# Make Peace With The Taliban? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [January 29, 2010, 10:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/make-peace-with-the-taliban/526959 "2010-01-29T22:55:40Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![PrettyVacant](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/49beb7/32.png) [@PrettyVacant](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/PrettyVacant)\ **Post date:** [January 31, 2010, 4:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/make-peace-with-the-taliban/526959/21 "2010-01-31T16:40:20Z")
Thank you , Mother Tereas. Why don’t you climb a little higher on the moral high ground so they can hear you at Guantanamo, at Abu Graib, at the torture centre at Bagram, in the refugee camps housing hundreds of thousands on the Pakistani border, and on the Jordanian border, on the West Bank. Tell all those motherless children about their rights, and then all those childless mothers. And when you’ve done there, move onto Cambodia and Laos and Vietnam and El Salvador, and Nicaragua and 20 other countries. And when you’re done with that have a think about the 25% of the entire worlds prisoners in US jails and what that means for broken families. Tell me more about your morality. ---
**Author:** ![Sam\_Stone](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ecccb3/32.png) [@Sam\_Stone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sam_Stone)\ **Post date:** [January 31, 2010, 6:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/make-peace-with-the-taliban/526959/22 "2010-01-31T18:38:26Z")
Funny, I don’t remember these relativistic arguments over apartheid South Africa. What is happening to women in Afghanistan is worse than what was happening to blacks then in South Africa, but I don’t remember a lot of hand-wringing over whether Americans were too evil and hypocritical to involve themselves in that. How come? ---
**Author:** ![Squink](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/b5e925/32.png) [@Squink](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Squink)\ **Post date:** [January 31, 2010, 6:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/make-peace-with-the-taliban/526959/23 "2010-01-31T18:38:35Z")
> [@Lynn\_Bodoni](#): > > Hell NO. Are the Taliban better than the valley kings/warlords that preceded them? Are they better than the continuing corruption and incompetence of our installed regime? Are they better than the valley kings/warlords that we’ll see in the future when Karzai’s gov’t falls? ## Without a huge increase in our commitment, we are not going to be able to turn Afghanistan into an asian version of a small Ohio town. The trick is to find the least bad outcome that we are willing to afford. The Taliban could very well be a part of that outcome, especially if we can ween them from their more primitive behaviors. Of course, we haven’t done too well weening Karzai from his penchant for corruption, and we’ve still not broken the power of the warlords, so perhaps we need to admit that we suck at making others see the light. Still, Karzai and his corrupt cronies and warlords are _not_ day to the taliban’s night. Any ‘win’\* for us is necessarily going to have to recognize and accommodate all the different sorts of assholes running around in the mountains with guns. \*to use **ralph** ’s criteria for what it’s OK for America to do. ---
**Author:** ![Skylark](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e274bd/32.png) [@Skylark](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Skylark)\ **Post date:** [January 31, 2010, 7:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/make-peace-with-the-taliban/526959/24 "2010-01-31T19:38:12Z")
> [@gonzomax](#): > > The neo-cons and military were desperate after Vietnam. They had no enemies . They trumpeted China but they were not really much of a threat. They had an enemies vacuum. Then Saddam blundered in front of them. He was no threat to America but he was a rallying point they could not pass up. They are doing their best to demonize Iran now, but they again are not much of a threat. They will have a hard time making Afghanistan or Yemen into a new and dangerous enemy. But they will try. It is way past time for America to gain control over the military. They keep making shit up . > The Taliban has no designs on the outside world. They are local war lords and a shards of a broken and corrupt government. It is past time to stop this warring around and mature as a civilization. The post-Vietnam era was still the Cold War. I don’t know how popular the term neo-con was yet, but those that would become noted neoconservatives (Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle, etc) were damn sure they had an enemy: the Soviet Union. The obvious enemy, the same enemy that had been there for 50 years already. They spent the late seventies and eighties demonizing the Soviet Union, as their influence in the Reagan administration can show. > [@](#): > > They trumpeted China but they were not really much of a threat. In 1972 Nixon went to China. This resulted in a normalization of Sino-American relations. It has been regarded as a brilliant geopolitical maneuver, as the United States and the PRC shared a common enemy (the Soviet Union). This is covered better in [The Cold War: A New History](http://www.amazon.com/Cold-War-New-History/dp/0143038273/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1264962625&sr=8-1). Although