Fighting makes Taliban too tired to beat their wives

Spread the love

Loading

Local Taleban commanders have allowed the women to be interviewed on condition that their faces are covered for photos and no one else in the village is informed. As we sit on a cheap red carpet in a cold room of their modest mud house, Mahmuda and Jawida explain that their husbands joined the Taleban six years ago, exasperated at the controversial US night-raids frequently conducted in their village.

The pair both support the Taleban despite its illiberal views on women. “They want to keep Afghanistan a good Muslim country,” Jawida says, “and we support that.”

If the Taleban return to power the two women see a brighter future for their children, including their daughters, who are banned by the movement from attending school.

“But if they [the Taleban] take power they will start religious schools for girls,” Mahmuda says.

As with nearly all Afghan women, Mahmuda’s movement is severely restricted by her husband. But she says that being the wife of an insurgent has its benefits.

“They are fighters and when they come home they are tired and don’t beat us.

Weasel Zippers

0 0 votes
Article Rating
Subscribe
Notify of

3 Comments
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments

Really, must every war we fight these days be Kafkaesque?

The ANA and NATO forces outnumber the Taliban by about 20-1. Yet, we are taught at the Academies that one needs a 10-1 to win a guerrilla war.

Now all we hear is that when NATO pulls out, the ANA will collapse (ANA outnumbers the Taliban by over 10 to 1 mind you) and the Taliban will take over.

Obvious, it isn’t the size of the dog in the fight, but the fight in the dog that counts. The West has zero fight in it for anything, apparently.

One of the things the U.S. could do is turn the military bases into colleges hospitals and cultural centers because that’s really what the war has turned into. The Taliban aren’t strong enough to take on public opinion.

Everyone should watch the 60 Minute piece on the Colombian military made in the 1990s. The troops were seen as incapable of holding up against FARC which controlled 50% of the count and had it’s own navy and air force. The U.S. turned their military around by giving it support without sending in massive amounts of troops. Now FARC controls 1% of Colombia, but it’s not the same 1% each day.

I don’t completely understand the mechanism of how these stone age brutes can be such a thorn in our side. I suspect that if you could ever remove martyrdom from the equation they would soon be spending all their energy on killing each other to the accolades of a grateful world. They do an amazing amount of that now with apparently no concept of how non-productive it is.