Afghanistan without Iraq

For gods sake, when did we get an infestation of racists around here? Has anyone considered that maybe the reason why the literacy rate in Afghanistan is so low is because there has been near-continuous war for 30 fucking years? Naturally, you can't really focus on education when people are getting shot at all the time. Iraq of course was headed in the right direction before Saddam took over and ruined Iraq with his stupid wars. Notice a pattern here? It seems to be war that retards development in these countries, not some stupid "its in their dark-age culture" argument.

EDIT - Oh, and actually answering the question, it seems unlikely that Afghanistan would be significantly different unless there is a different focus by the coalition. Prehaps if the Coalition can focus on building infastructure and promoting education, then there might be a significant difference.
 
These people's culture and society hasn't evolved or changed one iota from that of their great grandfathers (except with AK-47's and cell phones).

It's worse than that. Sharia as we know it today in all its totalitarian glory is fairly new. You know how our grandparents complain about our society getting too liberal and hedonistic? It's exactly the opposite in the Muslim world.

http://www.cracked.com/article_18510_6-supposedly-ancient-traditions-that-totally-arent.html

Scroll down to Item #4 for details. All it took was the teachings of what was at the time considered the lunatic fringe in Islam back in the 1800s to get the Muslim world where it is today. The Muslims of the Dark Ages would be horrified by the Muslim fundamentalists of today, for the exact opposite reasons Medieval Christians would be horrified by modern ones.
 
Whether we 'win' or not in Afghanistan depends a lot on what our goals are. Personally, the only goal I wanted to achieve there was wreaking bloody vengeance on Al Qaida and getting Osama Bin Laden. Arguably, we've done the first half of that, and failed miserably on the second. Taking out the Taliban? Nation building? Should never have been our goals. I'm not sure that Afghanistan can be made into a stable democracy, not because of racist reasons stated earlier, but because the place is such a mess of tangled ethnic groups who don't like each other. I've often thought that the blood and treasure we wasted screwing around in Iraq could have been put to far better use in Afghanistan, although the warplanes and tanks we used in Iraq wouldn't be so useful there (the infantry certainly would have been). As is stands now, if we can get our hands on Osama (or just his head), I'd declare victory and get the hell out...
 
Geez! Where has this thread gone?!

Anyway, for those who say that Afghanistan is and always has been a miserable, uncivilized craphole hopelessly stuck in the "Dark Ages" (whatever that means, as the time Christian Europe knew as the Dark Ages was actually an Islamic Golden Age), read this article and look at these pictures from Foreign Policy.

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/05/27/once_upon_a_time_in_afghanistan?page=full

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/05/27/once_upon_a_time_in_afghanistan?page=0,1
 
Its funny that Afghanistan along with eastern persia or Khorazem were among the richest and most culturally advanced parts of the world before the Mongol holocaust. Only Sung dynasty china ,Muslim Andalusia could match it..

War and foriegn invasion is the root cause of all that you see.
The Taliban are a reaction to that.

A good example of this is the mmisogynistic treatment of women in Afghanistan.

It would seem strange that duringt he hieght of taliban rule, most of the aghani women were rural and worked in the fields without the viel.
some even carried rifles, drove tractors and trucks.

The Taliban completly ignored them as they were not the target.
The target was western oriented educated women in the cities namely Kabul.

These were educated in the West and in the Soviet union and were very western in outlook and adopted femenist and secular ideas...

These were the targets of the Taliban, and this is why they closed down girls schools and attacked education.
 
Geez! Where has this thread gone?!

Anyway, for those who say that Afghanistan is and always has been a miserable, uncivilized craphole hopelessly stuck in the "Dark Ages" (whatever that means, as the time Christian Europe knew as the Dark Ages was actually an Islamic Golden Age), read this article and look at these pictures from Foreign Policy.

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/05/27/once_upon_a_time_in_afghanistan?page=full

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/05/27/once_upon_a_time_in_afghanistan?page=0,1

Wow, for once someone who suggests that it was the 30 years of warfare that has made Afghanistan a shithole rather than because the locals just like it better that way.
 
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