And? That doesn’t mean they actually get to go to school.
Due to the Taliban. And the amount of girls going to school now represents a vast improvement from those of the Taliban days.
How many women are there in Afghanistan between the ages of 6 and 16? How many of them are going to school?
No, due to the people we support. Who are just as brutal and fanatic, just in our pay.
It seems that everyone here but OP agrees that our efforts to “defeat the Taliban” are doomed because Taliban is an ideology, not a specific ethnic or geographic group. Fostering democratic ideals or economic prosperity might help, but that’s not what we’re doing.
Purely as a thought experiment I would ask OP to imagine that a benevolent foreign power invaded the U.S.A. to eradicate right-wing fundamentalism. How should they proceed, and how would they gauge success?
Au contraire, of the three “axis of evil” powers the one that was no threat was chosen as the target simply because it would be easiest to defeat.
And BTW to ask Iraqis whether they’re glad Saddam is gone is to ask the wrong question. Ask instead whether their lives have improved.
The chart shows very few states as “Most stable”, so placing U.S. in the same group as Japan, France and Britain hardly seems wrong. That Greece is in this group may seem odd, but the chart’s preparation might predate the intensification of the Greek crisis. Anyway I read that Greek per capita government debt is less than that of U.S.A. :dubious:
Women and homosexuals were both better off under Saddam; right there that’s the majority of the population.
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The chart shows very few states as “Most stable”, so placing U.S. in the same group as Japan, France and Britain hardly seems wrong.
[/QUOTE]
Considering that Spain, Portugal, Iceland and Greece are ALSO in the same categories it makes me question the validity of such a chart. Consider that Ireland is actually in the ‘most stable’ category there. And why are Norway, Denmark, Sweden and Finland in the ‘most stable’ category while Germany is only ‘stable’??
It’s a chart for 2011, but even if it was done before Greece blew up it throws these folks powers of prediction and analysis into some serious question. The Greece thing didn’t just spring up overnight, and to say their stability was on part with Germany before all the troubles started (and by 2011 no less) leads me to believe that the chart is pretty arbitrary, or the criteria they are using to determine the categories is skewed somehow.
Less in absolute terms, or less as a percentage of GDP? It’s meaningless anyway, unless you are seriously contending that the economic and structural situation in the US is on par with Greece even before their entire economy started to melt down requiring huge bailouts and actually threatening the EU.
-XT
A suicide bomber took himself and 35 innocent people out…at a hospital in Afghanistan.
The Taliban has NOT taken “credit” for this brave act of resistance.
What are we doing in such a place?
Trying to find a way to avoid admitting that we have no good reason to be there anymore, no plan, no goal, and are basically just spending time, lives and resources waiting until someone bites the bullet and withdraws our soldiers. With no doubt some speech about the great things we supposedly accomplished.
Do you suggest that we fight wars in places where the people are more agreeable?
YES-I do not consider these actions to be those of a human being.:smack:
Thanks to Robert Gates, who is not a military commander. In fact, he slashed several of the military’s cash cow superweapons to do so, including a reduction in the amount of F-22’s ordered. The military commanders didn’t ask for those to be cut, they and their Congressmen lobbied hard to stop those cuts.
Are you sure? I thought it was only the Congresscritters, not the military brass that were fighting the cuts. I could be wrong-- just asking.
I doubt the families of the dead would take much comfort from your distinction. Dead is dead and that is not an endorsement of your reasoning.
I’m saying America is not guilty of those deaths.
Well, the Air Force opposed the cuts - at least to the F-22 program - so Robert Gates brought in his own chief of staff to back the cut.
America is not guilty of those deaths!
America is not guilty of those deaths!
America is not guilty of those deaths!
America is not guilty of those deaths!
AMERICA IS NOT GUILTY OF THOSE DEATHS!
Hmm, that’s odd..
No matter how many times you say it, or how loud, America is still responsible for those deaths.
Paging Captain Yossarian – Captain Yossarian, could you please insure that the United States only goes to war in places where we can kill enemies that aren’t doing things that are quite so objectionable to us? Higher headquarters has a problem with killing the really bad people – it’s bad for morale back home.
Try to limit your objectives to destruction of enemy forces that aren’t quite so big a threat to peace.
We’ve been at war there for ten years.
How come people still don’t understand that Afghanistan is not a nation, but a collection of mutually hostile tribes, clans and ethnicities, all wedded to a barbarous view of Islam and wrapped up in a culture of endemic corruption ingrained beyond eradication?
The only difference between the people we support and the Taliban is that the Taliban are Pashtun, who straddle a border that makes fighting a guerilla war much easier.
The second we leave it’ll be back to the never-ending brutal civil war between competing warlords.
I remember when the Taliban first took power. Compared to the Northern Alliance of brutal warlords, the people we picked to do our dirty work, they were The Good Guys. The Army of Scholars.
Freedom House seems to have a different view that you.
The time the Taliban was in charge, Freedom House gave Afghanistan the lowest ratings possible in terms of civil and political rights. Following the defeat of the Taliban, the country was getting better – significant improvements, but still not Sweden. In the last two years, things have gone backwards, but the country has not (yet?) regained the terrible ratings that the Taliban earned.
Far be it from me to put on rose colored glasses and say that Afghanistan is on the mend right now, but the idea that the current government is every bit as bad as the Taliban is not supported by non-partisan NGOs. If the most reputable voices for human rights says that the current government isn’t as bad as the Taliban, I would say that your conclusion is factually wrong.