Who let this happen?

[Spider]

[Libertarian602]

Women in Afghanistan were suffering long before the Taliban. Amullah Khan tried to institute reform for the women of Afghanistan as early as 1923, but was forced to advocate by tribal leaders.

Afghanistan experienced a period of modernization. in the early 70's, but the bloodless coup by the communist ended that.

The rest is history. The women of Afghanistan have suffered from a mix of Islamic tribalism, and outside influences from the Soviets, Paks, and the US.

[Spider]

It was actually more like 3 decades of progress, not just the early 70's, but yes...tribal leaders. The ignorant right wing rednecks I'd mentioned.

[Libertarian602]

You'd have a point if rightwing rednecks were actually stoning women, cutting people's heads off, and etc. Your inflamatory partisan rhetoric aside, the peak of modernization was in the early 70's.

[Spider]

Meh. My posts aren't concerned with when the peak was. Your claim limited it to the early 70's. Just two posts above. Or maybe your wording was just unclear. I was simply pointing out that this is incorrect, because of course this had been normalizing for a couple of decades prior to the 70's.

And yes, actually. The rednecks have been stoning, decapitating, and generally behaving like morons for centuries if not millenia. The trouble in Afghanistan was that they gained the upper hand and dragged the flegdling modernization movement in Afghanistan back into the dark ages, kicking and screaming. Fast forward a few years and the decapitations and stonings were happening in athletic stadiums over PA systems, in view of thousands of forcibly veiled and bearded spectators, instead of off in the hills somewhere. Almost instantly, the transformed the country from something making serious inroads into the 20th century into a dark age nightmare.

These clowns are indefensible. I'm not sure what your point is.

[eynon81]

many of the hill-billies were pretty chill too, some were even nominal muslims. the main group that went bad-shit were all the folks living in refugee camps in Pakistan. while there they were heavily indoctrinated by Saudi back religious nutballs.

[Libertarian602]

[Philly]

[Indy]

Best I can tell Iraq was virtually devoid of fanaticism under Saddam and yes the country was very much secular.

Everything you're seeing today is a direct result of us invading that country with literally no after plan, and then de-Baathifying the country, creating a ton of now unemployed Sunni men. Shortly after AQ was able to finally get into Iraq because of the chaos. Which brings us to this.

Worst military blunder in my lifetime--we actually made things worse, not even close to better, for ourselves and the region.

[eynon81]