several in the United States military establishment are wary of China as a potential competitor in future years, at no point since 1950 has China ever been “trumpeted” as a threat. > [@](#): > > Then Saddam blundered in front of them. He was no threat to America but he was a rallying point they could not pass up. Saddam was a US ally in the eighties. He would not become a rallying point until 1990, almost twenty years ago the Vietnam war ended. That’s not post-Vietnam era. > [@](#): > > They are doing their best to demonize Iran now, but they again are not much of a threat. This may have been true in 2006. Not so much now. > [@](#): > > They will have a hard time making Afghanistan or Yemen into a new and dangerous enemy. We’ve been familiar with Islamic terrorism for almost thirty years. The WTC bombings in 1993 were almost twenty years ago. 9/11 was almost a decade ago. This is not a new enemy. Remember 9/11? That was the justification, with almost unanimous world support, for going into Afghanistan. We’ve been in Afghanistan ever since. We didn’t just show up there; people just forgot about it. We’ve been in Afghanistan for almost a decade; the Taliban are not new enemies. I don’t think you are familiar with history. ---
**Author:** ![Squink](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/b5e925/32.png) [@Squink](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Squink)\ **Post date:** [January 31, 2010, 9:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/make-peace-with-the-taliban/526959/25 "2010-01-31T21:25:41Z")
> [@Sam\_Stone](#): > > Funny, I don’t remember these relativistic arguments over apartheid South Africa. I don’t remember much support for finishing Afghanistan properly before haring off to Baghdad either. Why’d the US do that anyway, just to fuck over the Afghani women?\* Seems to me we let em hang for six years or more, so this sudden jumping on of moral high horses is pretty darn unjustifiable don’t cha know? If it takes talking to the Taliban to restore some measure of tranquility to the country, we owe it to the Afghan people to talk to the Taliban. If we can pull something off that has some vague resemblance to ‘winning’ it’ll be a soaring monument to our current administration’s competence, because the situation it inherited from the last administration was about as close to a straight up loss as it’s possible to be without even **ralph124c41+** seeing it as a loss. * * * \*Of course not, the women of Afghanistan merely suffered collateral damage when our need for conquest neccessitated their abandonment. ---
**Author:** ![Ludovic](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/7ab992/32.png) [@Ludovic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ludovic)\ **Post date:** [January 31, 2010, 9:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/make-peace-with-the-taliban/526959/26 "2010-01-31T21:34:23Z")
> [@Sam\_Stone](#): > > Funny, I don’t remember these relativistic arguments over apartheid South Africa. What is happening to women in Afghanistan is worse than what was happening to blacks then in South Africa, but I don’t remember a lot of hand-wringing over whether Americans were too evil and hypocritical to involve themselves in that. How come? I’m glad we put an end to apartheid in South Africa by the policy of Regime Change costing thousands of US lives and hundreds of thousand civilian lives and trillions of dollars. ---
**Author:** ![Dick\_Dastardly](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/c4cdca/32.png) [@Dick\_Dastardly](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dick_Dastardly)\ **Post date:** [January 31, 2010, 9:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/make-peace-with-the-taliban/526959/27 "2010-01-31T21:49:27Z")
> [@Simplicio](#): > > Yea, I don’t think the Afghan war was ever sold as “we’ll wipe the Taliban from the face of the Earth”, so it hardly seems like a defeat to try and come to some sort of accord with them. Indeed, IIRC, Bush originally suggested that if the Taliban would be spared if they forked over the leadership of Al-Queda. And as a result of the United States military, **Taliban no longer is in existence**. And the people of Afghanistan are now free. (Applause.) In other words when you say something as President you better make it clear so everybody understands what you’re saying, and you better mean what you say. George W 2004 > **[Google Search](http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=And+as+a+result+of+the+United+States+military%2C+Taliban+no+longer+is+in+existence.+And+the+people+of+Afghanistan+are+now+free.+%28Applause.%29&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-GB:official&client=firefox-a)** ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [January 31, 2010, 10:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/make-peace-with-the-taliban/526959/28 "2010-01-31T22:00:58Z")
> [@](#): > > Funny, I don’t remember these relativistic arguments over apartheid South Africa. What is happening to women in Afghanistan is worse than what was happening to blacks then in South Africa, but I don’t remember a lot of hand-wringing over whether Americans were too evil and hypocritical to involve themselves in that. How come? And what happened next? Was it: 1. We had to fight South Africa’s National Party to the death because they would never abandon apartheid. or 2. They gave up and abandoned apartheid. ---
