Thursday, 28 November 2024

The Kamala Harris Afghanistan Legacy


Kamala Harris said she was the last person in the room when the Harris/Biden regime cooked up the stupid strategy to withdraw from Afghanistan by evacuating the military first.  Then-president of Afghanistan Ashraf Ghani fled the nation in the summer of 2021, likely taking airplanes full of cash.  Harris and secretary of state Antony Blinken gravely misjudged the strength of the Taliban, believing that it would not be able to take control of the country, at least not without a lot of time and help.  Hapless Blinken admitted in a gross understatement that the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban “has happened more quickly than we anticipated.”  It happened so fast that you would need a stopwatch to map out that timeline.

Despite her self-proclaimed advocacy for the women of the world, Kamala Harris sacrificed a generation of Afghani women and girls to the Taliban.

The Taliban is not particularly kind to women.  First, it imposed radical modesty codes, requiring women to cover themselves head to toe with thick robes.  More recently, the Taliban made it a law that a woman’s voice may not be heard outdoors.  Women were legally prohibited from speaking other than within their own houses.

Women may not go out of their homes without having a good reason, and they must be accompanied by a male family member.  But even with a father or husband by her side, a woman seen in public without good reason can be arrested, incarcerated, tortured, and killed.

Harris and Blinken pretend they do not like what they initiated and have issued a statement that they “urge the Taliban to swiftly reverse the policies and practices that restrict enjoyment by women and girls of their human rights and fundamental freedoms.”

Wow, I bet the Taliban is shaking in its boots.  If we’re really quiet, maybe we can hear the teeth chattering.

In Afghanistan, as in many other places in the world, there are households that depend on a female breadwinner — whether she works to supplement her husband’s earnings or is the sole provider.  That is gone now, with the result that many households are starving, with no social net or other provisions to feed the children of single moms who are prohibited from leaving their home or speaking outside.  Starvation is happening in Afghanistan, mostly to women and children, on a scale we cannot imagine.  It is estimated that 90% of the country faces what is euphemistically called “food insecurity.”  That means they do not know where their next meal is coming from, and often it isn’t coming from anywhere.  In the old days, nonprofit organizations and charities provided some degree of emergency food for starving Afghans, but that has mostly dried up.

More bad news for females: Girls in Afghanistan must quit school after the fifth grade.  The idea is that a girl can be educated to learn to read and write and do some basic math, but all other education is illegal.  During the war years, girls could graduate high school, and some even attended university.  Not everyone was crazy about educated women in Afghanistan, but at least the schools were open to brave women.

This education ban is going to have catastrophic consequences soon, since sharia law prohibits females from seeing male physicians.  Although strict practices of Islam often prevent women from entering many professions, medicine has always been open to women, because women need female nurses and physicians.  But if no woman can go to school anymore, there will soon be no more female clinicians.  So who will take care of women who might need cancer treatment or emergency surgery?

Answer: no one.

Who cares?  Also no one, at least no one in power.

Meanwhile, the Taliban shuttered over 200 news outlets.  Women can be arrested, detained, even incarcerated, imprisoned, and executed without what we might consider proper cause or due process.  Data with respect to how many women and girls have been executed in Afghanistan are not available, since the government does not publish them and it shut down the media outlets.  The United Nations (did I mention I don’t trust them?) has said that more women and children have been killed in Afghanistan in 2021, the year Harris orchestrated the disastrous withdrawal, than in any other year since 2009.  In other words, war was better for the women and children of Afghanistan than a Harris-imposed peace.

And in cases of rape, even the most innocent of victims is seen as an adulteress and subject to criminal penalties.  Rape is not uncommon in Afghanistan, although reports of rape are.

In January 2023, a female former member of Parliament and Taliban critic named Mursal Nabizada was shot by assassins.  The United Nations called this and some other Afghani actions “gender persecution.”  Another piece of the Harris legacy.  It’s the crime with no punishment.

The economic consequences of sharia law are devastating to families that depend, in whole or part, on women working.  The result is that many Afghan households are now giving their young daughters to rich older men (mostly wealthy Taliban types) as child brides.  Young girls are most in demand.  An Afghan family can collect a bride price by giving up a nine-year-old girl to be the third wife of some 50-year-old Taliban creep.  Despite the horror of this situation, many Afghan families offer up their daughters willingly because such a marriage means it is unlikely the daughter will die of starvation, and the family may survive a bit longer with the money she brings.  As terrible as the practice of child brides can be, it is believed to be preferable to slow starvation at home.  It’s a form of gender slavery.

And just so you don’t think that Harris is responsible for everything that’s wrong in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan...look what the Taliban has done.  It banned music.  Yes, music cannot be played or heard in public settings.  When the Taliban was previously in power from 1996 to 2001, music was also banned, so this is nothing new.  But if Harris had not choreographed it so that Afghanistan was served up on a silver platter to the Taliban, there might be music and women’s voices heard in Afghanistan.  Girls might be going to school instead of being sold to old men.

Harris did not do all of this, but she opened the door and invited all the snakes in.

<p><em>Image via <a href=

Image via Picryl.


Source link