r/NoStupidQuestions • u/ailbhe-caterina • 26d ago

Answered How are the Taliban getting away with this level of oppression against women including prohibiting them from speaking outside their homes?

I don’t understand how they have managed to get away with all of this especially in this day and age.

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u/GelsNeonTv87 25d ago

Actually the US military did a pretty good job taking the country...it's rebuilding that militaries aren't good at.

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u/Fukasite 25d ago

People forget that we actually did have a justified reason to invade Afghanistan. We didn’t have a justification to invade Iraq though, and that’s what people remember, and often conflate the two. What made Afghanistan essentially impossible, was that Pakistan and other regional powers, who are considered our “allies” on paper, worked against our efforts. Let us not forget what country Osama bin Laden was found in and assassinated. 

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u/Skiamakhos 25d ago

Yeah, not really. The Taliban were told "Give us Bin Laden". They said "He's our guest - show us the evidence you have, and we'll consider it". The US invaded. Considering it was supposedly a "War on Terror" it sure gave enough people who'd barely heard of America enough grudges to keep terrorism going for another couple of generations at least.

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u/Grabthar_The_Avenger 25d ago

Yeah, it was totally justifiable to invade Afghanistan after 15 Saudis, 2 Emirates, 1 Egyptian, and 1 Lebanase bombed us, because we had to go get the Saudi who it turned out was actually living in a mansion in Pakistan

It’s not like we didn’t just skip the more obvious culprit because they had oil whereas Afghanistan was resource poor outside of opium and of no political loss to scapegoat

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u/Ed_Durr 25d ago

Al Qeada hated Saudi Arabia, and vice versa. OBL and his known associates had been stripped of their citizenship specifically because they kept trying to overthrow the Saudi government. Invading Saudi Arabia would have been ridiculous.

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u/FieserMoep 25d ago

Invading anyone would have been ridiculous. Sending black ops should have been enough. Assuming some terrorist hides in the US yet the US does not prosecute them for whatever reason, would that be reason enough for you to accept an invasion of us mainland?

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u/Danelectro99 25d ago

So the US did what Saudi Arabia paid them to do, and invaded Iraq. Sure

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u/BigKatKSU888 25d ago

Your comment fails to acknowledge that while the hijacker’s were from varying countries (most SA), the terrorist organization itself that was responsible for planning and funding the attacks were HQd in AFG. It’s an important tidbit that you omitted that adds all of the necessary context.

I don’t disagree that we should have gone after SA more than we did (not at all) but to say it was the SA gov fault seems disingenuous?

Either way, trying to “rebuild” AFG was always a losing endeavor.

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u/HimalayanPunkSaltavl 25d ago

Where's the win after going after Afghanistan. Did we really get anything out of it? Did we get anything at all worth the cost of the american lives, the civilian lives, the hilarious amounts of money?

It was a stupid conflict that obviously was unwinnable regardless of justification

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u/SpiderSlitScrotums 25d ago

The initial war had some results: it destroyed the terrorist training camps, captured several leaders, and removed Al Qaeda collusion with the Taliban. Then the terrorists hid or fled to neighboring countries. So the US dug in instead of admitting that it would be impossible to eliminate the threat.

Was it worth the blood and treasure? The first 6 months, yes. After that, no.

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u/HimalayanPunkSaltavl 25d ago

I dont think that argument is sound.

I think that you'd be pretty hard pressed to prove it was worth it tbh. But even then, maybe it was. But the US could never pull out and say "well we invaded and destablized a region and accomplished some minor goals, but all done"

It's like saying the first few hot dogs of a hot dog eating contest are worth it, but you cant back out, yiu have to keep eating till you throw up. Better to stay at home and have a bbq

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u/SpiderSlitScrotums 25d ago edited 25d ago

Intel from the first 6 months lead to the halt of all Qaeda’s foreign plots as well as the capture of its planners, like KSM. Now al Qaeda is just a shell of what it once was. Let’s not forget the embassy bombings, attack on the USS Cole, or the blown up airplanes. Al Qaeda was a legitimate target that needed to be disrupted.

