• Quick note - the problem with Youtube videos not embedding on the forum appears to have been fixed, thanks to ZiprHead. If you do still see problems let me know.

Afghanistan: Taliban Tactics

SteveGrenard

Philosopher
S
Joined
Oct 6, 2002
Messages
5,528
One of the best hopes for Afghanistan's future lies in the education of its young men AND women. The Taliban knows this, hence the following:

In the neighboring Swat district, the Taliban blew up five schools for girls in a growing effort to stop female education, according to Dawn, a leading English-language daily based in Karachi, Pakistan. "Swat District Coordination Officer Shaukat Khan Yousafzai said 182 schools, most of them for girls, had been destroyed by militants, affecting over 100,000 primary- to college-level students," it reported.
Click to expand...

http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0121/p99s01-duts.html
 
There's alot of left wing anti war kooks over here who protest and who want Canada out of Afghanistan.

This is why we need to stay, and fight those fascists.
 
Magnifico2.0 said:
The Taliban want their country to be a rubble heap forever. Progress is bad.
Click to expand...

Indeed, progress is bad, but the goal is not a rubble heap. What they want is pastoralism, essentially the purity of the culture of their bedouin (or other pastoral) predecessors. One Imam interviewed in Uzbekistan some time ago expressed the wish that the world shrink back to the 20 mile radius that was most people's existence before machines started becoming common. That is a plot which a single man can control; essentially the same as the Abrahamic tradition. Of course, that also implies feudalism and paternalism and a single religion/culture, for control. It is a goal remarkably similar to many ultra-conservative people, the world over. "Good old days" wishful thinking.

Know thy enemy - false assumpions about his motivations will not help you in the struggle.
 
For more information about what is possible in this part of the world, I recommend Three Cups of Tea , by and about Greg Mortenson and what he has done to bring education to these kids. If we could only scale this by a few orders of magnitude without governments screwing it up.



The person in charge of education says that she is going to attempt to keep Taliban-threatened schools open.



I have seen video footage of kids in decent schools in the most rural of Pashtun tribal lands, which spans the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Everything I have heard is consistent with Pashtun leaders supporting education for the kids.
 
shadron said:
Indeed, progress is bad, but the goal is not a rubble heap. What they want is pastoralism, essentially the purity of the culture of their bedouin (or other pastoral) predecessors. One Imam interviewed in Uzbekistan some time ago expressed the wish that the world shrink back to the 20 mile radius that was most people's existence before machines started becoming common. That is a plot which a single man can control; essentially the same as the Abrahamic tradition. Of course, that also implies feudalism and paternalism and a single religion/culture, for control. It is a goal remarkably similar to many ultra-conservative people, the world over. "Good old days" wishful thinking.

Know thy enemy - false assumpions about his motivations will not help you in the struggle.
Click to expand...

Being able to draw a few parallels does not make two cultures equal. Their mothers probably breast feed the infants too but that don't make our La Leche League savages too. The OP pointed to the Taliban blowing up schools. If you think that they will be pacified if left alone then you & I are on opposite sides of a very wide chasm.

The ultra-conservatives on this continent of which you speak are few and far between. When they blow something up they are made pay the piper as quickly as possible. Same thing needs to happen over there. Rule of law. Knowing this enemy means knowing that they are primitive savages in a brutal and lawless land. Their kids deserve protection any way we can provide it.
 
shadron said:
Indeed, progress is bad, but the goal is not a rubble heap...
Click to expand...

Nice post, and well said. The goal is not a rubble heap, you're right. I'd venture to guess that the result will be however.

I was being oversimplistic.
 
I don't mean to pick at nits, shadron, but the Taliban in Afghanistan are not descended from Bedouins. They are mostly Pashtun and are pastoral tribes of the Indus River region, closer in ethnic and cultural similarity to Pakistan and India than the Arab states.
 
GreNME said:
I don't mean to pick at nits, shadron, but the Taliban in Afghanistan are not descended from Bedouins. They are mostly Pashtun and are pastoral tribes of the Indus River region, closer in ethnic and cultural similarity to Pakistan and India than the Arab states.
Click to expand...

Yes, you are right, and that is why I said "essentially the purity of the culture of their bedouin (or other pastoral) predecessors" (emphasis added). That would include, of course, Berbers, Somalis, Persians, Bangladeshis, Malaysians and Philipinos, among others, who have pastoral and primitive farming backgrounds.
 
Last edited:
YoPopa said:
Being able to draw a few parallels does not make two cultures equal. Their mothers probably breast feed the infants too but that don't make our La Leche League savages too. The OP pointed to the Taliban blowing up schools. If you think that they will be pacified if left alone then you & I are on opposite sides of a very wide chasm.
Click to expand...

Who said anything about they being pacified by being left alone? It is physically impossible to leave them alone; the only way they could live their dream would be to quash hope of a better life elsewhere within their nitdom, and that is a hopeless cause when any able bodied teenager could look up and see a jet contrail, or hear rumors about a better living over the nearby mountain ridge. The schools teach that people can have a better life than they do, and are, ipso facto, a threat, not only the girl's schools.

