We're told it was a 6.0-magnitude earthquake.
September 1, 2025
"May God watch over our Afghan people. War, earthquakes, poverty — every hardship is a test from God."
Said a man named Said Meer, one of many Afghans who are returning to Afghanistan after being expelled from Pakistan, quoted in "Earthquake in Afghanistan Leaves More Than 800 Dead/The quake, near the border with Pakistan, injured more than 2,500 people in mountainous areas that rescue workers took hours to reach" (NYT).
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21 comments:
The religious: earth is a proving ground.
The secular: life is an exercise in risk management.
800 is not a big death toll by Asian standards.
May all those who force their women into burkas and who think stoning is ever an appropriate punishment for women perish in the wrath of almighty God.
Allahu clarkbar!
All at the snack bar!
It's a benighted place the last few centuries.
"...near the border with Pakistan" is the worst place in the world except for Pakistan near the border with Afghanistan. It's not the geography. It's not the climate. It's the people. The central government in Islamabad calls the whole region the tribal areas because they've given up trying to establish a law-abiding civilization there, as did the British before them, and the Moguls before the British, and the Sassanids before them.
800 dead. They might as well say 800 thousand for all the reliability of any statistical data gathered near the border with Pakistan. The error bars extend to infinity.
"May God watch over our Afghan people. War, earthquakes, poverty — every hardship is a test from God."
Hmmm…maybe God is trying to tell them something. Maybe they should take the hint and try Satan.
When I find myself in times of trouble, .....
I’m sure the Taliban government - or whoever the criminals are running that shithole - will take good care of the injured and rebuild.
To quote Tommy Lee Jones in The Fugitive: I don’t care.
…does anyone from civilization know what life is like there nowadays? I mean on the scale of did the skyscrapers collapse or did the quake just bounce the rubble?
"...every hardship is a test from god."
Could someone who has his ear, please ask him (nicely) to cut that out?
If they weren't stuck in the 12 Century, they'd have earthquake proof buildings.
But I guess marrying 9-year-old girls must be worth it for them.
Their hardships are caused by illiteracy, child rape and opioid abuse. I don't care if it's racist or victim blaming or whatever. It's the truth. A little crackerjack earthquake shouldn't kill a hundred thousand people either.
IF ONLY.. If Only they'd had one of the MOST POWERFUL countries in the world, sitting in their backyard... Just waiting to try to help..
IF ONLY.. If Only
Another shitty thing to happen to a shitty country. Where are their wealthy Muslim neighbors?
Yeah, it was Pakistan doing the shitty stuff alright, at our behest:
"Asked outright by Yalda Hakim about Pakistan's history of supporting and training terror groups, Asif replied,"Now we have been doing this dirty work for the United States for roughly three decades… and the West, including Britain. That was a blunder, and we paid for that." He also tried to rationalize Pakistan's actions by attributing the country's participation in the Cold War and post-9/11 wars to it. "If we hadn't participated in the war against the Soviet Union and then the war post-9/11, Pakistan's record was impeccable," —Pakistan Defence Minister Khawaja Asif "In a shocking interview" with Sky News host Yalda Hakim.
Note the part about the Soviet Union, which aligns with Jimmy Carter's National Security Advisor's 1999 confession that we had funded, trained, and armed the Taliban in order to force a response from the Soviets.
Go look at pictures of Afghanistan in the '70s, before the neocons destroyed their country, then tell me who was shitty.
BTW, if you are wondering why Biden skedaddled from Afghanistan like he did, Blinken explained to Congress that it got our troops out of harms way for the coming war with Russia which we were planning at that time, and taking steps to prepare for. Not only could Putin have armed up the Taliban to kill a lot of American soldiers, but the weapons that we were sending there would be needed in Ukraine.
Given that we put the Taliban in charge there, you could make the argument that trying to displace them again was somewhat noble, unlike the vast majority of other US wars.
One thing that is kind of funny, and probably also angers Pakistan is that they had to fold in their war with India so quickly because they had sent so many weapons to Ukraine. Not to mention, I think that all of Pakistan is a little bit mad at us for the humiliation we inflicted on them by ordering them to remove their most popular politician, Imran Kahn. He was removed and imprisoned, do you want to hear his crime? It's Kafkaesque. He was arrested and imprisoned for disclosing that the US had ordered his removal from power, which got him charged with "revealing state secrets."
So if Pakistan is a hellhole, we share a lot of the blame.
And here's Jaq, repeating the damned filthy lie that we "funded, trained, and armed the Taliban in order to force a response from the Soviets". One more time: the Taliban was founded in 1994, fifteen years after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and five years after it ended. The Taliban are not the Mujahideen, we did not "put them in charge there", and the people most responsible for destroying Afghanistan - besides the Afghans themselves - are the Russians who encouraged an unpopular faction to depose and murder their leader, and then helped their Afghan puppets slaughter tens of thousands of their fellow citizens over the next ten years. The radicalization that led to the rise of the Taliban was a direct result of Russian interference.
And the Defense Minister of Pakistan has self-serving excuses for all the vile things his country did, blaming everyone except Pakistan. There is no reason to believe him.
I don't think thats quite right, yes the us and the uk chose to support pakistan over india, but they didn't get this would entail empowering afghani and mawdudi, who had more of an influence on the officer corps, than say cawthorne the founder of the ISI, of course Pakistan had their own designs to reclaim territories like kashmir (sounds familiar in other circumstances) young salman Rushdie didn't seem to understand this, re his first novel, where he seem to think the Indian wars were all about inconveniencing him
'repeating the damned filthy lie"
It's not my lie, it's former US National Security Advisor to Jimmy Carter, Zbegniev Brzezinski's "lie" if it is a lie at all. And seconded by the Pakistani Defense Minister who confessed to it in the interview I noted above.
You guys accuse me of lying, but "where's the beef" in your accusations? I provided explicit quotes from high ranking officials who were in a position to know the truth, and you present more secondary sources which are more likely to be propaganda than anything else.
If you have some niggling objection about what these jihadis in Afghanistan that we funded and armed were called, precisely, I say again "Where's the beef?"
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