**Author:** ![Dick\_Dastardly](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/c4cdca/32.png) [@Dick\_Dastardly](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dick_Dastardly)\ **Post date:** [January 31, 2010, 10:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/make-peace-with-the-taliban/526959/29 "2010-01-31T22:02:33Z")
One of the original justifications for the war in 2001 that seemed to resonate most with liberal Americans was the liberation of Afghan women from a misogynist regime. This is now being resurrected as the following: If the U.S. forces withdraw, any gains made by Afghan women will be reversed and they’ll be at the mercy of fundamentalist forces. In fact, the fear of abandoning Afghan women seems to have caused the greatest confusion and paralysis in the antiwar movement. What this logic misses is that the United States chose right from the start to sell out Afghan women to its misogynist fundamentalist allies on the ground. The U.S. armed the Mujahadeen leaders in the 1980s against the Soviet occupation, opening the door to successive fundamentalist governments including the Taliban. In 2001, the United States then armed the same men, now called the Northern Alliance, to fight the Taliban and then welcomed them into the newly formed government as a reward. The American puppet president Hamid Karzai, in concert with a cabinet and parliament of thugs and criminals, passed one misogynist law after another, appointed one fundamentalist zealot after another to the judiciary, and literally enabled the downfall of Afghan women’s rights over eight long years. Any token gains have been countered by setbacks. For example, while women are considered equal to men in Afghanistan’s constitution, there have been vicious and deadly attacks against women’s rights activists, the legalization of rape within marriage in the Shia community, and a shockingly high rate of women’s imprisonment for so-called honor crimes — all under the watch of the U.S. occupation and the government we are protecting against the Taliban. Add to this the unacceptably high number of innocent women and children killed in U.S. bombing raids, which has also increased the Taliban’s numbers and clout, and it makes the case that **for eight years the United States has enabled the oppression of Afghan women and only added to their miseries.** **This is why grassroots political and feminist activists have called for an immediate U.S. withdrawal from their country.** > **[A Call for Clarity on the Afghanistan War - FPIF](https://fpif.org/a_call_for_clarity_on_the_afghanistan_war/)** > > While President Barack Obama reviews his strategy on Afghanistan, a perfect moment to send a strong unified message to end the war is slipping through our fingers. Whether it's because we seem to have bought into the lies about the goals of this war... The people of Afghanistan are really terrified of the Northern Alliance [our Afghan democratic partners, currently in power in Kabul] being part of any official government in Afghanistan. The period between 1992 and 1996, when they were in power, was really the blackest period in the history of Afghanistan. Coming back to your question of what was the worst time, that was really the worst time and what made it even worse and more tragic was that there was not any attention given to the situation. The Afghan people will not forget that time. People will not forget that the hospitals, schools, museums, and 70 - 80 percent of the capital city of Kabul were destroyed during that time. Many cases of rape, women’s abduction, forced marriages happened at that time. That would happen again, if they take the power. [http://afghanwomensmission.org/news/saidit0211.php](http://afghanwomensmission.org/news/saidit0211.php) \*\*Afghans turn to Taliban in fear of own police \*\* By Peter Graff – Sun Jul 12, 9:57 am ET PANKELA, Afghanistan (Reuters) – As British troops moved into the village newly freed from Taliban control, they heard one message from the anxious locals: for God’s sake do not bring back the Afghan police. U.S. and British troops have launched a campaign to seize control of Helmand province, about half of which was in Taliban hands, and restore Afghan government institutions. But as they advance, they are learning uncomfortable facts about their local allies: **villagers say the government’s police force was so brutal and corrupt that they welcomed the Taliban as liberators.** “The police would stop people driving on motorcycles, beat them and take their money,” said Mohammad Gul, an elder in the village of Pankela, which British troops have been securing for the past three days after flying in by helicopter. He pointed to two compounds of neighbors where pre-teen children had been abducted by police to be used for the local practice of “bachabazi,” or sex with pre-pubescent boys. “If the boys were out in the fields, the police would come and rape them,” he said. “You can go to any police base and you will see these boys. They hold them until they are finished with them and then let the child go.” [http://www.afghanistannewscenter.com/news/2009/july/jul122009.html#1](http://www.afghanistannewscenter.com/news/2009/july/jul122009.html#1) ---
