Posts by George Darroch
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I doubt many people in the US would notice or care; the political danger is a withdrawal followed by another terror attack inside the US.
The period 1989-1996 was basically one of full-on civil war followed by anarchy. Civilian casualties and excess mortality is unknown, but Afghanistan had the lowest life expectancy in the world during this period.
I doubt anything has changed.
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I find that cover something of a disgusting distortion of the truth.
And atrocities weren't happening during the 1990s?
An ugly situation which has been clusterfucked thoroughly by the United States, obviously, but we can only deal with what is, not some counterfactual world in which the United States had not invaded, or had invaded and done things "nicely".
None of which is to say that any course of action right now is the "right" one. Every option is painful, just some are worse than others. People I respect in Afghanistan feel like just leaving and pulling the plug, letting the country decline into a Taliban led religious feudalism. But they've got too much humanity to do that, just yet anyway.
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It appears that Afghani has entered the language accross the border as a derivation of Pakistani and Talibani - from Urdu.
I'll stick with Afghan for the moment. Speaking English and all.
George, I'm just going to simply go & bake up a batch - I'll send good thoughts!
And bake up a bunch tomorrow.
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Well I wouldn't want to spoil your little chit chat with unsavoury views.
There's plenty of room for opposing opinions here. State them politely and respectfully, like everyone else.
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Russell, I'm with you. That smug patronising aggressiveness towards anyone who dare question received truth. It's not conducive to anything but ugly slanging.
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Islander, definitely walnuts. And dark rich chocolate and cornflakes inside.
PAS, every thread is a food thread. I love this place.
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I think there's something in the criticism that the Taliban's records (they don't exist, of course) of atrocities are not being made public, as are those of other countries. There's a particular bias, in part towards the US, because it is more 'newsworthy', and towards languages which Wikileaks have capabilities in (English, French etc.) I think they're linguistically challenged and unable to evaluate much of their content.
This is slightly, if not entirely excusable. But there are problems and caveats to this excusability. As someone commented to me on Twitter today:
Wikileaks does NOT leak everything they receive. They edit, frame, narrate. Should drop the superiority complex.
On the whole however, I'd much rather that institutions like this exist than don't. The enemy of a good society is unrestrained power, and transparency and accountability are some of the strongest constraints on it.
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Really George? I am always willing to learn-
and what did your Mum call those little crunchy choclatey baked things?
(There may be a generational disconjunct here-)
I don't know if the usage I've heard is "correct", or correlates to standard use in any language. It may simply be a badly rendered form of English that's become common.
Mmmm, I'm thinking about afghans now. Delicious.
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Not to be an annoying pedant here -- this is a genuine question -- but is 'Afghani' really the word for someone from Afghanistan?
I thought that certain collective nouns could take an -i, such as Talibani. I don't speak Pashto or Farsi/Parsi/Persian, so this is just what seems to be true. I hear Afghani and Talibani frequently enough.
Afghan is certainly the conventional English language formation.
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They could rent some poor people surely? It's so hard being rich, on top of taxes this bus lane persecution really is too much.
This isn't Jakarta, yet. The practice was recently outlawed there, IIRC.