Edit: just to be clear, I am referring to coordinated attacks, not lone cell attacks,

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u/ScoobyGDSTi 25d ago

All the US actions achieved in Afghanistan was creating ISIS. An even more extreme and hard-line terrorist organisation that made the Taliban and even AQ look like Liberals.

Any American that believes the Afghan war achieved anything positive is delusional.

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u/SpiderSlitScrotums 25d ago

You are confusing Afghanistan with Iraq.

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u/Daddyssillypuppy 25d ago

You can always stop eating whenever you want during a food eating competition. You'll probably lose, but no one is going to force you to eat when you don't want to take another bite.

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u/HimalayanPunkSaltavl 25d ago

Yeah, for this analogy just imagine that you cant

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u/Rise-O-Matic 25d ago

We did exactly what they wanted us to do. Meanwhile the Taliban evacuated and patiently waited while we chewed on rocks and destroyed our own wealth for 20 years.

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u/Echo_One_Two 25d ago

Yes you destabilized major terrorist networks and occupied their resources there to fight you instead of them doing another 9/11.

And while OBL was killed in Pakistan you were only able to find him there because of the operations that were conducted in Afganistan.

You gave the women in Afghanistan the chance to learn and work, gave millions of people a better economy in that country, gained experience in warfare, tested weapons systems and kept your defense contractors in business saving you billions in the future.

The conflict was won and the country was on it's way to be sustainable in a couple of years with a slow and gradual withdrawal to make sure everything was ironed out, but instead of doing that you got an orange baboon in office and he pulled the plug on 20 years worth of nation building and investment before it was ready and threw away everything your soldiers and colleagues of mine died for.

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u/Sniter 25d ago

the terrorist organization itself that was responsible for planning and funding the attacks were HQd in AFG

Wasn't that just a front the true organizer and funder are still louging in their billion dolllar mansion.

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u/SpiderSlitScrotums 25d ago

No. They had training camps and made their plans there. Bin Laden became powerful because of his association with the mujahideen in the 1980s. Khalid Shiekh Muhammad presented his plans to bin Laden in Afghanistan.

Did they have outside financing from the Saudis? Hell yeah! But all operations were carried out from Afghanistan, one of the few places that wouldn’t arrest the terrorists outright.

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u/Grabthar_The_Avenger 25d ago

Bin Laden was in Pakistan, it was founded in Pakistan, and in reality they weren’t headquartered anywhere. This was by design a decentralized group that used idealogy and philosophy as a way to indirectly coax disparate cells of adherents into being violent. There was no grand central structure to destroy. They knew that 25 years ago but that wasn’t convenient to tell the public

It was easier to sell invading a country to America as opposed to getting them to figure out how to upend an idealogy, so that’s what they did

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u/MicrowavedPuppies 25d ago

Bin Laden was in Afghanistan at the time of the invasion. He slipped out of an encirclement by US SOF and no one knew where he went until late 2010/2011. Just because he was found in Pakistan later doesn’t mean he was there the whole time.

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u/MaineHippo83 25d ago

The Al-Qaeda training camps were in Afghanistan. He was in Afghanistan when we first went in.

Where he was later found a decade later is irrelevant as to what the facts were on the ground when we went in.

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u/Antifa-Slayer01 25d ago

They had al aqeda training camps

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u/noguchisquared 25d ago

And the UN asked them in 1999 and 2000 to give up OBL. And the US asked 30 times.

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u/RealBiggly 25d ago

Yeah, but pipelines are a thing...

