In Nigeria, Fulani raids Christian villages have been taking place for years with at least implied complicity on the part of Nigeria’s President Muhammadu Buhari. The Fulani’s violence has been brutal and, if reports are to be believed, rising to a stage beyond atrocity in the recent burning of a family alive in its own house.
Ranchers v Farmers?
That’s a familiar framing, but in the press, Fulani barbarism — no other word comes close to describing the inhumanity of it — plays as it has elsewhere, i.e., as Islamic terrorism against civil society. The underlying purposes may be economic and ethnic, but the horror created and relayed through Nigeria’s press would seem the same as that unbridled violence delivered by ISIS.
The attackers had reportedly destroyed the bridge leading to the community thereby preventing possible access before launching the attacks.
An entire family was burnt alive in their homes while others that attempted to run into nearby bush were shot. Several persons sustained gunshot wounds and are being treated in the hospitals.
Yelwa-zangam community is dominated by Christian Anagutta natives.
TVC News Nigeria, August 25, 2021.
Unknown assailants attacked the Yelwa Zangam community in Jos North Local Government Area (LGA), Plateau State overnight Aug 24-25. Initial accounts report that up to 36 residents died. Locals have attributed the attack to Fulani bandits who reportedly set bodies and homes on fire. Reports also indicate the attackers set fire to a bridge leading to the impacted area to prevent security personnel from responding. Authorities did confirm the incident without providing the casualty toll and announced that 10 individuals have already been arrested.
The incident underscores the deteriorating security situation in Plateau. Following a similar fatal incident Aug. 14, authorities imposed curfews in Jos North, Jos South, and Bassa LGAs. The curfews remain in effect 18:00-06:00 as of Aug. 25.
Instead of focusing on disaster, it would be more helpful if the Good of the world focused on improved Qualities of Living — biological, financial, psychological, social, spatial, spiritual — near and far. We need healthy communities globally as well as a healthy planet, and where there’s open conflict, we are collectively failing at both.
There’s the word from my low on-high seat, but I believe there’s some truth to having our obsessions and worries controlling our destinies in place of strong good possibilities and dreams appropriate to our individual and global existential challenges. If the latter attitude were prevalent across cultures, we would be chasing large fires with plantings conducive to producing a right human-healthy planetary atmosphere.
And why not?
Why not view natural destruction as opportunity for lending nature a hand on the positive side?
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In Afghanistan this past month, people, notable people, people in positions of great responsibility and power, allowed or enabled corruption and greed to overtake better judgment and ceded power — for the time being — to the most absolute, fanatical, narcissistic, and ruthless of malign actors who will now proceed to destroy modern education at its outermost reach and with its Draconian views dishearten its population. The Taliban, so expert in barbarism and terror, will probably fail at every modern challenge and task, further inviting into their medieval sphere greater and more controlling powers, one criminal, the other dystopian, when modern Afghani People could just as well run circles around their malignancy and regain for themselves a more authentic contemporary dignity and freedom.
And why not?
Why not view the Taliban as the egregious insult to universal dignity, freedom, prosperity, and security that it has proven itself to be?
Afghanistan, should it reenter a politically coherent and cohesive phase, would be wise to help its latest burden fly off the rails on its own.
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While the Taliban debate their 7th Century beliefs and Afghanistan goes dark, figuratively if not literally (but that’s a real possibility), the more advanced worlds as well as the Taliban might with to reconsider the Qualities of Living involved in the management of any geopolitical space (again biological, psychological, social, spatial, spiritual): where on earth does God, nature, or the universe, for that matter, protect air, soil, and water quality? Ask the same about security for persons and property? Given that we are all part of a gregarious species, what are “social freedoms” and what might the best societies offer in latitude and range for the full suite of our human enthusiasms, interests, and shared as well as dissenting values? What are our best options in our spiritual existence in relation to choice and reason?
Are forced confinement, control, and the delivery of feudal-medieval darkness really the best the Taliban’s Kabul might do?
While the Taliban appear on track for that, the world has changed and will continue changing beyond them for the better and by the most progressing of contemporary democratic standards. Perhaps all, including the Taliban themselves, would do better to dwell on transformations more suited to defending and serving earth and her human cargo — i.e., all of the rest of the world — than to a now deeply impoverished 7th Century system of belief and hypocritical religious egotism.
Anyone who thinks that the 21st century Taliban is a new version is delusional. Taliban spokesperson Zabiullah Mujahid publicly stated, “Women will be afforded all rights within the limits of Islam [Shariah].” However, they have not explained what they mean by “the limits of Islam,” given their messages are not in sync with their actions on the ground. What form of education will be provided and will women’s rights be safeguarded as before? Will women be able to maintain their positions in media and government?
Even if the Taliban stick to their words, they would still fall short of their obligations under international human rights law. The Taliban’s way of justice translates to harsh punishments, including public executions and beheading of accused murderers and adulterers. It is very unlikely that they will accept any form of criticism, which is incompatible with the universal declaration of human rights.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, during a June 16 summit meeting with President Biden, objected to any role for American forces in Central Asian countries, senior U.S. and Russian officials said, undercutting U.S. plans to act against new terrorist dangers after its Afghanistan withdrawal.
