Taliban: NGOs employing women will be banned & building should not have windows that women can be seen

[IwantToRetire]

In the latest crackdown on women’s rights in Afghanistan, the Taliban have announced they will no longer allow any national or foreign NGOs that employ women to operate in the country. In a letter published on social platform X on Sunday night, the Economy Ministry said NGOs that do not comply with the new rule will lose their licenses to operate.
Full article https://www.france24.com/en/asia-pacific/20241230-ngos-employ-afghan-women-face-closure-new-taliban-rule

Afghanistan's Taliban leader has ordered that new residential buildings are constructed without windows looking onto "places usually used by women" and said that existing windows with such views should be blocked to prevent "obscene acts".
Full article https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20241229-taliban-leader-bans-windows-overlooking-women-s-areas

"If you give all the women of Afghanistan a free choice, unbound by a lack of access and education, and they all choose this, that's one thing. But men imposing this 'culture' on them is quite another."

I would argue that by trying to set up an "alien " system of governance" and interfering in the country over the last 40 years or more the west has radicalised the country and increased extremism and fundamentalism there making things worse for the women that live there.

Ultimately change will have to come from within . Not sure how this can best be supported though

Trump who invited the Taliban to Camp David and later made the deal with them for the withdrawal of US troops? The deal which did not even involve the Afghan government? Biden was in the hot seat when the withdrawal actually finished (so catastrophically), but he inherited it.

8 September 2019: Trump cancels secret US meeting with Afghan Taliban
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-49624132

29 February 2020: Afghan conflict: US and Taliban sign deal to end 18-year war
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-51689443

If you're waiting for Trump to do something useful to protect Afghan women you'll be waiting a long time.

There might be some empty bloviating if he thinks there's something in it for him, but the idea of protecting women doesn't motivate sex-offender Trump and he's highly unlikely to do anything useful.

That's not to say some opportunity to assist Afghan women won't come up serendipitously, and then we can take advantage of it. But sadly, don't hold your breath.

Hence, 'graveyard of empires'.

Imposing from without is always a terrible idea. Imposing from without and then abandoning women is even worse.

For those of you against ‘imposing from without’, should the holocaust not have been counteracted because it was a part of German ‘culture’ at the time if we were to assume that it were a stand alone event with Germany’s borders?

There has to come a time when regime change from without is the right thing to do. The question is how bad does it need to get.

Personally I think that, in Afghanistan, the threshold has now been exceeded.

Whether we put troops on the ground or just bomb Taliban assets from the air until they demonstrably improve women’s rights is a matter of strategy or tactics.

The Taliban couldn’t be more different than apartheid South Africa. There they had plenty to lose including considerable internal opposition to Apartheid (including my antecedents), so sanctions had value.

Talking about it will achieve precisely zero other than appeasing consciences either for the women of Afghanistan or any similar misogynist theocratic regime.

Germany kept invading countries until everyone chose a side. We didn't start a war to counteract the holocaust.

The idea of a just war is always argued using the holocaust. It's the gotcha everyone loves. But that wasn't why the Second World War happened.

The mistake most people make is to assume the Taliban are really modern men playing at being medieval - sort or LARPing it up - and that they are aware what they are doing is somehow debilitating.

They aren't. They really do believe in the divine nature of what they are doing in exactly the same way our forebears believed they were saving womens souls by burning them at the stake. Yes, that system too was used to suppress women by a ruling elite playing on the superstitions of the ill educated.

I don't know what the answer is, but approaching it as if a smack around the chops will somehow "bring them out of it won't work".

If we could travel back in time and try to tell our ancestors that there is no such thing as witchcraft, it wouldn't stop the burnings, just require more fuel for us to be saved too.

"Whether we put troops on the ground or just bomb Taliban assets from the air until they demonstrably improve women’s rights is a matter of strategy or tactics."

Will you be passing the trump test and putting yourself in the line of fire, then?

There's something that weighs on my mind a lot regarding Afghanistan, Russia, and other current conflicts.

Germany changed after WW2 because Germany wanted to change.

Germany didn't change after WW1 because then it didn't want to change, and in fact wanted even more of the same.

It is this "wanting to change" which cannot be successfully imposed from outside.

Sure, outside agencies can help it along: there was a deliberate attempt at de-Nazification of postwar Germany by the Allies; and recent the Western presence in Afghanistan offered a certain amount of education for women and facilities for all (off the top of my head I can remember a big water-provision project).

But in the end, the interests which find their expression in the Taliban and their pals al-Qaeda have remained. So as soon as any obstacle holding them back is removed, they resurge.

The same is true in Russia. Even when Putin disappears (by old age or forcible removal), Russia will not suddenly change. Russians will not suddenly unlearn all that decades of tightly controlled media and education taught them about Russian history. Putin's imperial project is supported by extremist nationlists in Russia and will remain a threat to all the independent countries which were ever sucked into the Russian empire in whichever guise.

This is silly. I think there's an enormous difference between the Taliban and the average western government in terms of misogyny.

"Ultimately change will have to come from within . Not sure how this can best be supported though."

Yes, this.

Although I disagree with the idea that:
"40 years or more the west has radicalised the country and increased extremism and fundamentalism there"
because they were already very fundamentalist and the home of extremism.

The Russians only withdrew from Afghanistan 1989, so 36 years ago. It's not like Afghanistan was at peace until then.