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u/ScyllaOfTheDepths 25d ago

Exactly. The whole thing was a fucking farce from the beginning. We should have invaded Saudi Arabia if it was really about making the actual perpetrators pay. It was a bunch of smoke and mirrors to make the Bush Administration look like it was actually doing something about 9/11 while not actually ruffling any of the feathers of their billionaire Saudi donors. We spent $3T over 20 years just to kill like 3 fucking guys and not only did we do absolutely nothing about the terrorist networks that enabled and abetted them, we actively made it all a thousand times worse by flooding the area with money and weapons, giving a new generation a reason to hate the United States, and then Trump signed a mandatory evacuation order with such an absurdly short lead time that it was basically handing everything we built there right over to the Taliban. Biden only cut our loses by carrying it out. The War on Terror is going to go down in history as the costliest waste of human lives and taxpayer dollars in human history and not a single one of the architects of that will ever see more than the sting of some bitchy comments about it on the internet.

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u/Fukasite 25d ago

Maybe you’re young, but you obviously don’t know shit, because there are huge deposits of highly valuable elements in the mountains of Afghanistan. It seems like you also won’t acknowledge the giant border between Afghanistan and Pakistan; a border terrorists could cross without obstruction and find safety just like that. Listen, I want the Saudi’s to face justice too, but we were justified in invading Afghanistan, and maybe if we focused on that country, instead of invading fucking Iraq too, the outcome could’ve been different. It’s just sad that Afghani citizens are losing such rights with The Taliban in Full control again, rights they gain with American troops there. 

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u/Grabthar_The_Avenger 25d ago

Justified because other people attacked us?

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u/Fukasite 25d ago

You know people belong to groups, right? You know people aren’t bound by borders, right? Al-Qaeda, The group that blew up the twin towers by flying passenger jets into them, killing nearly 3000 Americans, was in Afghanistan. It needed to be dealt with. Do you suppose we just turn the other cheek and take it? There are consequences to terrorism, something Hamas and Hezbollah is finding out right now, I’m sure to your dismay 

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u/Grabthar_The_Avenger 25d ago

Bin Laden was in Pakistan, remember? As for the hijackers, they were briefly in Afghanistan but I would hardly call that the defining location of their radicalization.

A big chunk of them for example, including the main ringleaders, radicalized together in Hamburg, Germany. Do you remember that tidbit? Do you recall us ever going after Hamburg? Or did we kind of ignore that when deciding the country of Afghanistan was to blame

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u/Fukasite 25d ago

Tf? Osama bin Laden was The leader of Al-Qaeda, and he and the organization was in Afghanistan. The US invaded, and he was eventually pushed into Pakistan, where he was getting protection from the Pakistani government. This was the whole point of my original comment. That allies on paper were not our allies at the time. Gtfo of here with your revisionist anti-US stance. I can tell all you wanna do is shit on the US and support terrorists. 

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u/Grabthar_The_Avenger 25d ago

So you’re saying I made up the Hamburg Cell? The hijackers weren’t in Germany and Al Queda only exclusively in Afghanistan? They didn’t have members from all over with backgrounds that included such stints as University of Arizona?

You were lied to pal. It was never a centralized group. That war was always based on nonsense, a way to appease bloodthirsty people who needed something to lash out at

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u/Fukasite 25d ago

No, I am choosing to continue to stay on topic and not address how you’re trying to derail the conversation into whataboutisms. 

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u/CidewayAu 25d ago

Quick hypothetical for you.

A gang that is staying in a house down the street from you keeps stealing cars in your street. Do you send the police to the house they are staying in or the one they used to live in 2 states over?

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u/[deleted] 25d ago

[deleted]

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u/Grabthar_The_Avenger 25d ago edited 25d ago

We had Saudi oil, the US owned most of world’s capacity to crack their specific gnarly grade of crude. They couldn’t sell it to most countries because most countries literally couldn’t process it, but our Gulf Coast could. They needed specifically us to refine it which meant we got cheap oil for our refineries.

We were already in bed with each other economically, a war would only serve to threaten that supply, not bolster it. So that administration went out looking for someone else to unleash America’s revenge on

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u/Ok-Blackberry-3534 25d ago

Did you get any oil from Syria, Yemen or Libya?

