Afghanistan After The

[emmie]

American, British forces leave, experts are suggesting that the Taliban won't be able to wrest back control, i wonder...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-25879217

[emmie]

actually it was getting on its way to some from of modernisation if you look at the photos of earlier times in Afghanistan, women becoming educated, wearing western style clothes, now they are pushed into the background and are being treated like they are nothing.

[Barks]

Emmie, I'm not defending the Taliban, but the fact is they were a popular movement because they were prepared to take on the warlords and the gangsters particularly in the countryside

Much as we in the west would like them to embrace our concepts of freedom, equality and democracy that is, unfortunately, a long, long way off and no amount of military intervention is going to change that

[twofeathers]

My grandfather fought out there in the 1870's 140 years later and we are still at war with them (seems just a little insane to me)

[emmie]

we are not so much at war with the Afghan people but those who continue to terrorise them and others - and perhaps we didn't go in with the express intention of imposing some sort of order, democracy, but what they had under the Talibs was not remotely good, especially for the womenfolk

[mikey4444]

emmie...you are right, of course...my apologies. I was getting my uncivilised, uneducated and stupid people and places mixed up. But are the Taliban and Al-Qaeda not singing from the same hymnbook ( or whatever Islam used instead) ?

You have made some very good points about the way women were treated and continue to be treated by these religious extremists. I can remember an edition of Question Time a few years ago, when some chap from the UN was on and he said that hardly any children were immunised against the usual childhood diseases in Afghanistan, but within a few months of the West going into the country, nearly all had been. Clean water, education and access to modern medicine are the very least that the Afghani people should be demanding from their rulers, whoever they are.

[emmie]

i agree, and not for the women to be shut up, with no education, and used for breeding purposes, to put it bluntly.,

[anotheoldgit]

emmie

Some of those restrictions on women are in force now in Britain ie examinations by male doctors on Muslim women and of course the wearing of the burqa.

We should make a start and ban the wearing of the burga.

[FredPuli43]

The irony in that, AOG, is that, if Muslims were all as extreme as the Taleban, there would only be male doctors to examine the women since no woman would be allowed the education to become one.

Are there not 'ordinary' British women who prefer to be examined, at least intimately, by a female doctor ? It may be that , using the NHS , it's 'male or nothing' but assuming they had free choice ? It wouldn't strike me as an eccentric wish, whatever the patient's religion.

[naomi24]

If you’re in pain any help is welcome, but often it’s the men who prevent their women being treated by a male doctor – or dentist.

[FredPuli43]

Incidentally, just how far behind us , in Britain, are some Muslims ? Our first woman doctor was in 1865, Girton College opened as the initial college to admit women for degrees in 1869, moving to Cambridge in 1973; married women's property belonged to their husbands until 1882; the first woman barrister wasn't until 1923, and so on. Not all that far behind in some respects, it seems.

[naomi24]

//Incidentally, just how far behind us , in Britain, are some Muslims ?//

Unlike the Islam of the past, today’s Islam is immeasurably behind us and until it purposefully rejects fundamentalism, there it will remain.

[emmie]

unlike us, many of these countries are going backwards, we at least have equality, gay rights, sexual freedom, choice of own partners, education for all, not just for boys, men. Seeing so many women in the capital who wear the burqua, and often as not veiled, i do wonder how these women fare in our society.