The previously unreported exchange between the U.S. and Russian leaders complicated Biden administration hopes of basing drones and other counterterrorism forces in countries bordering landlocked Afghanistan. That challenge has deepened with the collapse over the weekend of the Afghan government and armed forces.
DUSHANBE, Tajikistan — As the Afghan government collapsed this week in Kabul and the United States scrambled to speed up its evacuation effort, hundreds of Russian armored vehicles and artillery pieces were clearly visible hundreds of miles away, on the border with Tajikistan.
They were part of a high-profile military exercise taking place just 12 miles from a Taliban position, and they were there, a Russian general said, to make a point.
“They are all visible,” said Gen. Anatoly Sidorov, commander of the forces involved in the exercise. “They are not hiding.”
It will now be Russia, the exercises signaled, that will be shielding Central Asia from potential violence next door.
The Taliban’s medieval program — if installed and as previously expressed — will prove against the grain of every civilized and modern society, but we may have to watch it to believe it.
The wish for societies in their main part to be broad, compassionate, inclusive, just, reasoning, and vibrant carries with it revulsion for those who would believe themselves exclusive and whose narcissistic behavior repeatedly proves fanatical, fascist, hypocritical, and intolerant. Today’s Taliban risk proving themselves and their unique program — the idea of God courses and varies through the world’s 4,300 religions and sects, not only Islam, and not only theirs — confining, egotistical, self-serving, sadistic, selfish and nothing more. They are those whose income have previously been derived from “protection” — demanding pay to be left alone — and the wholesale shipping of poppy juice into the world’s transnational crime organizations — cartel and gangs — not pharmaceutical companies and on to hospitals.
How the Taliban now respond to the fears voiced by those representing millions of Afghans and how they meet their modern criticism will tell their true character, and should the past prove prelude, they will founder and drown in their own malign reflections.
Wikipedia offers a term for what happens next: “Talibanization“.
Read it and weep.
India Times, August 14, 2021.
From Journeyman Pictures, “Afghani Life Under Taliban Rule (1998)” — and regarding filming (in 1998): “According to Islam and according to our society, we are not allowed . . . under Islamic rule, there is no question of ‘why’. In Islamic society, nothing is allowed such as television, such as type (stet) such as any other recording, uh, recorders to play . . . .” (1:46-2:13).
From U.S. Department of State (November 17, 2001): “Report on the Taliban’s War Against Women”: “The life of Afghan women is so bad. We are locked at home and cannot see the sun” (Nageeba, a 35-year-old widow in Kabul).
The Taliban wants to establish an Islamic government in Afghanistan, ideally as an emirate, which would be led by a religious leader and draw its legitimacy from clerics. Afghanistan is currently an Islamic republic, which is led by a president and draws legitimacy from universal suffrage and accordance with international laws and norms.
The Taliban will have to defend Afghanistan now, and they will not be able to do that without serious Chinese and Russian and other support in the navigating of modern international legal, political, and technology systems.
Worse for the Taliban: Afghanis appear to fear them, not respect them.
Apart from fighting, first the Russians — and then the Americans who helped them stave off the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan — they have done nothing for Afghanistan apart from threatening, at least, to again impose their medieval will on a modern society. In that way, their “win” may more resemble the tyranny of the Islamic Revolution in Iran than true modern cultural Afghani self-determination.
Today, August 17, 2021.
To garner respect, the Taliban would have to deliver into their own outlook and politics the most advanced of the world’s standards having to do with comprehension of the human condition, the individual yearning for autonomy and freedom from absolute power — authoritarianism — and the dogma and propaganda employed to justify its own sadism. It has missed its own complete education thus far in the collective poetry of the world and while offering assurances has been quick nonetheless to paint over a vibrant modernity with its own darkness.
Will the Taliban escape their own darkness, in essence their own culturally suffocating presence, and make the steep climb into the light of awareness, compassion, and responsibility in concert with the decent, engaged, and responsible of the world?
The Obama White House, June 4, 2009.
While today’s west will always support indigenous self-determination and respect the sovereignty of independent states, it has demonstrated that it will not respect claims to ethnic, racial, or religious supremacism within its own bounds, and it will not approve or endorse as much elsewhere in the world. As a political bloc, EU/NATO will forever abhor absolutism, bigotry, cruelty, enslavement, hate, and subjugation — and all of that whether threatened by forces or processes within or by the enemies of freedom and security without.
How sweet this victory for the most archaic, medieval, narcissistic, and selfish of human political minds across cultures.
The Afghan People, the Afghan Military, the United States of America, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) have been not only humiliated by the Taliban’s guerrilla putsch made possible by corruption within the Afghan government — or money would have reached its troops and those troops would have been more appreciated, moved, and better defended when most needed — the same have been looted by Moscow, more or less, and left to do their “lessons learned” back home, which from today may become less safe in relation to the deeply retrograde Islamic Revolution in Afghanistan.
