Category Archives: Mission to Afghanistan

Taliban asserts harsh sharia in Swat valley. Forces women to ‘marry’ militants.

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I put marry in quotes because if one party of the two being ‘married’ is forced it is hardly marriage by any definition a civilized person would recognize. In fact on the issue of Islamic polygamy I am indifferent to the aspect of multiple wives. It is the concept of Islamic marriage as a whole I object to. When a woman is forced into a marriage often as young as six years old to men in their thirties and older it is slavery not marriage and a ceremony does not change that. Read the story below from India Express to get an idea of how the Taliban is managing to reassert its old regime and draconian version of sharia law in Pakistan’s Swat Valley in the North West Frontier Province. It really is dificult to imagine that anyone would want to live this way let alone force this way of life upon as many others as they are able. I will post a video at the bottom of this article which shows how a teenager from Pakistan was tricked into becoming a ‘shahid’ or suicide bomber. Fortunately for him and his potential victims he was arrested and taken into custody in Afghanistan.

Islamabad: On the heels of their crusade against girls going to schools, the Taliban have now issued new dictum in the areas under their sway asking parents of the grown up daughters to marry them to militants or ‘face dire consequences’.This new force-marriage campaign is being run in most of the areas in the Pakistan’s troubled NWFP through regular announcements made in mosques to congregations.

Such instances have come to light recently through some of the affected women daring to go to authorities for justice rather than meekly surrender to the militants dictates.

Salma, who teaches in a primary school in Peshawar, told the influential ‘Dawn’ newspaper that Taliban have told families to declare in mosques if they have unmarried girls so that their hand could be given in marriage, most probably to militants.

If they did not do so, the girls would be forcibly married off; the newspaper quoted the 30-year-old widow as saying.

She also said the Taliban in the Swat valley of NWFP have threatened women with dire punishment, if they are found outside their homes without identity cards and a male relative accompanying them. Couples should also carry ‘Nikah Nama’ or marriage certificates with them when they venture out of home or they will be in trouble, she said.”I have heard that Taliban have announced that if a girl above the age of seven is found outside her house, she would be slaughtered,” Salma said.

Once an avid listener of Pakistani Taliban commander Maulana Fazlullah’s FM radio station, Salma doesn’t tune in to the channel any more.

“Usually there is only dreadful news on the radio, so I stopped listening to it,” said Salma, who has three sons.

Fazlullah, also known as Mullah Radio for the fiery sermons he broadcasts on his illegal FM station, leads a campaign by Taliban militants to enforce Shariat or Islamic law in Swat.

Fazlullah’s followers have blown up or torched over 100 girls’ schools in Swat and barred women from going to markets.

The Taliban’s recent decision to completely ban girls’ education from January 15 has upset Salma and her colleagues because most of them are the sole bread-winners of their families.

“My colleagues were crying when they heard this bad news. Some have aged and handicapped parents while others have lost their male members in the ongoing conflict,” she said.

“Our principal has said that all female teachers should write down the domestic problems forcing them to work so that they could be forwarded to Taliban, who would be requested to review their policy about women’s education,” Salma said.

And now the video of the captured suicide bomber from CNN.COM

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Some vid caps of Muslim love of their own children

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Here are 4 video captures of how a loving taliban offers to assist school kids walking home from school with his jeep taken from this US forces video

In the first one we see some Afghani kids walking home from school. Probably some girls enjoying the first opportunity for a real education are among the students.

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Below, a clearer picture of the children as a Jeep approaches to offer them a lift Islamic style. I think the Taliban should try out their slogan for the western press with respect to girls getting an education…..

Graves Not Schools!

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The jeep slows down so as to be able to lift the maximum number of school kids who clearly do not know enough about their proud heritage of Islam

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And lastly the jeep taking all the kids for a last ride right to Allah. I wonder how many lives it gets per ton of C4.

Do watch the video its only about a minute here.

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India fears Pakistan will manufacture more fake Hindu terror to blame on India

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From the times of India

NEW DELHI: Last week’s bomb blast in Lahore could have become a diplomatic incident if a little known Taliban group had not
owned responsibility.

However, the incident has many security officials worried, because in the coming days and weeks, there could be other such “incidents” manufactured by the over-active Pakistani establishment to “blame” India.