**Author:** ![Dick\_Dastardly](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/c4cdca/32.png) [@Dick\_Dastardly](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dick_Dastardly)\ **Post date:** [January 31, 2010, 10:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/make-peace-with-the-taliban/526959/30 "2010-01-31T22:08:33Z")
I want to read from a defence official’s letter dated August 17. He calls for an honest admission of failure after eight years, citing the squandering of huge material resources and considerable casualties and a failure to stabilise the country – militarily or politically. Most of the population has lost trust, because the campaign is bogged down and a strategic breakthrough is unlikely. “The experience of the past years,” he continues somberly, “clearly shows that the Afghan problem cannot be solved by military means only. We should decisively reject our illusions and undertake principally new steps, taking into account the lessons of the past, and the real situation in the country…” That might have been a note to General McChrystal as he prepared his report – but the date was August 17, 1987. And the author, Colonel K. Tsagalov, was addressing the then newly appointed Soviet defence minister, Dmitry Yazov. > **[Afghan insurgency given new life by their enemies](https://www.theage.com.au/politics/federal/afghan-insurgency-given-new-life-by-their-enemies-20091023-hd58.html)** > > In their rush to congratulate President Hamid Karzai on buckling to a second Afghan presidential election this week, world leaders heaved a sigh of relief. But none bothered – at least, not in public – to canvas the part played by the international... ---
**Author:** ![ZPG\_Zealot](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/z/e47c2d/32.png) [@ZPG\_Zealot](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ZPG_Zealot)\ **Post date:** [February 1, 2010, 2:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/make-peace-with-the-taliban/526959/31 "2010-02-01T02:54:06Z")
> [@LavenderBlue](#): > > Yeah. > > The laws they’ve imposed against half their popular are completely inexcusable. They are no different than the Nazis or those who promulgate apartheid. The woman of Afghanistan deserve much better than to be ruled by openly unrepentant extremist misogynysts. Have you examined the condition of women in Saudi Arabia, our so-called allie? ---
**Author:** ![Guinastasia](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/guinastasia/32/5751_2.png) [@Guinastasia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Guinastasia)\ **Post date:** [February 1, 2010, 4:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/make-peace-with-the-taliban/526959/32 "2010-02-01T04:11:51Z")
> [@blindboyard](#): > > The Taleban aren’t all bad. First off, it’s Tal **i** ban. And second, yes, yes they are. What good is ending child sex slavery if women end up being slaves (sexually to their husbands) anyways? :dubious: It’d be like making peace with the Nazis. ---
**Author:** ![Squink](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/b5e925/32.png) [@Squink](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Squink)\ **Post date:** [February 1, 2010, 4:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/make-peace-with-the-taliban/526959/33 "2010-02-01T04:49:11Z")
> [@Guinastasia](#): > > First off, it’s Tal **i** ban. > > And second, yes, yes they are. What good is ending child sex slavery if women end up being slaves (sexually to their husbands) anyways? :dubious: > > It’d be like making peace with the Nazis. Or Karzai? We’re not doing women any favors by talking to Afghanistan’s current president. [‘Worse than the Taliban’ - new law rolls back rights for Afghan women](http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/mar/31/hamid-karzai-afghanistan-law) > [@](#): > > March 2009 > Hamid Karzai has been accused of trying to win votes in Afghanistan’s presidential election by backing a law the UN says legalises rape within marriage and bans wives from stepping outside their homes without their husbands’ permission. > > The Afghan president signed the law earlier this month, despite condemnation by human rights activists and some MPs that it flouts the constitution’s equal rights provisions. > > The final document has not been published, but the law is believed to contain articles that rule women cannot leave the house without their husbands’ permission, that they can only seek work, education or visit the doctor with their husbands’ permission, and that they cannot refuse their husband sex. Would you have us sit on our hands in a snit until someone decent comes along, someone we can deal with without feeling dirty? That is not going to happen. We squandered any possibility of a clean solution four to six years ago. Now we have to work with who we must, and take whatever good we can get. That’s called winning. It’ll suck, but supposedly it’ll beat the alternative. ---
**Author:** ![Spoke](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/a88e57/32.png) [@Spoke](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spoke)\ **Post date:** [February 1, 2010, 4:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/make-peace-with-the-taliban/526959/34 "2010-02-01T04:58:10Z")
> [@PrettyVacant](#): > > Why don’t you climb a little higher on the moral high ground so they can hear you at Guantanamo, at Abu Graib, at the torture centre at Bagram, in the refugee camps housing hundreds of thousands on the Pakistani border, and **on the Jordanian border, on the West Bank**. Tell all those motherless children about their rights, and then all those childless mothers. US ≠ Israel Just so we’re clear on that point. If you want to incriminate the US, stick to the stuff **we’ve** done. ---
