The same poll in 2013 shows among Muslims, 91% support in Iraq, 74% support in Egypt, 84% support in Pakistan. Didn't see Saudi Arabia in the poll, but you can take a good guess that it's very high. And yes, there is a wide view of what it entails. I find it so conveniently simplistic to forget that we are allies with Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and so on are all under Sharia law.
Bummer. Over the last few decades they’ve been increasingly exposed to secular and progressive concepts but they still persist in their 8th century nonsense. Sad for all the people it steals human dignity from.
The problem is they saw an alternative where the alternative was rife with corruption. ANCOP and ANA abused their power plenty in rural villages. Yes the women on average had it better but there were still massive issues with governance as most officials were just grifters drunk on power. Unfortunately the women don't have much say. I'm sure a majority of them would prefer the US backed government.
Was referring to all the other countries listed in the post above mine as well. Lots of exposure to media/internet western ideas. Additionally, I suspect sharia is still probably pretty popular amongst migrants who have lived in the west a generation or two. Maybe it’s getting better but it’s still very bad.
I’m just glad we’re finally out of there 1 of the biggest wastes of time, money, resources, and lives ever u know u really fcked up when 20 years of work gets obliterated in 1 week…that shows u how big a waste this whole thing was
not really. For example in the US, the percentage of American Muslims who support gay Marriage is higher than American Christians. Maybe it's a lot different in Europe though.
The United States? The country we live in? The leader of Western nations? The world's hegemonic power?
If all the people who decided to leave decided to fight they might still have a country. I mean there were only 77k Taliban. In all honesty there was nothing worth fighting for. They probably glad they got the opportunity to get out.
You don’t have to play cute. You and I both know the story of assimilation varies in West and The United States has probably the best assimilated community.
The conservative pro-war crowd and their kissing cousins the sort of liberal centrists so common in the mainstream media still maintain that we could have maintained the status quo in Afghanistan by keeping a few thousand troops, training the Afghans lol and bombing the sheet out of the Taliban. A thorough refutation by surprisingly an article in Newsweek. Arguing that aside from the enormous number of Afghan civilians killed in forever war , that the Afghan army was having more casualties than it could sustain. https://www.newsweek.com/us-there-was-no-goldilocks-option-afghanistan-opinion-1623412
Taliban to Allow 200 Americans, Other Foreigners to Fly Out of Kabul No Afghans without foreign citizenship are expected to be allowed on the flight to Qatar https://www.wsj.com/articles/taliba...fly-out-of-kabul-11631173763?mod=hp_lead_pos1 excerpt KABUL—Afghanistan’s Taliban authorities are allowing some 200 Americans and other foreign citizens to leave the country on a flight to Qatar scheduled for Thursday, the first such departure by air since U.S. forces withdrew last month, Qatari and American officials said. The expected flight by a Qatar Airways Boeing 777 would mark the resumption of international passenger operations at Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport, and is expected to be followed by daily air links to foreign countries, a senior Qatari official said. The Qatari official said it wasn’t an evacuation flight as all the passengers hold foreign passports and, if required, visas to their destinations, and have been ticketed by the airline. Qatar is facilitating the movement to the airport in a convoy of minibuses that were parked Thursday morning in a Kabul hotel, one of them with a bullet hole through the windshield. Most of the foreign citizens still in Afghanistan are dual nationals. The Taliban have consistently pledged to allow foreigners to leave unimpeded. At Tuesday’s press conference announcing the formation of their new government, the movement’s spokesman and new deputy information minister, Zabiullah Mujahid, said problems with international travel would be resolved soon. “When Afghans and foreigners want to leave Afghanistan, they should do it lawfully, having a passport and visa,” he said. *** For more than a week, about 100 Americans and hundreds of at-risk Afghans looking to flee the country have been waiting in the northern Afghan city of Mazar-e-Sharif on a deal to allow them to fly out on charter flights. Mazar-e-Sharif’s international airport hasn’t been damaged. These negotiations have been bogged down, thwarting the efforts. Secretary of State Antony Blinken pressed the Taliban on Wednesday to allow people to leave. “The Taliban are not permitting the charter flights to depart. They claim that some of the passengers do not have the required documentation,” he told reporters at a press conference with German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas at Ramstein Air Base, where thousands of Afghans who fled the country are staying while various Western governments try to work on resettlement plans. “We’ve made clear to all parties—we’ve made it clear to the Taliban—that these charters need to be able to depart.” On Wednesday, Taliban officials told organizers working on the charter flights that they would allow Americans and others with valid passports and visas to fly out of Kabul, but not from Mazar-e-Sharif. At the same time, U.S. officials started calling Americans waiting in Mazar-e-Sharif for flights and told them to come to Kabul. It remained unclear how many Americans in Mazar-e-Sharif could make it back to Kabul for Thursday’s flight. U.S. officials have vowed to help all Afghans who worked with America over the last two decades that want to leave.