The fear is that the process could go to the extreme of triggering bigger blasts at institutions and then describing them as “Indian surgical strikes” which could then “invite” Pakistani retaliation.

There is a general conclusion in India that the Pakistan army is spoiling for a fight. That has resulted in a lot of diversionary tactics including hoax calls, air force alerts and moving troops towards the Indian border, to leave the western border unattended.

The Lahore blast last week, which killed one person, prompted the Pakistani establishment to blame India, even saying that they had arrested an Indian. This could have had implications if it hadn’t been for some Taliban group in Waziristan claiming responsibility.

Subsequently, India was concerned enough to issue a rare travel advisory to its citizens, asking them to get out of Pakistan forthwith to avoid being implicated in some strange event there.

Sources said the strategic reason for Pakistan army and jihadis trying to provoke a conflict with India is not far to see. It suits them if India reacts like it did in 2001-02 with Operation Parakram, the mass mobilisation exercise. The Pakistan army and the jihadis don’t want security forces in the FATA and NWFP areas. This would give the Taliban a free hand to take positions in Afghanistan and make the resurgence of Taliban into a regime change game. Or at the very least, have their forces in position before new US president Barack Obama sends his 30,000-strong “surge” in Afghanistan by spring. In many ways, it would be the decisive war for Afghanistan.

But this is a dangerous strategy, analysts said, because the blowback on Pakistan could be equally huge. It could create the space for Pashtuns and Taliban to create a swathe of “Talibanistan” in the tribal areas.

The first signs of this is already being seen. Pakistani media is already apprehensive of the implications of the fall of Swat and Orakzai agencies to the Taliban this week. In Swat, the announcement to close girls schools by January 15 is being seen as the tipping point.

An editorial in The News said, “The notion that somehow the militants are our allies runs as a strong and deep current through elements of the army and intelligence services, the bureaucracy and the politicians themselves. There are powerful forces that provide tacit if not overt support to them, forces which would like to see the Taliban triumphant in the rest of Pakistan and not just Swat. The caliphate of Swat is becoming a reality before our eyes. Where next?”

French Department store gets bomb … Scare? something unislamic about this one. No one died.

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This is probably some anarchist or communist group. Muslim’s don’t warn anyone nor do they ‘forget’ the detonators. In fact it’s unlikely Muslim groups would use dynamite as they tend to prefer Semtex or improvised explosives. Since Russia’s emergence on to the world stage with the attack on Georgia we have seen them go back to funding every two bit rebel group from the FLQ in Quebec Canada to far right wing extremists in Germany. Russia as it’s no longer impeded by communist ideology is now free to fund any group at all that can keep a nation off balance and ideally a western NATO nation. So the story below seems suspiciously more Russian funded leftists than it does Islamic. When was the last time a Muslim terrorist warned about ‘Capitalist stores’?

Afghan militants plant dynamite in the ‘Harrods’ of Paris and tell France: ‘Get your troops out of our country by February’

By Peter Allen and Mail Foreign Service
Last updated at 3:05 PM on 16th December 2008

Terrorists brought panic to the heart of Paris this morning after dynamite was discovered in one of the city’s most famous department stores.

Police evacuate Department store.

Police evacuate Department store.

Thousands of shoppers and staff were evacuated from Printemps, the French equivalent of Harrods, following a warning from a previously unknown group calling itself the Afghan Revolutionary Front.

They had threatened to bring ‘death and destruction’ unless French troops leave Afghanistan.

Police officers outside the Printemps department shop in Paris this lunchtime after the explosives had been neutralized

The explosives were found in the washrooms of the menswear department shortly after the store was opened today.

Anti-crime brigades and de-mining teams were called in, and the store evacuated and cordoned off to prevent any harm to shoppers crowding the busy streets less than two weeks before Christmas.

British shoppers were among those caught up in the drama.

Nina Bradshaw, of North London, said: ‘It was absolute chaos. We were told to get out immediately, and didn’t hang about.

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The cowardice & misogyny of Islamic extremism

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In mid November two men on a motorcycle tossed acid in the faces of young Afghani girls walking to school in Khandar as punishment for wanting to be educated. The group of schoolgirls some as young as fourteen, have all been disfigured for life with two permanently blinded. All of their mothers insist they will not allow their daughters to continue their schooling for fear they will be either maimed again, or eventually murdered for the offence.

