Back in 2021, President Biden recounted a story of an Afghanistan woman begging him not to leave the country.
And a young woman said, "You can't leave. You can't leave." It was — it was heartbreaking. "You can't leave," she said. "I want to be a doctor. I want to be a doctor. I want to be a doctor. If you leave, I'll never be able to be a doctor." Well, that's why we spent so much time and money training the Afghan Security Forces to do the work of defending that. If every work — Well, anyway — so, yes, I'm aware.
Those hopes and dreams were quashed pretty quickly because "so much time and money" training the Afghan Security Forces turned into a total recapture of the country by the Taliban within weeks of the disastrous U.S. withdrawal under Biden's command.
The Taliban quickly shut down girls' schools across the country.
Now, things for women are getting even bleaker under Taliban rule.
The Taliban's Supreme Leader, Mullah Hibatullah Akhundzada, has vowed to start stoning women to death in public as he declared the fight against Western democracy will continue.
"You say it's a violation of women's rights when we stone them to death," [he said] in a voice message, aired on state television over the weekend, addressing Western officials.
"But we will soon implement the punishment for adultery. We will flog women in public. We will stone them to death in public," he declared.
He added,
"You may call it a violation of women's rights when we publicly stone or flog them for committing adultery because they conflict with your democratic principles. [But] I represent Allah, and you represent Satan."
(Well, can't argue with that! 🙄)
Sahar Fetrat, an Afghan researcher at Human Rights Watch, said,
"Two years ago, they didn't have the courage they have today to vow stoning women to death in public; now they do.
"They tested their draconian policies one by one, and have reached this point because there is no one to hold them accountable for the abuses. Through the bodies of Afghan women, the Taliban demand and command moral and societal orders. We should all be warned that if not stopped, more and more will come."
So far, 57 women have been publicly flogged or executed in stadiums.
Attendance for the "punishments" is urged as a lesson to the population, but video and photography has been banned.
Though that's hard to enforce in the information age; some videos of flogging are out there, but I'm not going to embed them here.
At this point, there is very little difference in the the way Afghanistan was being run before America spent hundreds of billions of dollars (and lost too many lives) there ...
Except the Taliban has new roads, vehicles, and guns, courtesy of U.S. taxpayers.
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