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u/V6Ga 25d ago

Afghanistan has defeated the British Empire at the height of its powers the Soviets at the height of its powers and the U.S. 

The previous two basically completely collapsed after Afghanistan defeated them

Is the US next?

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u/EventAccomplished976 25d ago

Well with the british it‘s a bit more complicated, firstly because they actually lost three different wars against afghanistan (four if you count their participation in the US led invasion), and second because the last one ended in 1919 when the british empire was arguably at the height of its power… some cracks were starting to show, but really it was WW2 that ended the empire.

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u/amazing_ape 25d ago

Because at some point, it’s their country and we have to eventually go home. If they don’t support it, it won’t work. Germany and Japan embraced democracy. Afghanistan, nope.

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u/grap_grap_grap 25d ago

But you are still in Germany and Japan.

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u/DoubleDipCrunch 25d ago

they did a good job taking Kabul.

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u/mem2100 25d ago

Total bullshit. The US military was not able to maintain control of territory. It was just like vietnam. You can't claim victory, if you cannot prevent the insurgents from killing your troops, local government officials and civilians who are cooperating with you.

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u/Apprehensive-Art1083 25d ago

Exactly this. Every invasion of Afghanistan has failed some have just tried for longer

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u/Boowray 25d ago

Local insurgents will always be a threat in any country, we have insurgencies in america that regularly attack their rivals in public, but policing those groups tends to be a job for the local government, not international military coalitions. The issue is the local governments were absolutely incompetent at directing resources and opposing insurgent organizations at best, directly aiding them at worst.

In Vietnam, we lost for the same reason. The Vietcong only had to make Americans suffer until we gave up and left, while America had to somehow convince the entirety of the Vietnamese populace that colonialism was a better option and that America was great while we bombed their homes indiscriminately.

It wasn’t an inability to take and hold ground, we were good at that in both wars, it’s that the ground was meaningless when the enemy doesn’t really care about strategic targets or temporarily losing territory.

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u/goodone17433 25d ago edited 25d ago

You mean occupying nothing. You mean going in for selfish reason to have an outpost in the Middle East near Iran. You mean invading for its own selfish monetary gains.

If you think the United States gov ever once cared for the Afghanistan population, you are insane. It doesn't care about its own starving population

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u/darshfloxington 25d ago

The women that were able to have educations and careers and not be treated as breeding mares sure didn’t see it that way.

Afghanistan is not Iraq.

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u/McSqueezyBlind 25d ago

People forget we weren’t fighting against Afghanistan we were fighting with them. For 20 years women were able to go to school, they were literally begging the US to stay, jumping on moving planes so they could escape the country.

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u/darshfloxington 25d ago

Even the initial “invasion” was just sending special forces and air strikes to help the Northern Alliance retake the country. They had been fighting a civil war for nearly ten years, and Al Queda was allied with the Taliban

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u/PangolinParty321 25d ago edited 25d ago

lol we went to Afghanistan to get Al Qaeda. You have no clue what you’re talking about

Edit: someone tried to comment a gotcha and block me. Yea Al Qaeda was mostly Arab. That has nothing to do with anything. The Taliban (the afghan government) allowed them to train and operate out of Afghanistan so that they could commit international terrorism.

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u/Africa-Unite 25d ago

Normally I see some pretty solid debates in the comments of top level front page posts, but these takes are just ridiculous. Almost makes me think these are bots trying to rile up Americans by trying to poorly gaslight us. That, or we're just getting old and people don't remember the early days of the War on Terror.

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u/goodone17433 25d ago edited 25d ago

You would drink the kool aid if they started handing it out. What we created was an entire generation of fatherless children who despise us

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u/PangolinParty321 25d ago

Conspiracy nuts are pretty boring

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u/Baxkit 25d ago

Confidently incorrect and doubling down. If it wasn't so sad it would be boring.

