Rolling Afghanistan Thread

[shakahislop]

runs deep doesn't it

 

[Mr. Tea]

More like Tweaking Afghanistan Thread, lol.

 

[Leo]

"Please hold that pose, Mr. Skeleton Heroin Addict, I need to adjust the lights to more convincingly portray the despair of your situation to my publication's upper middle class readers, who will appreciate the emotional and artistic value of the image while viewing it on their new MacBook Air with enhanced pixel density."

 

[Murphy]

Monstrous detox program profiled to say the least, funnel the addict into prayer. Reintegration masking recidivism

Tehran and Iran as a whole has an opiate problem that‘s well hidden. Ever passed through @shakahislop ? Hefty purity, punctuates classes

If any org deserves a spare tenner anyone has kicking round this crew are worthy of it, more Afghans than ever hitting migration bottle-necks and none of it goes towards blister-packed pharmacology (masked as treatment) either

Middle East Project – Trauma Aid UK

www.traumaaiduk.org

 

[shakahislop]

Monstrous detox program profiled to say the least, funnel the addict into prayer. Reintegration masking recidivism

Tehran and Iran as a whole has an opiate problem that‘s well hidden. Ever passed through @shakahislop ? Hefty purity, punctuates classes

If any org deserves a spare tenner anyone has kicking round this crew are worthy of it, more Afghans than ever hitting migration bottle-necks and none of it goes towards blister-packed pharmacology (masked as treatment) either

Middle East Project – Trauma Aid UK

www.traumaaiduk.org

never been able to go there - hard to get a visa on a UK passport. a long-term frustration.

 

[Mr. Tea]

They've now just had a massive earthquake:



How much shitty luck can one country have, really?

 

[version]

What do you think of this, @shakahislop ?

The U.S. Keeps Losing Wars Because Nobody Listens to the Spooks

The intel failures behind conflicts from Vietnam to Afghanistan are not identical, but most of them come down to the people in power not listening to the spies on the ground.

www.thedailybeast.com

It's a bit of an intelligence services puff piece with that title and lines like this . . .

"Why did America's policymakers dismiss the astute counsel of the CIA’s wise men?"

😂

. . . but it's reasonably convincing.

 

[shakahislop]

What do you think of this, @shakahislop ?

The U.S. Keeps Losing Wars Because Nobody Listens to the Spooks

The intel failures behind conflicts from Vietnam to Afghanistan are not identical, but most of them come down to the people in power not listening to the spies on the ground.

www.thedailybeast.com

It's a bit of an intelligence services puff piece with that title and lines like this . . .

"Why did America's policymakers dismiss the astute counsel of the CIA’s wise men?"

😂

. . . but it's reasonably convincing.

hi from kabul, appropriately. it's absolutely clear that starting a war anywhere puts you in a situation where it's pretty much impossible to predict accurately what the consequences will be. the guys who are in a position to make that decision (Bush, Blair, Putin, whoever) have access to what I'd imagine is very good analysis of the situation, including from intelligence but also from the Foreign Office and so on. but that kind of analysis can only go so far because the consequences of any invasion or foreign intervention are unpredictable. Russia in Ukraine is the obvious example at the moment of a situation which has gone totally contrary to how anyone seemed to expect.

for Afghanistan I don't think it really mattered what the intelligence guys were saying. America wanted revenge and they made it happen quickly with very little resistance from the intelligence world (who were profoundly ashamed and cowed from their failure on 9/11), the US public, or other countries. Once the revenge was done and the collective bloodlust sated the rest of the war was about trying to figure out what to do in the aftermath. I'm pretty confident about that analysis. for Iraq i know a lot less.

 

[Leo]

Hey @shakahislop, slick work in taking out al-Zawahiri. In downtown Kabul, no less.

 

[shakahislop]

Hey @shakahislop, slick work in taking out al-Zawahiri. In downtown Kabul, no less.

i drove through there the other day.

as usual in afghanistan, another development in the story that comes out of the blue. there was a report on afghan news at the weekend about a drone strike in kabul but the facts were very vague. that area sherpoor where it was is very dense, they've done well to manage to do it without killing a load of other people, if that is indeed the case, its a part of town that was essentially land-grabbed by the northerers when they came into kabul with the americans in 2001. dostum's house is/was there.

 

[version]

i drove through there the other day.

Reconnaissance.

 

[Murphy]

Reccy’d.

 

[shakahislop]

been trying to collect my thoughts on what i'm seeing in the news on afghanistan at the moment. on an emotional level its always frustrating watching the uk media (and uk people) grapple with things they don't understand. am sure whoever they have on ground in afghanistan at the moment are well informed, but i think very few outlets have anyone there nowadays. even in the dying days of the war it was only the nyt, washington post, guardian, bbc who had full-time reporters in afghanistan i think. maybe some others. in any case even with someone good on the ground, all of that information about reality is filtered through editorial decisions about what gets written about and how prominently, and i guess those editors are very much in tune with what their audience wants, metrics on what gets read and what doesn't, have a sense of how things should sound on a word by word basis.

there's a weird entanglement between western pop-feminism and the taliban. at various stages the situation of afghan women under the taliban has been a cause celebre for a certain category of western feminist. barbara bush for example was always on about afghan women back in the day, and it was one strand of the justification that america, the uk and the rest used to justify their war there, that we had to do it for the sake of afghan women, coz what the taliban are doing is beyond the pale. its not just people like barbara bush though, it pops up all over the place, a concern for how afghan women are treated. that interest is resurgent at the moment now that the taliban are in power again. so you get a bit of a media focus - the fourth or fifth story on the news, its never the big headline - when the taliban do something particularly bad that focuses on women. our interest in it doesn't feel very wholesome or cautious, it feels like an expression of that impulse to find something to condemn.

