Said 24-year-old Afghan woman, speaking about her female cousins, who were visiting from Europe. She is quoted in "Women despair over Taliban rules, but many Afghan returnees don’t see it/Afghans living abroad are flocking back to visit relatives for the first time since the Taliban takeover. Severe restrictions on women are not top of mind" (WaPo)(free-access link).
For the first time since the Taliban takeover three years ago, Afghans living outside the country have begun flocking back to their homeland, usually to visit relatives who have remained in Afghanistan. Upon their return, few seem preoccupied by the Taliban’s increasingly draconian restrictions on women — including bans on women going to university and school above sixth grade — or by the reluctance of many local women to leave their homes out of fear of encountering the morality police, according to interviews with residents and visitors. Instead, many of the visitors, carrying foreign passports or visas, marvel about the sense of security and the construction of new roads under Taliban rule. They post photos of their favorite Afghan dishes, discuss business plans and shop in the Kabul airport’s new duty-free store....
“The quality of life in Afghanistan, especially under the Taliban, is better than in Germany,” said Ali, a 65-year-old Afghan German who recently visited the country and reconnected with a conservative culture he says he feels closer to....
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The Taliban can construct new roads because Biden left billions of dollars in American military equipment behind when he bugged out and the Taliban is selling it.
I imagine that most Germans would be delighted to see Ali return to Afghanistan permanently.
People tend to see what they want anyway, but particularly when traveling. Even if you think you know a place, you don't know it until you live there. But you would think returning Afghanis would have a sense of what's going on in front of them.
I guess when you fled war, and now there is no war, you're thinking it's really nice there now. Until you stay and find out you have to ask permission as a woman to leave your house, you must be fully covered, you mustn't speak to a man, and you should always walk behind him. You cannot go to university. And at certain hours, you cannot go out at all. Oh...and if you get raped, that's your fault.
But at least the roads are better.
I read recently that some huge (70+%) number of "refugees" in European countries take vacations back in their home countries. Many keep second homes there. Asylum is a worldwide scam in almost every case, and everyone knows it.
Golly. So much to unpack there. While US women wail they’ve kinda but not really lost the ‘right’ to have a late term abortion educated afghan women take nostalgic trips back to the feminist stone age…and like what they see. Security! No potholes! Yikes…
…I suspect this is only some kind of propaganda effort for the Democrats legacy in abandoning the Afghan war in favour of the Ukraine war but it’s interesting they chose to do it with women observing traditional female roles and liking what they see. C’mon ladies! handmaid’s tale is the feel good story of the age…
No hope of being a princess for little girls, either.
IF the Washington Post was an objective observer and reporter of events, I might have some empathy here. They aren't. They lie all the time. They reported for 3 years on Russia Collusion and got, and still have, a Pulitzer Prize for that false reporting. This after their Jason Blair affair.
They still report the Trump "all sides" lie as if it were the truth.
The Taliban women need trustworthy media discussing their plight if they want me to give two fucks.
Everyone in Washington DC sees this as a positive. Everyone in Washington DC benefits when the Democrats just abandon weapons on the field of their failed battles. Because then those weapons and ammo have to be replaced. Everyone benefits.
Until that dynamic changes, the world is doomed.
On the other side, that is our side, feminism is an evil, despicable doctrine that is whoring out all our young women, justifying the butchering of full term babies and playing the seminal role in generating the hellish identity politics that has made us so stupid that we can’t tell the difference between a man and a women. The U.S. plundered and bombed Afghanistan for 20 years in an attempt to force the devil worship ideology of feminism on it. I don’t have a dog in this fight.
Funny thing here in this article, no mention of the open exploitation of boys there as a “cultural norm” to be proud of too. The Bacha Bazi boys just get all the attention ( and not the good kind) that the poor shut in girls are missing.
Not justifying either - condemning both - but I think the open treatment of many poor boys there, rented and sold by families, deserves equal or frankly more attention and exposure.
“Those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
No matter when in time, no matter where in the world, here's one of life's constants - Find Muslims, find trouble.
visit relatives for the first time since the Taliban takeover. Severe restrictions on women are not top of mind"
kinda like Millions of Americas this morning..
it turned out.. That right wing turkey was Pretty Good
Safetyism is a broad cultural belief that many people, especially women have. Freedom minded people should never be surprised to hear it.
Hey, look at Vietnam today. One of our biggest growing allies in Asia. Rumor has it that the Taliban want to make deal with Trump.
Remember when the U.S. embassy flew the gay flag in Kabul?
It's not their problem anymore. They just want to enjoy their vacay.
@ Begley
Not only that, the U.S. State Dept is sending $80 million in cash to Afghanistan under Taliban control every 10 to 14 days.
I wish they send me just a tenth of that.
https://afghanistanpeacecampaign.org/2024/01/20/us-admits-sending-40-million-weekly-to-afghanistan-amid-controversy/
Reporters at the WaPo don't seem preoccupied with increasingly draconian controls on what they can and can't write about. They're just happy they're on a good road careerwise.
