Fogbow

Kendra wrote: ↑Mon Sep 13, 2021 7:31 pm Whew! I sat through most of today's hearing with Secretary Blinken. Thank goodness there was no Gym Jordan there, but there were other Trump nutters like Ronny Jackson.

I won't post it all here, but Aaron Rupar has some nice recaps on his Twitter page: https://twitter.com/atrupar

In case you were wondering if today's
@SenateForeign
hearing with
@SecBlinken
would be a more serious affair than the
@HouseForeign
was yesterday, Ranking Member
@SenatorRisch
is now asking the Secretary of State about the operations of the White House YouTube livestream.

A Harsh New Reality for Afghan Women and Girls in Taliban-Run Schools
Afghanistan’s new government is likely to severely restrict education for girls and women despite the Taliban’s claims that schooling will eventually resume.

By Victor J. Blue and David Zucchino
Sept. 20, 2021

KABUL, Afghanistan — The director of a girls’ school in Kabul desperately wants to learn details of the Taliban’s plan for girls’ education. But she can’t attend the weekly Taliban committee meetings on education. They are for men only.

“They say, ‘You should send a male representative,’” the director, Aqila, said inside the Sayed Ul-Shuhada High School, which was shattered in May by a terrorist bombing that killed scores of girls.

But Aqila and other Afghan educators don’t need to attend meetings to comprehend the harsh new reality of education under Taliban rule. The emerging government has made clear that it intends to severely restrict the educational freedoms enjoyed by many women and girls the past 20 years.

The only question is just how draconian the new system will be, and what type of Islamic-based education will be imposed on both boys and girls. Just as they did when they ruled most of Afghanistan in the late 1990s, the Taliban seem intent on ruling not strictly by decree, but by inference and intimidation.

When schools reopened Saturday for grades seven through 12, only male students were told to report for their studies. The Taliban said nothing about girls in those grades, so they stayed home, their families anxious and uncertain about their future. Both boys and girls in grades one through six have been attending schools, with students segregated by gender in the higher three grades.


https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/20/worl ... liban.html

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — The Taliban hanged a dead body from a crane in the main square of Herat city in western Afghanistan, a witness said Saturday, in a gruesome display that signaled a return to some of the Taliban’s methods of the past.

Wazir Ahmad Seddiqi, who runs a pharmacy on the side of the square, told The Associated Press that four bodies were brought to the main square and three bodies were moved to other parts of the city for public display.

Seddiqi said the Taliban announced in the square that the four were caught taking part in a kidnapping and were killed by police.

New Taliban Chancellor Bars Women From Kabul University
The new policy for Afghanistan’s premier university is another major blow to women’s rights under Taliban rule, and to a two-decade effort to build up higher education.

By Cora Engelbrecht and Sharif Hassan
Sept. 27, 2021

Tightening the Taliban’s restrictions on women, the group’s new chancellor for Kabul University announced on Monday that women would be indefinitely banned from the institution either as instructors or students.

“I give you my words as chancellor of Kabul University,” Mohammad Ashraf Ghairat said in a Tweet on Monday. “As long as a real Islamic environment is not provided for all, women will not be allowed to come to universities or work. Islam first.”

The new university policy echoes the Taliban’s first time in power, in the 1990s, when women were only allowed in public if accompanied by a male relative and would be beaten for disobeying, and were kept from school entirely.

Some female staff members, who have worked in relative freedom over the past two decades, pushed back against the new decree, questioning the idea that the Taliban had a monopoly on defining the Islamic faith.

“In this holy place, there was nothing un-Islamic,” one female lecturer said, speaking on condition of anonymity out of fear of reprisal, as did several others interviewed by The New York Times. “Presidents, teachers, engineers and even mullahs are trained here and gifted to society,” she said. “Kabul University is the home to the nation of Afghanistan.”



https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/27/worl ... rsity.html

Volkonski wrote: ↑Tue Sep 28, 2021 10:17 am https:// twitter.com/laraseligman/status/1442852736068956167

Lara Seligman @laraseligman
BREAKING: Milley just now acknowledges reporting that on Nov 11 he received an unclassified signed order from Trump directly the military to withdraw from Afghanistan by Jan. 15.

