Better sit down for this one, folks, it really is just that shocking.
How We Lost Afghanistan
Cockburn thinks he has found the key explanation: Western elites let Afghans see what Western elite culture is like. Naturally, and inevitably, they took down their AK-47s from the wall and fought tooth and nail to prevent being assimilated into that!
I personally know quite a few folks who are fully primed and nearly ready to do the same thing right here. NYM’s brief post is by way of pointing us to this more in-depth but still concise one:
Twenty years of war in Afghanistan are over. What comes next is 20 years, or even more, of recriminations and blame for why the war ended as it did. Scholars and partisans still argue over the reasons America lost in Vietnam, so why should Afghanistan be any different?
On the plus side, the debate promises to be far more interesting. When it comes to Vietnam, partisans debate rules of engagement, bombing strategies, funding levels and the Tet Offensive. With Afghanistan, the question could be: did gender studies cause America to suffer its most humiliating defeat ever? Cockburn wishes he was joking.
Traditionally, nations have waged war by mustering armies, defeating their enemies in battle, and despoiling their lands and cities. Only after total victory is the process of remaking a society feasible.
But America in Afghanistan sought a shortcut, and by ‘shortcut’ Cockburn means ‘something that takes 10 times as long but doesn’t look as nasty for TV cameras’. America hoped that with enough half-baked social engineering in the half of Afghanistan it controlled, it would eventually be rewarded with victory, and Afghanistan would become the Holland of the Hindu Kush. On Ivy League campuses, students are taught to decry ‘colonialism’, but the Ivy League diplomats who sought to remake Afghanistan in Harvard’s image were among the most ambitious practitioners of it in world history.
So, alongside the billions for bombs went hundreds of millions for gender studies in Afghanistan. According to US government reports, $787 million was spent on gender programs in Afghanistan, but that substantially understates the actual total, since gender goals were folded into practically every undertaking America made in the country.
A recent report from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) broke down the difficulties of the project. For starters, in both Dari and Pastho there are no words for ‘gender’. That makes sense, since the distinction between ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ was only invented by a sexually-abusive child psychiatrist in the 1960s, but evidently Americans were caught off-guard. Things didn’t improve from there. Under the US’s guidance, Afghanistan’s 2004 constitution set a 27 percent quota for women in the lower house — higher than the actual figure in America! A strategy that sometimes required having women represent provinces they had never actually been to. Remarkably, this experiment in ‘democracy’ created a government few were willing to fight for, let alone die for.
The more layers stripped off the Afghanistan onion the worse it stinks, and the more ridiculous the whole clusterfuck looks to anyone with even half a lick of sense. I mean, seriously now—can there actually be a living soul on this planet who:
- Is capable of feeding himself without assistance
- Can successfully dress himself
- Understands what a flush toilet is, how to use it, and why that might be a good idea
- Who is nonetheless dim or naive enough to think that riding the “gender” hobbyhorse so beloved of overly effete Westerners across the Khyber Pass (in a manner of speaking), down the mountains, and directly into a clutch of some of the most vicious, benighted, and ardent Muzzrat primordials currently extant was ever going to accomplish a damned thing, apart from getting their blood-simple asses shot out of the saddle
Of course, as damned-nigh impossible as it is to believe, the answer is Yes. Yes, they really ARE that stupid. Our self-declared Elite masters seem to be quite proud of being abject morons; they must be, strutting around like peacocks as they do after each new failure or fiasco; quacking on and on as if they hadn’t just stepped in yet another steaming pile of their own dung, or as if no one saw them do it.
The rogue facade they built over the face of a once-legitimate US government displaced by their machinations is shot through with utter, blank stupidity, on exhibit in its every department, office, and bureau. The evidence of this stupidity is voluminous, ubiquitous, and continually mounting. It proclaims its presence with every blustering politician’s gaseous windbaggery; every unlawful, unworkable, and redundant edict; every heedlessly squandered taxpayer dollar; every empty, disingenuous claim to cherish “principles” or “values” they routinely disgrace, and are in reality contemptuous of.
So why do I say all the above is stupid? Because these mountebanks, these grifters, these preening fucking muttonheads are unswervingly convinced that their subjects all adore, respect, and trust them. Their faith in their ability to pull the wool over our eyes again and again, and to keep it there indefinitely, is absolute. If they only knew the truth: we aren’t even listening to them anymore.
Maybe we ought to set ’em straight about that, eh? And soon, too. They’d certainly profit from a good, stiff dose of enlightening, before they’ve screwed things up beyond repair.
(Via KT)
In my old research group, there was a British Pakistani post-doc who was a Deobandi Muslim. The Taliban are Deobandis, btw. He’d gone to Eton, then Oxford for his BSc and MSc, and Cambridge for his PhD. He looked and spoke like one of the British upper class, except that he had coffee-colored skin. He was married on his 21st birthday, he met his wife for the first time that night. She had been bought for him when she was six weeks old, for the sum of 100 ounces of gold, a car, camels and various other livestock, and an assortment of household goods, by his father. She had three years of formal education, enough to learn to read and write, and then she was taken out of school and taught how to keep house, cook, and raise children, by the other women in the household. She did not venture outside of the house except in the presence of her father or one of her male relatives, and she’d never learned how to drive a car – that was for men only. When Tahir and his wife showed up for research group social functions, she would be dressed in a fine silk niqab with gold thread which covered her totally, head to foot, a piece of lace covering the slit through which she could see. She walked three steps behind Tahir, and he showed her where she could sit. If someone asked her a question, she asked his permission before answering. Deobandi men have the right to beat their wives, a severe beating was three light taps of a pencil eraser on their forehead – a dire warning that if they did not obey and submit, their husband could say in the presence of two male witnesses, “I divorce thee” three times, and that would be the end of it – and her. Tahir owned everything she had, including every stitch of clothing – and the same for her children. In that dire case, she would have been sent back to her father, and her life expectancy would be short and very unpleasant. Her duties were to cook – and she was an excellent cook – keep house, and bring up the children. She did not leave the house unless in his presence. And that’s been the custom with the Deobandis for over 1000 years. Homosexuality is a death penalty offense, so is idolatry, so is looking at the daily horoscope – that’s sorcery. And gender studies … Nope, not going to happen.
The American elites are the ultimate hypocrites, they know little or nothing of the other cultures in the world, but advocate “multiculturalism” while they attempt to impose their own on other peoples, whose long-standing cultures and traditions they dismiss out of hand, what little they know of them. And they’re utterly mystified by the strong and violent opposition they get – but if culture and tradition are to be preserved, that’s exactly what needs to happen.
The American elites know exactly what they are and how they are. They don’t care. They’ll use them to destroy real Americans while playing the Useful Idiots into believing total BS because “Diversity is Our Strength”.
Besides, they’ll be relocated to places our “Elites” won’t have to deal with them. Tamir will be kept around as he’s useful and as long as he never gets his colleagues there in critical mass neither the Elite Males will care about his chattel and the Females won’t care.
As is prevalent in Hollywood. #MeToo is as much about #SheKnew and #HeKnew among Leftists.
Just as Bolsheviks believed (and Mensheviks) overthrowing the current status quo is primary and then killing your rivals in Purges comes next.
I got halfway through Machiavelli and got interrupted. I need to finish that one and move on to Sun Tsu. I read many classics in literature but I need brushing up on that and my old chess skills.