**Author:** ![The\_Second\_Stone](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/bbe5ce/32.png) [@The\_Second\_Stone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Second_Stone)\ **Post date:** [February 1, 2010, 5:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/make-peace-with-the-taliban/526959/35 "2010-02-01T05:23:23Z")
The war in Afghanistan is entirely winnable, provided that the definition of winning is coming to an agreement with our enemies. It simply isn’t possible within international law to “defeat” the Taliban as it is a broad religious idea that people can adhere to now and then. As soon as the Taliban come to an agreement with us not to attack or harbor Al Queda, I’m fine with getting out. However, there is the small matter of the oil pipeline. Obama doesn’t give a shit about the pipeline, but the last administration did. And a future one might. ---
**Author:** ![PrettyVacant](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/49beb7/32.png) [@PrettyVacant](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/PrettyVacant)\ **Post date:** [February 1, 2010, 10:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/make-peace-with-the-taliban/526959/36 "2010-02-01T10:54:22Z")
> [@spoke-](#): > > US ≠ Israel > > Just so we’re clear on that point. > > If you want to incriminate the US, stick to the stuff **we’ve** done. Direct aid to Israel is currently running at $3 billion a year – not bad for a 7 million population. Indirect aid is incalculably higher. Does that buy the USA influence – no, Israel has more influence on the USA than the inverse. 1/10, could do better. ---
**Author:** ![Ludovic](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/7ab992/32.png) [@Ludovic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ludovic)\ **Post date:** [February 1, 2010, 1:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/make-peace-with-the-taliban/526959/37 "2010-02-01T13:01:55Z")
> [@Guinastasia](#): > > First off, it’s Tal **i** ban. > > And second, yes, yes they are. What good is ending child sex slavery if women end up being slaves (sexually to their husbands) anyways? :dubious: > > It’d be like making peace with the Nazis. Almost precisely, yes. Perhaps even extensible to “It’d be like siding with the Nazis over the Russians and Japanese in WW2 because they rape less.” ---
**Author:** ![gonzomax](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/e8c25b/32.png) [@gonzomax](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gonzomax)\ **Post date:** [February 1, 2010, 2:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/make-peace-with-the-taliban/526959/38 "2010-02-01T14:43:56Z")
> [@Skylark](#): > > The post-Vietnam era was still the Cold War. I don’t know how popular the term neo-con was yet, but those that would become noted neoconservatives (Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle, etc) were damn sure they had an enemy: the Soviet Union. The obvious enemy, the same enemy that had been there for 50 years already. They spent the late seventies and eighties demonizing the Soviet Union, as their influence in the Reagan administration can show. > > In 1972 Nixon went to China. This resulted in a normalization of Sino-American relations. It has been regarded as a brilliant geopolitical maneuver, as the United States and the PRC shared a common enemy (the Soviet Union). This is covered better in [The Cold War: A New History](http://www.amazon.com/Cold-War-New-History/dp/0143038273/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1264962625&sr=8-1). Although several in the United States military establishment are wary of China as a potential competitor in future years, at no point since 1950 has China ever been “trumpeted” as a threat. > Saddam was a US ally in the eighties. He would not become a rallying point until 1990, almost twenty years ago the Vietnam war ended. That’s not post-Vietnam era. > This may have been true in 2006. Not so much now. > > We’ve been familiar with Islamic terrorism for almost thirty years. The WTC bombings in 1993 were almost twenty years ago. 9/11 was almost a decade ago. This is not a new enemy. Remember 9/11? That was the justification, with almost unanimous world support, for going into Afghanistan. We’ve been in Afghanistan ever since. We didn’t just show up there; people just forgot about it. We’ve been in Afghanistan for almost a decade; the Taliban are not new enemies. > I don’t think you are familiar with history. Saddam was not post Viet Nam? How do you figure that. He was not next in line. But he certainly came after. That means “post”.We demonized China for a decade or two first. The neo-cons need to have an enemy, even if one does not exist. Afghanistan was armed and the fighters trained by America to fight the Soviets. They were back woods tribal fighters until we trained them. As far as Chins being mentioned as our future threat. It certainly was. They were the red menace. They were the commies that were after America, probably because they hate our freedoms. The Taliban did not attack the WTC. We believe some El Qeada were using Afghanistan territory for training . It was not under the Afghan government. It was a local war lords thing. Afghanistan has not had a strong government in control. The Taliban does not have any interest in attacking America. There goals are local. They are still not enemies. We can pretend they are to justify attacking a backwards country thousands of miles away. But that does not make it true. Of course, as we attack them, the people do become resentful as their homes get blown up and their friends and family die at our hands. They eventually do fulfill the role of American hating enemies. ---
