The new law, banning women from raising their voice in public, is the latest crushing women's rights.
The daily English lessons that Shabana attends are the highlight of her day. Taking the bus in Kabul to the private course with her friends, chatting and laughing with them, learning something new for one hour each day - it’s a brief respite from the emptiness that has engulfed her life since the Taliban took over Afghanistan.
In another country, Shabana* would have been graduating from high school next year, pursuing her dream to get a business degree. In Afghanistan, she and all teenage girls have been barred from formal education for three years.
Now even the small joys that were making life bearable are fraught with fear after a new law was announced saying if a woman is outside her home, even her voice must not be heard.
Conservatism is a plague of oppression, cruelty and death. It always has been. There is no place in a modern culture for harm-based ideologies like conservatism.
Nearly four months since the Taliban seized power, Afghanistan is on the brink of a mass starvation that aid groups say threatens to kill a million children this winter — a toll that would dwarf the total number of Afghan civilians estimated to have been killed as a direct result of the war over the past 20 years.
While Afghanistan has suffered from malnutrition for decades, the country’s hunger crisis has drastically worsened in recent months. This winter, an estimated 22.8 million people — more than half the population — are expected to face potentially life-threatening levels of food insecurity, according to an analysis by the United Nations World Food Program and Food and Agriculture Organization. Of those, 8.7 million people are nearing famine — the worst stage of a food crisis.
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“We need to separate the politics from the humanitarian imperative,” said Mary-Ellen McGroarty, the World Food Program’s country director for Afghanistan. “The millions of women, of children, of men in the current crisis in Afghanistan are innocent people who are being condemned to a winter of absolute desperation and potentially death.”
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Since the Taliban seized power, the United States and other Western donors have grappled with delicate questions over how to avert a humanitarian catastrophe in Afghanistan without granting the new regime legitimacy by removing sanctions or putting money directly into the Taliban’s hands.
“We believe that it’s essential that we maintain our sanctions against the Taliban but at the same time find ways for legitimate humanitarian assistance to get to the Afghan people. That’s exactly what we’re doing,” the deputy U.S. Treasury secretary, Wally Adeyemo, told the Senate Banking Committee in October.
But as the humanitarian situation has worsened, aid organizations have called on the United States to move more quickly.
American officials showed some flexibility around loosening the economic chokehold on Afghanistan last week, when the World Bank’s board — which includes the United States — moved to free up $280 million in frozen donor funding for the World Food Program and UNICEF. Still, the sum is just a portion of the $1.5 billion frozen by the World Bank amid pressure from the United States Treasury after the Taliban took control.
The Taliban isn't the organization demanding help. They seem relatively content to squat on the administrative offices in the central urban areas, simply to keep American military out.
The US economic sanctions are hitting all the folks on the periphery. The liberal institutions that used to live under the American military shadow are the ones we've effectively pincered between our punitive fiscal rules and the Taliban's own ultra-orthodox conservative social policy.
This is exactly what happened to Iran in the early 80s. A revolution powered by a combination of progressive anti-monarchists and revanchist religious leaders emerged victorious, only for the progressives to get knee-capped by a Reagan government that claimed to be targeting the religious leadership. The only way to make this analogy more perfect would be for the US to start funneling chemical weapons into Turkmenistan so they can start chipping away at the Afghan western border, like they did with Saddam's Iraq back in the early 80s.
I kinda don't get it. If someone would oppress me like that, I'd pack my shit and fuckin walked away. Till I reach the country's border.
It's anyways all in the mountains.
Wake up early, take your stuff, and walk in any direction. Who's gonna find you?
I feel like you are neither fully appreciating the scope of the control exerted over them nor the scale of the distances and hostility of terrain. I understand the sentiment, but what you’re suggesting is essentially tantamount to suicide. That may itself have merit, but call it what it is.