Keys
–Rightful CIA intercession on behalf of the mujaheddin during the Soviet Army’s invasion of Afghanistan (see “Operation Cyclone” for the details).
— While both the CIA and Russian interests appeared to mirror one another in retreat from Afghanistan and leaving the state to its own devices, BackChannels believes Moscow directly influenced Ayman Al-Zawahiri during a 1996-97 detention in Russia and through him the compact with Osama Bin Laden that would produce Al-Qaeda and lead to 9/11 and successive acts of Islamist terror worldwide. Conspiratorial? Delusional? Look again at whose embassy is not only staying put in Kabul but which has Taliban guards keeping it secured.
–Today, “Moscow-Kabul” may be added to “Moscow-Tehran”, another block-and-goad nexus against western culture, democracy, humanism, and liberalism.
For peace, Asian powers as well as EU/NATO have with half-measures navigated what they have believed to be an “East-West Rivalry” sustained on business and political accommodations and tensions, and as much would seem in the natural course of diplomatic and international affairs. However, BackChannels has long noted a much different axis in conflict, and that has been the tension between Feudal-Medieval Personalities and States, the chief representatives of “Political Absolutism”, and the Modern of Mind devoted to universal dignity and freedom in the address of common and global challenges to human well-being and the survival of Earth herself.
Moscow and Company (lately Beijing as well) have been most interested in Power and Wealth benefiting select elites as determined in each respective absolutist and feudal-medieval framework while much of the rest of the world now cries for deliverance from them with hopes for modern improvements in Qualities of Living wherever life has planted them.
The deeply archaic and medieval Taliban were not welcomed yesterday in Kabul nearly as much as dreaded and feared.
Modern universal moral revulsion will now oppose the Taliban’s primitive narcissism, rigidity, and violence, and however disorganized it may be, it will by way of species-wide intellectual evolution emerge naturally and implacably — no less so than what mankind has done to create the culturally interwoven complex machinery that delivers the modern world in materials and services — and yesterday’s “victory” (over millions determined to flee it and now subject to living beneath the lowering shadow of the fear of it) may yet prove but the beginning of the Islamists own end.
Crowds of people desperate to escape Afghanistan stormed Kabul’s international airport, rushing onto the tarmac.
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — Two Afghan officials say President Ashraf Ghani has left the country.
The officials, one from former President Hamid Karzai’s office and another an aide on the Afghan security council, told The Associated Press that Ghani left Sunday. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to brief journalists.
Ghani left along with his National Security Adviser Hamdullah Mohib and a second close associate. It wasn’t immediately clear where they went.
Meanwhile, the Taliban said it would further enter Kabul on Sunday night after spending hours on the city’s outskirts.
While ordinary Afghani cower within or flee their presence, the Taliban appear to have just won their chance to further fail and horrify Afghanistan.
Posted by Astra, May 11, 2016.
The Taliban were born when Mullah Omar took revenge on a tank crew and its commander for the rape of two village girls. The crew were killed and the commander as well by hanging him from his own tank barrel. Omar then fled with his band to recruit an army of resistance to the then Soviet invasion.
Most who have followed Afghanistan from the Cold War forward know that story and the subsequent arming of the mujaheddin, the defeat of the Soviet Army, the mirroring CIA retreat from the theater, and the final bankrupting of Soviet Union and the opening of the gangway for the lawless of Russia for 1992. At the time, I believe — unless corrected — the mujaheddin were left with their ideologies and weapons and a broken nation that would then be subdued by arms, but in an interesting turnabout, that loose energy would fall to Russian encouragement. The situation would be analogous to clearing a house of burglars only to leave one’s own gun out on the dining room table.
April 14, 2021 Biden Decides on Complete U.S. Withdrawal by 9/11
President Biden announces that the United States will not meet the deadline set under the U.S.-Taliban agreement to withdraw all troops by May 1 and instead releases a plan for a full withdrawal by September 11, 2021. “It’s time to end America’s longest war,” he says. The remaining 3,500 troops in Afghanistan will be withdrawn regardless of whether progress is made in intra-Afghan peace talks or the Taliban reduces its attacks on Afghan security forces and citizens. NATO troops in Afghanistan will also leave. Biden says Washington will continue to assist Afghan security forces and support the peace process. The Taliban says it will not participate in “any conference” on Afghanistan’s future until all foreign troops leave.
What have the Afghani People to look forward to under Taliban rule?
Compelled affirmation of archaic attitudes and beliefs enforced by continuous surveillance, intimidation, and violence — Afghanistan has just been returned to the status of a medieval theocracy;
Feudal-medieval conflict as religious principles fail to resolve personal, tribal, state, and international disputes or temper the criminality and greed that have corrupted not only the politics of the state but have seen the most unsavory of receipts fill the Taliban’s own war chest.
Afghanistan’s women will be diminished as persons, conservative or modern, and again mastered by a patriarchy infamous for its cruelties and most unbalanced and terrifying “guidance” as laid out by Islamic law.
BackChannels 