George Petrolekas and Mike Capstick write in an editorial in today’s Ottawa Citizen:

” And as punishment, at least two of those girls will never see the light of day again; their friends and countless hundreds of other little girls equally condemned to a lesser life as the very fear of venturing outside their homes denies them a future as surely as the acid in the eyes has accomplished. And to that end, it is no different than the torching of schools, the beheading of teachers and the intimidation of parents”.

I predict that this recent example of human depravity will sink to the bottom of our collective conscience like the many other countless examples of terrorism have found themselves. Worse, it will provide one more opportunity for the apologizers of terror to which there are many, to spin their usual, pap and nonsense. Common catch phrases such as ‘root cause’, ‘ cultural misunderstanding’, the ‘resistance to western influence’, ‘religious hijacking’ or ‘religious misinterpretation” will all surface by the usual suspects to explain away the revolting and bizarre tactics of those who would impose horror at every turn, every day, against innocents. For those who work diligently to convince the world community turn a blind eye to the insufferable inhumane treatment of these girls and who would deny the Islamic religious component of these atrocities, the media will once again be labelled as an ‘islamophobic, Zionist institution with a never ending anti-Islam bent’. Blah, blah, blah.

What sheer and utter nonsense.

To entertain this piety is to abandon the clear plight of women and girls in Afghanistan and to condone the oppressive and suffocating lives these women are forced to endure. While fomenting imams in North American and European mosques spew their transplanted misogynist rhetoric with near carte blanche ease, many Western politicians work over time to bastardize long established Western values to accommodate these extremist, retrograde views that continue to deny women lives of dignity, freedom and the right to fulfill their full potential as equal human beings. Misogyny is an undeniable constant in much of the Middle East. While all this dialogue dithering, religious sentimentality and cultural tolerance is hashed out across America and Europe, these Afghan mothers and daughters must surely feel an overwhelming sense of abandonment.  

I cannot understand the passive response, excuses and warped justifications made in reference to such incidents, especially by many western women’s rights groups. Is gender equality a quality of life notion which should only be guaranteed for western women? Why do these medieval tyrants deserve an ounce of consideration or their backers access to fair dialogue? How many western mothers would be willing to barter the well being of their own daughters away for cultural, religious sentiment? Zero? All?

Messrs. Petrolekas and Capstick continue: “this day, girls won’t go to school for fear, not because they don’t belong there, but because misogynist terrorists have made the decision for them”. ‘For the sake of another generation we must not forget these girls, as their unseeing eyes exhort us to do more; we cannot let our own granddaughters conclude that we stood about and did nothing’.  

Grace

Child Brides, Afghanistan, the CIC and Mohamed El Masry

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In this heartbreaking slide show from World Vision, you get a clear idea about how bad conditions are for women in Afghanistan and thats today under the new ‘liberal’ non Taliban government. I feel even the intensely felt comments of the women who put these slides together show that the commentator still doesn’t get it. She makes the usual claim of ‘root causes’ of poverty and so on that causes women or more accurately, little girls even Maurice Chevalier would be ashamed to look at, to be sold into marriage.

I suppose thats understandable in that World Vision is seeking money to spread to solve these problems as they understand them. But the problem is Islam. If these girls where sent to a decent agriculture school and taught how to use genetically modified strains of food suited for these conditions poverty would be greatly reduced as they have everywhere these products are used. Islam holds no value for women as persons but great value as chattel. So no amount of money will improve the rights of women in Afghanistan or else we would see Saudi Women as having the best rights on Earth. Or at least having the right to drive a car. Or not be killed for being raped which is clearly a result of a property crime as opposed to a human one.

Here is a link to an interview with

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with a woman who is speaking on the condition of women’s rights in Afghanistan today. This woman makes the case for Petreaus. Send more troops. However you cant change the entire culture of a people and a nation no matter how much force you use unless at the very least, you actually try to. There is no way to improve the conditions for women and people in general in Afghanistan if you leave people thinking the way they always have and the way that caused these issues in the first place.

Then we have Mohamed El Masry, spokesmouth for the Canadian Islamic Confrence. It should come as no surprise that the CIC’s position is women have the same or better rights in Islamic nations than they do in the western world.

Here are a few choice moments from the above linked article:

“You’d think that the media in our so-called “liberal” society would pay more attention to concrete issues that genuinely compromise and demean the quality of life of Western women, who are statistically at greatest risk from the effects of poverty, pornography, domestic abuse, marginalization, or lack of educational opportunities in career-building fields (like maths and sciences).”