Right. I don’t believe it because it’s WaPo, but even if a few bints said that, it’s either because they fear the secret police are listening or they still have not absorbed the freedoms generously granted to them by the the states they “fled” to.
Almost all of the “ news” we get from these regions are from Durante types.
We lost the war, Russia won. Russia's defense minister just visited Kabul and they are cementing a military alliance as we speak. I cannot understand how a group with such a string of foreign policy and strategic failures continues to hold such sway over our country's government, originally over its foreign policy, but they managed to bring their "rules based order," we make the rules, you obey them, we don't, home to US domestic policy.
China and Russia are going to make sure that Afghanistan succeeds, and if we try again to foment some kind of "insurgency," they will make sure that the Taliban has the means to crush it.
Maybe Alec Baldwin was right, that we are ‘uninformed about reality’, certainly about the reality of other countries and cultures. Hollywood has fallen down on the job.
Excellent point. It didn’t take much time for some predatory older gay men to discover how easy it was to hit the Afghan and other refugee communities in Atlanta to find sexually vulnerable boys. But we weren’t allowed to talk about things like that.
It’s sexual and sex-based slavery, not safetyism. They have no choice to opt out and can be killed for being not safe (raped). And they certainly can’t criticize it, especially if they want to return to freedom in asylum or fear repercussions for their female relatives still living in their home countries.
Unslant
What? Walter Duranty is alive and working at the WaPo now?
The Gilded Cage.
It seems to me - living as I do in an American community that's close to half expats from all over the world - that when you hold that foreign passport (or that work visa) that enables you to return to the US or another stable, developed, rule-of-lsw nation, you are free to appreciate what has changed for the better in your home country since you left.
I mean, I go to Ireland, where my most recently immigrated relatives came from, and I love hanging out in trad pubs and how great the salmon is and such. But I can return to the US and pay lower taxes, own a house and two cars, have a terrific HVAC system that keeps me comfortable in all weather, speak my mind at only the risk of losing friends, not my freedom... Ireland is way better than it was during the Troubles, but they're still pretty far behind my quality of life in the US (as made possible by greater American social mobility).
The idea that order is more important than liberty (let alone equality) goes back a long way in history and is still dominant in many parts of the world. If the shooting has stopped, people appreciate that.
There's also the question of whether the Taliban is still radically intrusive in people's lives or if it will let women do what they want behind closed doors. That doesn't satisfy women who want more, but it would be an improvement over what they've been doing.
Is there still greater American social mobility, though? If the Global Social Mobility Index isn't bogus, social mobility is greater in Ireland -- and even in the UK -- than in the US (the GSMI may be bogus, though, since it comes from the World Economic Forum, i.e. Davos and Schwab).
So the propaganda technique used here is called "negative spin". You have a situation that Afghanistan is better off now that the war is over. You have peace, safety, and Afghan expats are returning home. So, how do you make that into a bad thing? Oh, bring up how "Oppressed" women are.
I was shocked the article didn't go into homophobia. Or maybe that's because some of our "Afghan allies" were into Gay sex with minors.
BTW, how are Jewish women being treated by some of the more extreme Jewish Orthodox sects? Or can't we talk about that?
I assume some of the restrictions on women are unjust but others are required by Islam. I dont know enough about their religion. Anyway, I'm not sending my daughter to live in Afghanistan, and its their country, not mine.
I think the point of the article is to take modern American and European feminists off the hook for their inattention to the terrible problems of women living under Sharia law. They did not lift a finger to help their Muslim sisters during the twenty years when armed American soldiers were there to help, so they seek to excuse themselves by finding women who say positive things about life under the Taliban after life in the West. Capped, of course, by a comment from a man who says “The quality of life in Afghanistan, especially under the Taliban, is better than in Germany.” For him, maybe yes. For him.
I was just thinking of back in the '90s when I made many imports in San Francisco and even worked out of San Deigo for a year and how nice it seemed. But I was also aware that I was not a taxed resident of the state being a legal resident of TN and a member of a uniformed service. So I got benefit of what the residents paid for and lived under but didn't have to pay their income taxes and was always prepped for my next transfer.
It is easy to enjoy socialism or fanaticism if you can quickly leave without fear of the government interfering with your travel. Had I had a family that had to live on the economy and would have put me under the thumb the the CA taxperson, things would have been different.
Per capita GDP in Afghanistan is $552. And dropping each year. If you said they had any economy at all, you would say they were experiencing a depression.
By way of comparison California, which has roughly the same population, has a per capita GDP of $85,546.
IOW, "nice place to visit but I wouldn't want to live there."
I sincerely hope it all works out for them.
Sure we can talk about Orthodox Jews.
Orthodox Jews value education for everyone and have developed advanced programs for women which allow for greater involvement and leadership roles in the synagogue, believing "that for traditional Judaism to remain vital, it had to and could adjust to the American environment." For more info see: "Orthodox Judaism in the United States"
The reactions of women visiting their relatives in Afghanistan sound like the reactions any tourist might have when on vacation, not being concerned with the struggles of the locals but focused on enjoying the opportunities for family time, shopping, food, etc. They know they are going back to Europe after this excursion.
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