Except none of them held that position when Trump was in office saying (in a bafoonish fashion) the same thing Biden is saying about Afghanistan. Im not at all surprised at the Repugs who are desperate to land a blow any way they can even if it means death and economic collapse because that’s who they are, but I am surprised at the “Centrists” and the MSM who seem to think that landing a blow on Biden’s policy on Afghanistan helps them and the country out. The fact is everyone knows Afghanistan status quo wasn’t sustainable. Everyone who knows anything knows that even after the 2010 surge the Taliban still regained control of like 80% of the country and staying in Afghanistan even as “advisors” meant that the US would be engaging in a massive either proxy war or a more than likely war war with the Taliban. That would have just got us back to 2012 again and then years later we’d be back where we are again. The old saying about what insanity is applies here. I like the Biden approach here to shift towards diplomatic influence even if it means cutting some deals with crappy dictators and warlords. Everyone knows the status quo was unsustainable. What’s shocking is that people think it’s a good idea to act otherwise when the both political leaders of both parties say the opposite and their voters obviously agree with them.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/09/06/terrorism-new-phase-ali-soufan/ Opinion: The terrorism threat is entering a new, more dangerous phase Opinion by Ali Soufan September 6, 2021 at 8:19 a.m. EDT Ali Soufan, a former FBI counterterrorism agent, is a private security consultant and the author of “Anatomy of Terror: From the Death of Bin Laden to the Rise of the Islamic State.” On Sunday, the Biden administration separately dispatched both Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to the Persian Gulf region. The goal, according to media reports, was to reassure allies there that even though President Biden withdrew U.S. forces from Afghanistan and said he wants to focus on security threats from China and Russia, the United States remains committed to fighting terrorist extremism. It seems to be dawning on the Biden administration that the chaotic evacuation from Afghanistan ahead of the 20th anniversary of 9/11 sent the opposite message: that the “war on terror” was a closed chapter in U.S. history. Much more than Blinken-Austin glad-handing will be needed, because the terrorism era is far from over. A new, more dangerous phase has begun. Despite the Taliban’s protestations to the contrary, al-Qaeda remains fused to the militants running Afghanistan, by an oath made by Osama bin Laden, and twice renewed by his successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri. In May, a U.N. monitoring group said of al-Qaeda that “it would be difficult, if not impossible, to separate it from its Taliban allies.” Al-Qaeda is hardly the only terrorist group with a presence in Afghanistan. Most prominently, the local Islamic State affiliate, ISIS-Khorasan, or ISIS-K, is a deadly threat, as shown by the horrific bombings at the Kabul airport last month. Afghanistan is on the verge of again becoming a hub for terrorism. Even before the Taliban fully took over, various extremist groups were running training camps there, the way they did before 9/11. The U.N. report in May estimated the total number of foreign fighters in the country at 8,000 to 10,000, including groups from the Arab world, Central Asia and the Uyghur areas of China. Following the U.S. withdrawal, my organization’s monitoring of Islamist communications on social media and in chat rooms indicated that groups as far afield as Syria and Southeast Asia began redirecting potential recruits to Afghanistan. Biden touts an “over the horizon” use of drones and cruise missiles to combat terrorist outposts in Afghanistan. But in 2015, dismantling one large al-Qaeda camp in Afghanistan, near the Pakistan border, required 63 coalition airstrikes and a ground force of 200 U.S. troops. The Afghan skies would need to be filled with U.S. military hardware to destroy the terrorist bases that are likely on the way. Yet the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan hasn’t simply reset the clock to Sept. 10, 2001, with the Taliban again ruling Afghanistan. Today is different in one critical respect: Afghanistan is now far from the only country in the region where extremist groups hold sway. Large swaths of Libya, Somalia, Yemen, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq are all, to a greater or lesser extent, ruled by non-state militias, creating an arc of instability from North Africa to South Asia. These groups work with different agendas (many, though not all, take direction from Iran’s Quds Force), but they share one thing in common: virulent anti-Americanism. Moreover, as things stand, there is little the United States can do about it, because as these groups expand their power, America appears to be in retreat. Over the past decade or so, the United States has systematically dismantled its influence across most of the region’s flash points. U.S. embassies in several countries, including Libya, Yemen, Syria and now Afghanistan, have been closed. The United States demonstrably, humiliatingly, cannot control its nominal allies in Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. And in Iraq, despite a vast sacrifice of blood and treasure, we are forced to tolerate political leaders who flaunt their membership in Iranian-controlled militias. Despite the Biden administration’s professed desire to refocus on countering security threats from Russia and China, the pullout from Afghanistan seems only to have bolstered these authoritarians. British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab recently said that to rein in the Taliban, “we’re going to have to bring in countries with a potentially moderating influence, like Russia and China, however uncomfortable that is.” For the United States, after 20 years and trillions of dollars, that is more than uncomfortable, it is a tragedy. The only remedy is to urgently reengage with the region. Not just, or even mainly, militarily. Special Forces raids and drone strikes will continue to be essential in fighting terrorism. But the U.S. failure in Afghanistan made clear that there is no exclusively military solution to this problem. The anti-terror toolbox has some underused options to go along with the hammer: diplomacy, development assistance, intelligence, law enforcement, trade. We should deploy them, wherever possible, not only to assist U.S. allies, but also as part of comprehensive diplomatic initiatives that promote stability and advance political solutions to the various conflicts destabilizing the region. In 1989, as a very different superpower withdrew from Afghanistan in defeat, the United States shut down its embassy in Kabul. For 12 years, we tried our best to ignore Afghanistan — until the horror of 9/11 finally forced us awake. Now, Western governments are being tempted to turn the page on Afghanistan again. That would be a colossal mistake.
