. To leave the country and its citizens in the hands of these zealots is sheer folly. It could have been done differently.
The best readers’ comment that I came across in The New York Times on the fall of Kabul is this – “Among the most indelible images from Afghanistan this week was young girls headed to school in the early morning, defiant and determined. It must be terrifying to the Taliban, who thrive on ignorance, to imagine facing a populace that is educated and in which females’ equal worth is recognized.”