I'm not qualified to opine about the war, but I will never forget the desperation of the thousands of people we promised visas to and then abandoned back into the hands of the Taliban.
Same. But it's been 20 years and I was thinking people may not remember how the Taliban operated. I had the Swallows of Kabul book on my shelf and saw it had been made into an animated film just released. For me seeing things through literature is my best way to understand, then I go back and try to figure out how this happened.
I'm by no means endorsing the Taliban -- and this is tangential at best to the content of your post -- but I think it's worthwhile to note that the Taliban of today are not the Taliban of 2001. Most of the old hardline leaders are retired or dead. (Former Emir Akhtar Mohammad Mansour, a moderate who wanted desperately to negotiate a peace deal with the US, was assassinated by the US in a drone strike, along with an innocent taxi driver: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akhtar_Mansour.)
During the lengthy negotiations that led to the February '20 Doha Agreement, the Taliban put pretty much everything on the table, surrendering intelligence on al-Qaeda and making promises to respect women's rights and build girls' schools. I'm not in a position to evaluate their sincerity.
Along the way the Taliban has become a multi-ethnic and broad-based popular insurgency -- an Afghan nationalist movement first and foremost. A New York Times article from this morning describes Kabul as "eerily quiet" as the Taliban attempt to exercise a peaceful transfer of power. We'll see how it all shakes out, I guess.
We can hope. The Internet was barely born when they took over in 1996, so maybe that will have had an effect. A personal note. At my university there were men from A. who did not want to interact with female teachers so there is a good bit of anti-female bias in the culture which maybe will change but was always odd to me when I encountered it.
Thanks for alerting me to another book I want to read. I hope the Taliban leaders of today have learned to be less dogmatic than their fathers and grandfathers were. Perhaps women in Afghanistan will be able to hang on to some of the gains made over the last 20 years.
I'm not qualified to opine about the war, but I will never forget the desperation of the thousands of people we promised visas to and then abandoned back into the hands of the Taliban.
Same. But it's been 20 years and I was thinking people may not remember how the Taliban operated. I had the Swallows of Kabul book on my shelf and saw it had been made into an animated film just released. For me seeing things through literature is my best way to understand, then I go back and try to figure out how this happened.
I'm by no means endorsing the Taliban -- and this is tangential at best to the content of your post -- but I think it's worthwhile to note that the Taliban of today are not the Taliban of 2001. Most of the old hardline leaders are retired or dead. (Former Emir Akhtar Mohammad Mansour, a moderate who wanted desperately to negotiate a peace deal with the US, was assassinated by the US in a drone strike, along with an innocent taxi driver: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akhtar_Mansour.)
During the lengthy negotiations that led to the February '20 Doha Agreement, the Taliban put pretty much everything on the table, surrendering intelligence on al-Qaeda and making promises to respect women's rights and build girls' schools. I'm not in a position to evaluate their sincerity.
Along the way the Taliban has become a multi-ethnic and broad-based popular insurgency -- an Afghan nationalist movement first and foremost. A New York Times article from this morning describes Kabul as "eerily quiet" as the Taliban attempt to exercise a peaceful transfer of power. We'll see how it all shakes out, I guess.
We can hope. The Internet was barely born when they took over in 1996, so maybe that will have had an effect. A personal note. At my university there were men from A. who did not want to interact with female teachers so there is a good bit of anti-female bias in the culture which maybe will change but was always odd to me when I encountered it.
Thanks for alerting me to another book I want to read. I hope the Taliban leaders of today have learned to be less dogmatic than their fathers and grandfathers were. Perhaps women in Afghanistan will be able to hang on to some of the gains made over the last 20 years.
It was an ALA Notable Book in 2005. I was on the committee then. https://www.ala.org/rusa/awards/notablebooks/lists/2005
Thank you for this timely post and book recommendation. Will read this soon!
I think you will cry.