Of course it doesn’t take a minute to discover that in Islamic nations schools that teach women more than Koran are often burned to the ground. Should those women inside not be wearing a Hijab at the time, they may not be allowed to leave.

Not to mention that the whole paragraph is utter nonsense. Women in he western world have over fifty percent of the total wealth and much or most of that is from wealth ‘redistribution’ from divorces. While this itself is not a good thing and needs careful scrutiny as a process, it certainly makes minced pork out of ElMasri.

I am tempted to refute the CIC post point for point but playing ‘whack a mole’ is exhausting. Anyone who may feel tempted to believe any of the patent nonsense and abuse of logic in it may wish to investigate his claims and attempts to make the liberal democracies appear to be the problem. If they where, why are all the Muslims coming to western nations with a conspicuous absence of women from the west applying for Visa’s to live (certainly not work, thats not allowed in many Muslim nations) in Kandahar; Tehran; Islamabad or Riyadh.

Lastly i invite you to read a particularly excellent essay by Phyllis Chesler who did in fact move to Afghanistan. Well she thought she was visiting but it turned out she was moving as once she got there the first thing the Afghans did was take away her passport.

I think we would do well to ask ourselves exactly what is it we are doing in Afghanistan. Are we so so committed to our path of cultural egalitarianism we are willing to lose this war? Because thats the choice. Either be prepared to fight Islam the way we fought Nazism and Communism and other repugnant inhuman ideologies or be prepared to lose.

Phyllis Chesler. ‘How Afghanistan shaped my feminism’

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This is an older essay by Chesler but truly excellent. I meant to post it many months ago and thought I did but here it is again. From ME Quarterly

How Afghan Captivity Shaped My Feminism

by Phyllis Chesler
Middle East Quarterly
Winter 2006, pp. 3-10

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On December 21, 1961, when I returned from Afghanistan, I kissed the ground at New York City’s Idlewild Airport. I weighed 90 pounds and had hepatitis. Although I would soon become active in the American civil rights, anti-Vietnam war, and feminist movements, what I had learned in Kabul rendered me immune to the Third World romanticism that infected so many American radicals. As a young bride in Afghanistan, I was an eyewitness to just how badly women are treated in the Muslim world. I was mistreated, too, but I survived. My “Western” feminism was forged in that most beautiful and treacherous of countries.

In 1962, when I returned to Bard College, I tried to tell my classmates how important it was that America had so many free libraries, so many movie theatres, bookstores, universities, unveiled women, freedom of movement on the streets, freedom to leave our families of origin if we so chose, freedom from arranged marriages—and from polygamy, too. This meant that as imperfect as America may be, it was still the land of opportunity and of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

My friends, future journalists, artists, physicians, lawyers, and intellectuals, wanted only to hear fancy Hollywood fairy tales, not reality. They wanted to know how many servants I had and whether I ever met the king. I had no way of communicating the horror, and the truth. My American friends could not or did not want to understand. As with my young college friends so long ago, today’s leftists and progressives want to remain ignorant.

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Freedumb in Afghanistan, Islam style.

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How do you spell freedom in Afghanistan?

F R E E D U M B.

On October 21,2008 an Afghan appeal court overturned a death penalty ruling against student journalist Sayed Perwiz Kambakhsh, sentencing him instead to twenty years imprisonment. His crime? Questioning the tenets of Islam relating to women. The charge? Blasphemy. 

One year ago, Mr. Perwiz Kambakhsh was arrested for downloading an article from the internet which discussed and questioned Islam’s treatment of women under sharia law. He proceeded to bring the article in question to journalism class, presumably hoping to debate it’s contents. His professor informed the authorities and he was promptly arrested and charged with insulting Islam.He sits in pul-e-Charki prison. This was not an act committed by the Taliban, but by the Afghan government, which surely must convince even the most stubborn defender of the world’s religion of peace that brutality and ignorance meted out against Afghanis is not specific to Taliban henchmen. The government itself is devoted to the same Islamic idiocy albeit to a somewhat lesser degree. Sharia law is incorporated into the Afghan constitution; insulting Islam is illegal and blasphemy is a crime punishable by death.