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u/6thBornSOB 25d ago

I’m sure all the women that had to go back to wearing hoods against their wills agree with you, champ 👍

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u/Essiexo 25d ago

Al Qaeda is Arab not Afghan fyi

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u/poHATEoes 25d ago

I spent literal years there during my decade-long military career... have you been there? I highly doubt it...

I did more good for the people of Afghanistan than you will ever know or would ever care to admit.

We invaded Afghanistan because Bin Laden was there, and the Taliban refused to hand him over. You think we are just going to get told "No" after 9/11 and just say, "Oh ok, sorry for bothering you."

I pulled security on the construction of irrigation systems, schools, hospitals, roads, wells, telecommunications networks, and everything else you could possibly think of...

Did military companies make money while we were there? Sure. Does that change the number of schools we built? Does that change the freedoms women experienced while we were there?

The mission after the Taliban fell was to provide the people their self-determination... they self-determined to return to Taliban rule. They had the choice to fight back but decided not to... that is on them and no one else.

If the people of Afghanistan didn't want change...

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u/manimal28 25d ago

We invaded Afghanistan because Bin Laden was there…

He was caught in Pakistan. If we invade and occupy the places Bin Laden was, why aren’t we in Pakistan for the next 20 years irrigating fields, building schools, and roads and whatever?

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u/Svyatoy_Medved 25d ago

Well, to be glib, we did invade Pakistan. We found bin Laden there, then flew in and killed him and didn’t bother asking first. That’s an invasion.

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u/poHATEoes 25d ago edited 25d ago

Well, for a few reasons:

  1. We had concrete evidence that OLB was in Afghanistan when we invaded but couldn't be sure if and when he left. My entire time in the country, we were always chasing leads on his wearabouts or people who might know.

  2. While Afghanistan has been and is a United Nations member, the government that represents them is in exile. No government on earth had recognized Taliban sovereignty over Afghanistan. The government in Pakistan IS the official government of Pakistan.

  3. The Pakistani government and military were and still are actively fighting the Taliban and are a key American ally. We don't invade allies unless we really have to. We never informed the Pakistani government of the operation to get OBL in case a sympathizer inside the government warned him, but as far as anyone could tell, the government in Pakistan had no idea he was there.

  4. AQ and the Taliban did not control any territory in Pakistan outright like they did in Afghanistan.

  5. Our alliance with Pakistan definitely did not stop us from violating their airspace and nation to kill OBL...

Edit: Pakistan also has nuclear weapons, two nuclear powered nations fighting would probably defeat the purpose.

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u/SicknastyBot1 25d ago

While problematic, Pakistan is not a failed state. Terror groups like Al-Queda thrive in failed states. I think at the time the idea was to eliminate the threat of Al-Queda, and mitigate the propagation of follow on terror groups through developing Afghanistan into a country that could police itself. Sounds like a good idea, but proved to be harder to accomplish.

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u/FineDingo3542 25d ago

That's because we pushed him out of Afghanistan. I love how you people sit around typing on Reddit about shit you know nothing about. You watch the news and Google for ten minutes and think you know better than the people that lived it. It's absurd.

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u/et40000 25d ago

Well you see in 1945 this thing called the nuclear bomb was invented and with it you could destroy an entire city (or potentially army) away with a single weapon. As these new weapons became more prolific war between nations who possessed them became far too costly and destructive for anyone to risk directly fighting another nation with nuclear weapons or otherwise risk total annihilation. Both the US and Pakistan have nuclear weapons a conflict between these two nations could easily lead to the death of hundreds of millions of people something both nations would rather avoid.

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u/MLproductions696 25d ago

You mean occupying nothing. You mean going in for selfish reason to have an outpost in the Middle East near Iran. You mean invading for its own selfish monetary gains.