"After further discussions... the order was rescinded."
4:04 PM · Sep 28, 2021

Lani wrote: ↑Wed Sep 29, 2021 7:47 pm What the hell did those idjits think a small number of military personnel could do in that environment... other then be driven out or killed.

Top US general says Afghan collapse can be traced to Trump-Taliban deal
The Doha agreement, signed in February 2020, set a date for the US to fully withdraw troops by May 2021

AP in Washington
Wed 29 Sep 2021 20.44 BST

The collapse of the Afghan government and its security forces can be traced to a 2020 agreement between the Taliban and the Trump administration that promised a complete US troop withdrawal, senior Pentagon officials have told Congress.

Gen Frank McKenzie, the head of central command, told the House armed services committee that once the US troop presence was pushed below 2,500 as part of President Joe Biden’s decision in April to complete a total withdrawal by September, the unraveling of the US-backed Afghan government accelerated.

“The signing of the Doha agreement had a really pernicious effect on the government of Afghanistan and on its military, psychological more than anything else, but we set a date – certain for when we were going to leave and when they could expect all assistance to end,” McKenzie said.





https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/202 ... mp-taliban

RTH10260 wrote: ↑Tue Sep 21, 2021 6:03 am

A Harsh New Reality for Afghan Women and Girls in Taliban-Run Schools
Afghanistan’s new government is likely to severely restrict education for girls and women despite the Taliban’s claims that schooling will eventually resume.

When schools reopened Saturday for grades seven through 12, only male students were told to report for their studies. The Taliban said nothing about girls in those grades, so they stayed home, their families anxious and uncertain about their future. Both boys and girls in grades one through six have been attending schools, with students segregated by gender in the higher three grades.


https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/20/worl ... liban.html

John Thomas8 wrote: ↑Thu Sep 30, 2021 8:30 pm “I wouldn't go to war again as I have done to protect some lousy investment of the bankers. There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket."

-- Major General Smedley Darlington Butler
(1881-1940) Major General USMC, "Old Gimlet Eye'' and "Hell Devil Darling", most highly decorated military man from the pre-World War II era.
Source: from a speech in 1933

Afghan women disappear from public life by order of Taliban's Vice and Virtue Ministry - BBC News

BBC News
17 Oct 2021

The Taliban have banned girls from secondary schools across most of Afghanistan.

Women, except those in the public health sector, have not been allowed to return to work.

The fear is that they are being treated once again as second-class citizens under a hardline Taliban regime.

The BBC has obtained access to the Taliban's Vice and Virtue Ministry in the capital Kabul - what was formerly the Women’s Affairs ministry before they seized power.

Clive Myrie presents BBC News at Ten reporting by Yogita Limaye.

Female Judges in Afghanistan, Now Jobless and in Hiding
They fear that they or their loved ones could be tracked down and killed because of their work delivering justice to women. “We have lost everything — our jobs, our homes, the way we lived.”

By David Zucchino
Oct. 20, 2021

When Nabila was a judge in Afghanistan’s Supreme Court, she granted divorces to women whose husbands were sometimes jailed for assaulting or kidnapping them. Some of the men threatened to kill her after they had served their time, she said.

In mid-August, as the Taliban poured into Kabul and seized power, hundreds of prisoners were set free. Men once sentenced in Nabila’s courtroom were among them, according to the judge. Like the other women interviewed for this article, her full name has been withheld for her protection.

Within days, Nabila said, she began receiving death threat calls from former prisoners. She moved out of her house in Kabul and went into hiding as she sought ways to leave Afghanistan with her husband and three young daughters.

“I lost my job and now I can’t even go outside or do anything freely because I fear these freed prisoners,” Nabila said by phone from a safe house. “A dark future is awaiting everyone in Afghanistan, especially female judges.”

More than 200 female judges remain in Afghanistan, many of them under threat and in hiding, according to the International Association of Women Judges. Taliban officials have recovered their personal information from court records, several former judges said, and some have had their bank accounts frozen.

“They are women who had the effrontery to sit in judgment on men,” said Susan Glazebrook, president of the judges’ association and a justice of the Supreme Court in New Zealand.



https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/20/worl ... liban.html