The judges presiding over Mr. Perwiz Kambakhsh’s speedy and closed trial, epitomize the seemingly overwhelming low level of average intellect among Afghanistan’s elite policy makers and legal officials. These same judges were left confused, unaware and bewildered that an article could be downloaded and printed from the internet at all, yet believe themselves fully qualified to oversee legal proceedings which impact the lives of Afghanis in the 21st century.

“The judges who are living in the Middle Ages did not understand the case and readily complied” says Kambakhsh”s brother Sayed Yaqub Ibrahimi, also a journalist. He asserts that Islamists pressured President Hamid Karzai and the appeal court to impose the stiff penalty and asks countries like Canada to intervene on behalf of his brother and condemn the ruling.

In an article from today’s Ottawa Citizen,” Canada must protest sentence of Afghan ‘blasphemer’ brother says” Mr. Ibrahimi notes that his brother has one more chance to appeal the ruling to Afghan’s Supreme Court. It is at this junction he believes Canada could intervene. ” Canada is one of the biggest supporters of Afghanistan. It must ask President Karzai why it is spending millions and millions of dollars for democracy, justice and freedom (when cases like this happen).

Perhaps we should. Or perhaps not.

There can be no doubt by international and rational standards, the penalty brought against Mr. Perwiz Kambakhsh is extreme and unwarranted. If Canada were to consider protesting this sentence and confronting President Karzai on such matters, then perhaps it would also be timely and appropriate to include Canadian Muslim organizations to accompany the Canadian government in issuing a joint statement of condemnation. It would be a breakaway opportunity to end their silence on such matters and contribute in the denouncement of Mr. Kambakhsh’s treatment while simultaneously promoting Western progressive, egalitarian and tolerant ideals they have come to admire and have had the advantage to experience.

Surely, Dr. Muhammed Elmasry of the Canadian Islamic Congress would welcome such an opportunity to exercise his groups long established record on insisting the progression of human rights and fairness for all Muslims. By extending it’s zeal to help a fellow brother of faith in a case clearly mismanaged, the CIC could shake it’s obsession with condemning the Canadian media and to stand behind it’s purported mandate of good will, peace, solidarity and aid as national spokesmen of Canada’s Muslim majority.

Additionally, Muslim organizations such as the CIC and Caircan may be briefly catapulted away from their standard insistence and inflated notion that Muslims are victims primarily of Western, bullish, Islamophobic tactics and openly realize the fact that the vast majority of brutality and oppression perpetrated against Muslims globally comes first and foremost from Islam itself in Islamic nations. 

If Canada’s much despised presence in Afghanistan and billions of tax payer dollars are to be spent promoting the principles of democracy and individual freedom amongst a populace either unable or unwilling to progress only to have cases such as this come to the fore where stone age mindset is the obvious rule, then perhaps it is time to re-evaluate our commitment and stop enabling such an ignorant and lost cause, that is Afghanistan.

Unlikely as it is, I would like to believe that Sayed Perwiz Kambakhsh would receive fair legal treatment in his appeal in this case and hope for his release. As unlikely, would be any denouncement from Canadian Muslim organizations in relation to such harsh religious interpretation and Mr. Kambakhsh’s ordeal. All things considered and seven years later the fact remains, this is Afghan freedumb, Islam style.

Grace

CFRA interview with Chris Wattie and General Lewis McKenzie on Afghanistan

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Steve Madely of CFRA interviews Chris Wattie author of Contact Charlie on the Canadian involvement in Afghanistan. Many feel this is simply the best book written on the allied war there.

“Canadians are good fighters but their politicians are weak” From intel officer within Afghanistan. Very accurate observation.

Chris speaks eloquently about Taliban mentality and tactics. This is revealing of the mind set of terrorists. Putting women children and the odd man in sea shipping containers who wouldn’t obey draconian Islamic rule for a few days and anyone left alive after that would feel a grenade going off within the container.

The most dangerous occupation in Afghanistan then and now is … Teacher.

chris_wattie_oct21 Click here to listen to interview - Interview with Chris Wattie on the war in Afghanistan     

Pay special attention to what comes after Steve’s question ‘I want to talk to you a bit about the Taliban’ for a great description of how Taliban and indeed Islamics operate.

On a related matter, Journalism student sentenced to twenty years in jail in Afghanistan for questioning the lack of women’s rights under Islam.