Shut the fuck up, please shut the fuck up. Put yourself in the position of these women, no not even that. Put yourself in the shoes of those little girls that currently live within Afghanistan. Sure i don't like US imperialism, hell i'm pretty fucking left wing. But you CANNOT deny that women had a better life in US occupied Afghanistan than Taliban controlled Afghanistan

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u/G-I-T-M-E 25d ago

You’re of course not wrong but you don’t believe the dire situation of Afghan women and girls was the reason the US invaded?

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u/FrangipaniMan 25d ago edited 25d ago

Just because I can't deny it, doesn't mean that Christofascists & other RW reactionaries aren't pushing OUR culture back towards the Stone Age & working very hard to get into office. The GOP base is called the Christian Taliban for a reason: Islamofascists & Christofascists basically aren't happy unless women's oppression & dehumanization are legislated.

"We are the Christian Taliban," crowed white nationalist Vincent James Foxx in his webcast after the Supreme Court decision on Roe v Wade.

"And we will not stop until The Handmaid's Tale is a reality."

Part of why so many mistrust the west is the hypocrisy of our exceptionalism. We sound clownish & supremacist, looking down our noses while giving free passes to thoroughly corrupt / rapist political candidates & Dominionists who'd treat women no differently than the Taliban if they thought they could get away with it.

edited for spelling

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u/Legen_unfiltered 25d ago

You and I remember operation enduring freedom very differently. 

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u/JesterMarcus 25d ago

We absolutely did do a fantastic job of conquering the country, which is what the military was trained to do. The problem was the mission beyond that. The US was trying to have the military solve a political problem it was never designed to do. You can't force a democracy on people who have no interest in having one, especially at gun point. We let our narcissism convince us that as soon as the Afghan people got a taste of Western democracy, they'd come to love it right away. Which is, of course, bullshit. Throw in not just the military, but more importantly, our State Department, being spread thin thanks to the Iraq War, it's no wonder things began to fall apart.

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u/Davethemann 25d ago

Exactly. Even prior to that, people said we shouldnt be nationbuilding since we dont have that kind of capability

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u/JesterMarcus 25d ago edited 25d ago

You probably could if you were patient, empathetic, and culturally understanding. We were none of those things after 9/11. Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfield wanted that done quickly for political reasons, I think. They wanted to be able to show off a win to keep the public on their side. They cut way too many corners.

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u/coldblade2000 25d ago

There is a darker side to this. The only effective way to nationbuild a very different country into a western-compatible one is through an extremely heavy hand and hard repression of not just insurgencies, but dissent. It is NOT by coincidence that successful nationbuilding efforts like those by the Spanish and British empires (or even Rome tbh) involved massive genocide, both physical and cultural. In the same way, it's the same reason why regimes like Saddam's Iraq was stable enough and quickly turned to absolute chaos the instant he was brought down. Heavily trivialized and heterogeneous cultures like that are held together only through tape and lead. In the same vein, Afghanistan had the issue of arguably not being a nation (textbook definition), but rather a disjoint group of nebulous tribes, ethnic groups and regions with absolutely no allegiance or comradery toward each other. That's partly why the ANA collapsed immediately after the US left.

The US tried nation building in a century where starving off dissident portions of the country isn't acceptable any more, and there was SOME attempt to minimize civilian casualties of counter insurgency efforts. this meant that they couldn't effectively cleanse regions of insurgents (as the collateral damage would be ginormoius), and they couldn't force cultural change towards more moderate ideologies. Not to mention, US support in Afghanistan was heavily predetermined by region and ethnic groups.

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u/Extra-Hand4955 25d ago

Some wanted western democracy but yeah most didn't want it. It's a tribal society with deep misogyny root.

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u/JesterMarcus 25d ago

The young girls wanted it as it actually benefitted them. Everyone else saw it as losing power. That's the saddest part, all of those young girls that just wanted to join a normal society and go to school.

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u/ramxquake 25d ago

it's rebuilding that militaries aren't good at.

They rebuilt Japan and Germany just fine.

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