@MrsTerryPratchett ,

‘Germany kept invading countries until everyone chose a side. We didn't start a war to counteract the holocaust.’

Did you read my post, which contained a conditional clause and a hypothetical question? I am aware of when and why we entered the war.

‘The idea of a just war is always argued using the holocaust. It's the gotcha everyone loves. But that wasn't why the Second World War happened.’

It is a reductio ad extremum argument and one that is also personal to me, being Jewish.

But, if you prefer a more recent example, how about our intervention in the Bosnian genocide?

It's personal to me, being female. And we're on the Feminism board. I get a little irked with men on here telling me what to think and feel.

@MrsTerryPratchett ,

‘It's personal to me, being female. And we're on the Feminism board. I get a little irked with men on here telling me what to think and feel.’

The holocaust is?! Because you are female?

Except I didn’t tell you what to think in the least.

I told you that I thought the Taliban’s actions merited intervention and I asked a polite hypothetical question to everyone.

You chose to respond to my post by attacking the premise behind it, either without reading it or reading it and choosing to disingenuously misinterpret it.

I then asked another polite hypothetical question re the siege of Sarajevo, which you also chose not to engage with.

Regardless of what board we are on, we are all allowed to state our opinions politely. I would have thought that my disgust to the point of wanting to militarily intervene on the basis of how the Taliban are treating females would at least resonate with you.

No, obviously the Taliban abusing women is personal. And the millions upon millions of missing women who have been murdered, aborted, starved everywhere.

I won't be engaging with you again on this thread. Read the name of the Board and the title of the thread.

Germany didn't change after WW1 because then it didn't want to change, and in fact wanted even more of the same.

no. Germany was literally bled dry (bombed into the stone age) and they were on the bones of their arse as a country due to the overly harsh terms of the Treaty of Versailles.

I'm sure plenty of them (leadership types) did think they should be top dog and wanted to provoke another massive war to prove that, but joe bloggs? they were buying bread with wheelbarrows full of money.

It's way more complicated than that of course as is Afghanistan. The west (ok the British Empire) had never won a war in the country and nobody ever will. That is not what I'm all about though. I want acknowledgement that in a democratic society, women's rights are worthwhile.

Coming soon to a Syria near you

This is the fear, of course. That Syria's release from a viscious, murderous, authoritarian dictator will be out of the frying pan, into the fire.

We're still at the "cautious hope" stage with that one.

havent the new powers that be in Syria started indicating that's the way they want to go - opressing women?

In what way was Germany "bombed into the stone age" in the First World War? Perhaps a confusion for the Second World War? In WWI most bomber planes weren't advanced enough for long-distance bombing on a large scale. German largely fought its war elsewhere and other countries had the pleasure of being turned into moonscapes.

The penalties of the Treaty of Versaille weren't sufficient to prevent Germany building a highly advanced industrial-military complex within a mere 20 years, so "bombed back to the stone age" is particularly inapt.

After WW1, Germany was overt about the fact it was building an empire, intended to compete with the British empire aka largest empire the world has ever known.

The leadership types got enough buy-in from the people buying bread with wheelbarrows of money to be able to mobilise an army, invade much of Europe, carry off The Wrong Sorts to concentration camps, and have enthusiastic volunteers dobbing in their neighbours to ensure everyone toed the line.

By "more of the same" I didn't mean they intended to be in the trenches being killed, but there were certainly enough people in favour of solving their own unhappiness by attacking other people, and other countries, to enable it.

So no, not identically the same, but certainly more of a medicine of a very similar kind to the one which had failed the previous time round. This is what I mean by the country not having changed this aspect of itself after WWI.

Anyway, quibbling aside, I think we are probably in considerable agreement that merely invading a country is not sufficient to make it abandon the values one objects to in it.

One way or another the change has to come from within.

You're right it's not just Afghanistan and Taliban rules.

Girls in some places in the Middle East are taken out of school as soon as they can read and write to "learn to be a housewife" married at the ages of 14/15 to older cousins who they've been engaged to from birth.

These girls are breeding machines and have no life whatsoever, they don't even realise it because it's all they understand, it's just their culture it's normal.
Human rights issues regarding women are worldwide and in remote areas laws can't be or just aren't enforced so these men get away with it.

Janice Turner has published another piece on this today, calling for the boycott of the February England-Afghanistan cricket fixture. She suggests the Taliban love cricket and have posed for photographs with some of the team's stars. It certainly wouldn't change anything for Afghan women immediately, but it would be a start and, as others have said, would at least make it appear as if we don't condone these horrors. Link here, archive link below https://www.thetimes.com/comment/columnists/article/cricketers-should-stand-up-to-talibans-gender-apartheid-j6x8wwnsq

https://archive.ph/m8LYy

"Janice Turner has published another piece on this today, calling for the boycott of the February England-Afghanistan cricket fixture"

By far the most influential cricket board for international cricket is the bcci. You'd need them to be on board for this to gain traction..

yeah i've just been told on twitter that calling for a boycott of Afghan cricket is "silly" and "virtue signalling"

This is what he said "No I don't stand with anyone who makes ridiculous, shallow and virtue signalling demands. As for standing with women, I have been a supporter of GC thinking for a while. I think I have also liked several of your tweets. Take your braindead sarcasm and stuff it."

so my resolution - insofar as i make them - is: gloves off. no more #BeKind. No pandering to "allys" i will plough my own furrow

You can look to communities a lot closer to home in the U.K. where this happens - white Christian ones at that.