The ultra-conservatives on this continent of which you speak are few and far between. When they blow something up they are made pay the piper as quickly as possible. Same thing needs to happen over there. Rule of law. Knowing this enemy means knowing that they are primitive savages in a brutal and lawless land. Their kids deserve protection any way we can provide it.
Click to expand...
...and I'm absolutely pro-education and protection of such. What makes you think I'm an apologist? As for he conservatives, some people in the south, for example, think that life was best in ante-bellum Georgia and would like to see it restored, which is just as hopeless as the Imam's desires. Some Native Americans want the Europeans, all of them, to leave so they can once again hunt and commune with nature. Many Christians have a favorite time in their past they want to relive, from walking with Christ on the Mount of Olives to burning witches in Salem, but there is no putting the genii back into he bottle. And the question is not really which of us has such dreams; I personally would like to have lived in small town America in the late 1800's. The question is, how hard do we push to see our dreams, crazy as they are, realized? The Moslem radicals push a lot, Don Quixote notwithstanding, and they are dead serious about it.

My belief is that even if the Israeli state evaporated overnight and the Palestinians alone were left on their desert rockpile, enmity with the west, particularly the Great Satan, would not cease. Radical Moslems know the value of an overwhelming enemy in the achievement of their goals.

You aren't going to win such a struggle if you don't know what is motivating them, or over-simplfy it. Don't cease to learn.
 
Last edited:
I would say, in light of the above, that the short term reason for shutting down the girl's schools is strictly religious (obviously!) because that is what the Koran preaches and their followers understand. Later on it will be all education (at least for the lower casts). That isn't yet palatable to enough of the followers, but if they can come to some conquest of the west (allah willing!) then that will be next up on the agenda. At one time in history learning and achievement were Moslem goals, fully supported by both religion and temporal powers in the Moslem world, but those days are gone to adverse theology, and there is no return foretold in the tea leaves.
 
Last edited:
BigAl said:
For more information about what is possible in this part of the world, I recommend Three Cups of Tea , by and about Greg Mortenson and what he has done to bring education to these kids. If we could only scale this by a few orders of magnitude without governments screwing it up.
Click to expand...
Sir, the If Only is why I never played for the Dallas Mavericks. If only I were six foot six ... (about thirty years ago)

It is the immense trouble of things retaining their vitality as things scale up that is a problem in many things governmental, this issue not in the least.
I have seen video footage of kids in decent schools in the most rural of Pashtun tribal lands, which spans the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Everything I have heard is consistent with Pashtun leaders supporting education for the kids.
Click to expand...
Yes, there is hope, it's not all doom and gloom.

Hope isn't just a town in Arkansas. ;)
 
I thought the Taliban's PR said they merely objected to men teaching girls not to girls being taught at all.

Has propaganda been exposed as lies by actions yet again?
 
Travis said:
I thought the Taliban's PR said they merely objected to men teaching girls not to girls being taught at all.

Has propaganda been exposed as lies by actions yet again?
Click to expand...

That's what it is, all it is: PR. They don't do what they say.

Since the Taliban was driven from power in 2001, some 5.4 million Afghan children have been enrolled in schools, including 1.6 million girls. But a devastating campaign of intimidation through school burnings and the killing of teachers has forced the closure of many schools in the southern provinces where the insurgency is strongest. "How can the Taliban say they want to build schools when they have already burnt 180, closed 396 and prevented the youth of the country from going to school?" says Education Minister Hanif Atmar. "What they are really talking about building is madrassahs [religious schools] and terrorist training grounds. They will take young boys and train them in killing and suicide attacks on our country."

The Taliban says its schools will offer an Islamically correct education, and will provide students with Taliban-era textbooks. Some of those textbooks, which can still be found in curio shops and bookstores in Kabul, teach children to count with Kalashnikovs, and to subtract by killing off members of rival groups.

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1581119,00.html
Click to expand...
 
shadron said:
Yes, you are right, and that is why I said "essentially the purity of the culture of their bedouin (or other pastoral) predecessors" (emphasis added). That would include, of course, Berbers, Somalis, Persians, Bangladeshis, Malaysians and Philipinos, among others, who have pastoral and primitive farming backgrounds.
Click to expand...

I understand that's what you said. However, I'm pointing out a very important clarification that distinguishes these people from the Bedouin. Your explanation lacked the clarity of the fact that these people are very different from the Bedouin in significant ways. They're not the same, except in only the most general ways. That does nothing to explain why the Taliban are so willfully against the social mechanisms of pretty much any outside culture, because those reasons are based on things far more specific.
 
GreNME said:
I understand that's what you said. However, I'm pointing out a very important clarification that distinguishes these people from the Bedouin. Your explanation lacked the clarity of the fact that these people are very different from the Bedouin in significant ways. They're not the same, except in only the most general ways. That does nothing to explain why the Taliban are so willfully against the social mechanisms of pretty much any outside culture, because those reasons are based on things far more specific.
Click to expand...

Well, then, clue me in; I'm here to learn (and spout off; my wife says I excel at that). I'm all for knowing what the basic motivations of the Taliban are, beyond what I've managed to read.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top Bottom