Kabullshit
January 22nd, 2007What’s the matter with our command when we have been at war with a small faction for years and still have not destroyed their capability to build schools and control “regions” of a country?
The Taliban said they will open their own schools in areas of southern Afghanistan under the group’s control, an apparent effort to win support among local residents and undermine the Western-backed government’s efforts to expand education. The announcement follows a violent campaign by the fundamentalist Islamic group against state schools in the five years since its ouster by U.S.-led forces. The Taliban destroyed 200 schools and killed 20 teachers last year, and President Hamid Karzai said Sunday that 200,000 children had been driven from the classroom.
The Taliban’s announcement that they will open schools “is like putting salt into the wound,” said Mohammad Hanif Atmar, Afghanistan’s education minister. Abdul Hai Muthmahien, the purported chief spokesman for the militants, said the group will begin providing Islamic education to students in March in at least six southern provinces, funded by $1 million allotted by the Taliban’s ruling council. He said textbooks would be the same ones used during Taliban rule. He also said education would be available to boys first and later to girls, but he did not explain if there had been a change in Taliban thinking about schooling girls. During its rule, the hardliners banned girls from schools in Kabul, the capital, although elsewhere they sometimes permitted their schooling until age 8 — but only to study the Quran, Islam’s holy book.
Muthmahien said the program had been approved by tribal elders in the region. “The U.S. and its allies are doing propaganda against the Taliban,” he said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press from an undisclosed location late Saturday. “The Taliban are not against education. The Taliban want Shariah (Islamic) education.”
Answer: a lack of resolve and a refusal to play it tough. There’s absolutely no reason not to have obliterated the Taliban a long time ago and the fact that we’re still (half-)fighting the War in Afghanistan is a testament to the Pentagon’s small mindset and the President’s incompetence. This is an embarrassment to the nation, and George Bush should be ashamed to have allowed the Taliban survival after all these years.