 

[Mr. Tea]

been trying to collect my thoughts on what i'm seeing in the news on afghanistan at the moment. on an emotional level its always frustrating watching the uk media (and uk people) grapple with things they don't understand. am sure whoever they have on ground in afghanistan at the moment are well informed, but i think very few outlets have anyone there nowadays. even in the dying days of the war it was only the nyt, washington post, guardian, bbc who had full-time reporters in afghanistan i think. maybe some others. in any case even with someone good on the ground, all of that information about reality is filtered through editorial decisions about what gets written about and how prominently, and i guess those editors are very much in tune with what their audience wants, metrics on what gets read and what doesn't, have a sense of how things should sound on a word by word basis.

there's a weird entanglement between western pop-feminism and the taliban. at various stages the situation of afghan women under the taliban has been a cause celebre for a certain category of western feminist. barbara bush for example was always on about afghan women back in the day, and it was one strand of the justification that america, the uk and the rest used to justify their war there, that we had to do it for the sake of afghan women, coz what the taliban are doing is beyond the pale. its not just people like barbara bush though, it pops up all over the place, a concern for how afghan women are treated. that interest is resurgent at the moment now that the taliban are in power again. so you get a bit of a media focus - the fourth or fifth story on the news, its never the big headline - when the taliban do something particularly bad that focuses on women. our interest in it doesn't feel very wholesome or cautious, it feels like an expression of that impulse to find something to condemn.

I'm not sure I get you. The Taliban are "beyond the pale", but Western condemnation of their misogyny is "unwholesome"? So what's the correct reaction? Ignore them?

And what about non-Western feminists, where do they figure in this scheme?

 

[Leo]

Yeah, I’m a little unclear too. It can also be a damned if you do, damned if you don’t for media and people in the public eye. They can be criticized as being hypocritical woke/PC bandwagon jumpers if they do speak out, or unfeeling out of touch/clueless elites if they don’t.

 

[Mr. Tea]

Yeah, I’m a little unclear too. It can also be a damned if you do, damned if you don’t for media and people in the public eye. They can be criticized as being hypocritical woke/PC bandwagon jumpers if they do speak out, or unfeeling out of touch/clueless elites if they don’t.

Similar phenomenon to the current protests in Iran and the state crackdown against them, with the usual "anti-imperialist" fuckheads having a much bigger problem with people who think it's a bit shit that cops there are beating women to death than they do with cops beating women to death.

 

[shakahislop]

I'm not sure I get you. The Taliban are "beyond the pale", but Western condemnation of their misogyny is "unwholesome"? So what's the correct reaction? Ignore them?

And what about non-Western feminists, where do they figure in this scheme?

i don't know what the correct reaction is from western media and publics is. i think the media outside of fox etc is probably doing the right thing in terms of keeping women's rights on the agenda. i'd prefer it if they were able to also get beyond the good side of the war vs bad side of the war framing that we're still saddled with, the idea of the taliban as an enemy. not saying that they're good dudes but that way of thinking about things does get in the way of understanding what's going on.

in terms of it being unwholesome, what i mean is that generally i think people should hold back a bit when they're talking about places and people that they don't know anything about. i don't think a lot of people really give a shit about girls not going to school or particularly university in all kinds of places when its for more mundane reasons or for more complicated reasons. but when its because of a decree by an old enemy people get pulled into the drama and engage on some kind of emotional level. the story is more shocking and more compelling. and its also a continuation of a narrative involving the west, afghan women and the taliban that's been running since the late 90s. that narrative is the interesting part of this i think, that its been a minor feature or thread running through our media and the broad western worldview for so long.

i don't know anything about feminism outside the west really. probably the only relevant ones for this discussion are afghan feminists but even that terminology feels like a foreign and misleading framing. there's women-focused activists but it's confined to a very small number of people, and they are going out and protesting. probably that's very risky. but this is hardly a broad-based social movement.

 

[Mr. Tea]

i don't know what the correct reaction is from western media and publics is. i think the media outside of fox etc is probably doing the right thing in terms of keeping women's rights on the agenda. i'd prefer it if they were able to also get beyond the good side of the war vs bad side of the war framing that we're still saddled with, the idea of the taliban as an enemy. not saying that they're good dudes but that way of thinking about things does get in the way of understanding what's going on.

in terms of it being unwholesome, what i mean is that generally i think people should hold back a bit when they're talking about places and people that they don't know anything about. i don't think a lot of people really give a shit about girls not going to school or particularly university in all kinds of places when its for more mundane reasons or for more complicated reasons. but when its because of a decree by an old enemy people get pulled into the drama and engage on some kind of emotional level. the story is more shocking and more compelling. and its also a continuation of a narrative involving the west, afghan women and the taliban that's been running since the late 90s. that narrative is the interesting part of this i think, that its been a minor feature or thread running through our media and the broad western worldview for so long.

i don't know anything about feminism outside the west really. probably the only relevant ones for this discussion are afghan feminists but even that terminology feels like a foreign and misleading framing. there's women-focused activists but it's confined to a very small number of people, and they are going out and protesting. probably that's very risky. but this is hardly a broad-based social movement.

I see where you're coming from with some of that, certainly. It's entirely fair to call out the hypocrisy of Western conservatives who only ever criticise feminism in their own countries but who then turn into Simone de Beauvoir when it comes to misogyny in Muslim countries. On the other hand, the flipside of that is Western leftists who are as progressive as you like on domestic issues but who will bend over backwards to defend any government or group, no matter how objectively repulsive, that is not Western-aligned.

And it seems perfectly OK to me to call anyone defending women's rights a feminist? In fact it seems more apposite the bigger the challenges they're up against.