**Author:** ![Ravenman](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ravenman/32/2929_2.png) [@Ravenman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ravenman)\ **Post date:** [February 1, 2010, 3:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/make-peace-with-the-taliban/526959/39 "2010-02-01T15:05:09Z")
> [@Dick\_Dastardly](#): > > [INDENT] **This is why grassroots political and feminist activists have called for an immediate U.S. withdrawal from their country.** Funny, because some notable American grassroots political and feminist activists have learned that an immediate U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan would be a disaster for women and girls. [Link.](http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Asia-South-Central/2009/1006/p06s10-wosc.html) > [@](#): > > When Medea Benjamin stood up in a Kabul meeting hall this weekend to ask Masooda Jalal if she would prefer more international troops or more development funds, the cofounder of US antiwar group Code Pink was hoping her fellow activist would support her call for US troop withdrawal. > > She was disappointed. … > > During their weeklong visit here, in which they met with government officials, politicians, ministers, women activists, and civil society groups, the small team of Code Pink members had hoped to gather evidence to bolster their call for US troop withdrawal within two years, and capitalize on growing anxiety back home about the war. > > While the group hasn’t dropped its call for a pullout, the visit convinced them that setting a deadline isn’t in Afghanistan’s interests, say Ms. Benjamin and fellow cofounder Jodie Evans. ---
**Author:** ![blindboyard](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/blindboyard/32/2833_2.png) [@blindboyard](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/blindboyard)\ **Post date:** [February 1, 2010, 3:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/make-peace-with-the-taliban/526959/40 "2010-02-01T15:37:00Z")
> [@Sam\_Stone](#): > > Unless you don’t count that whole “Shooting innocent women in the head in a soccer stadium” thing. But really, who’s counting? That’s why I didn’t day “good”, dear. “Not all bad” carries the implication of general badness leavened with a bit of occasional goodness, some examples of which I listed on the hypothesis that their more morally dubious activities were well known. I mean, Hitler wasn’t all bad, although I’m momentarily stumped for an example of anything good he might have done. Well intentioned, probably, just misguided. Even war-criminal, election-stealing accused rapist George W Bush can’t be all bad, you know. So the Taleban are, on the whole, not a political movement I would support but also not the one moral absolute in a relativistic world, a sort of modern day satan for us all to unite against. They’re just human being like you and me with reasoning minds that can be talked to and reasoned with. > [@Lynn\_Bodoni](#): > > To echo **Sam Stone’s** comment, are we talking about the same Taliban that enforces morality for [women](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taliban_treatment_of_women) (and I guess men) by restricting women’s freedom in just about every way possible? The burqa, no schooling, no going out without a male chaperone, all that stuff? We’re talking about making peace with THAT Taliban? > > Hell NO. Those scamps, eh? But unless we’re going to nuke Jeddah, this isn’t a good enough reason not to talk to them. > [@Sam\_Stone](#): > > What is happening to women in Afghanistan is worse than what was happening to blacks then in South Africa I must say I disagree. True, women are somewhat badly treated by the Taliban, but there are no prison camps just for female dissidents, no biological warfare programmes designing weapons that would only effect women, no death squads hunting female political activists (or not full time ones, anyway), to take three examples of Apartheid crimes. Also, as you say, what IS happening, now that our pet drug-dealing gangster warlords are in power, which we can hardly blame their mortal enemies the Taliban for. Even under the Taliban, women might have been harshly treated but they were at least spared the forced conscription and beardwearing men for subjected to. Hence the big sex disparity in Afghanistan and the refugee camps in Pakistan: mostly women, because so many men have died. > [@Ludovic](#): > > Almost precisely, yes. Perhaps even extensible to “It’d be like siding with the Nazis over the Russians and Japanese in WW2 because they rape less.” I think the historical consensus is that the Russians and Japanese raped more, although the Germans were bigger on the ethnic cleansing front. And of course lots of people were in favour of siding with the Nazis against the REAL threat, the example of social upheaval and economic revolution embodied in the popular image of the Soviet Union. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/make-peace-with-the-taliban/526959.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/make-peace-with-the-taliban/526959.md?page=3)