The Taliban have been revisiting rulings made under the US-backed government, overturning thousands of cases.

There is a young woman sheltering under a tree between two busy roads clutching a pile of documents to her chest.

These pieces of paper are more important to Bibi Nazdana than anything in the world: they are the divorce granted to her after a two-year court battle to free herself from life as a child bride.

They are the same papers a Taliban court has invalidated - a victim of the group’s hardline interpretation on Sharia (religious law) which has seen women effectively silenced in Afghanistan’s legal system.

Nazdana’s divorce is one of tens of thousands of court rulings revoked since the Taliban took control of the country three years ago this month.

  • fine_sandy_bottom@lemmy.federate.ccEnglish
    6·
    4 hours ago

    “Women aren’t qualified or able to judge because in our Sharia principles the judiciary work requires people with high intelligence,” says Abdulrahim Rashid, director of foreign relations and communications at Taliban’s Supreme Court.

    IDK why someone would actually say this even if you did believe it were true. This guy is director of communications? Just say “The big wigs say only dudes can be judges.” At least you’re not giving away a quote like that.

    • OlinOfTheHillPeople@lemmy.worldEnglish
      182·
      13 hours ago

      I mean, the last GOP president literally handed the country back to the Taliban - so less of a dream, and more of a conservative “success” story.

      • bamboo@lemm.eeEnglish
        51·
        9 hours ago

        In their defense the previous government was a puppet government installed and propped up by the US. It wasn’t particularly popular and could never sustain itself without direct foreign military support.

        • HerrBeter@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          5 hours ago

          It was a löst cause, in the end, no one wanted to pay for reconfiguring traditions and values that were made up a long time ago

  • eacapesamsara@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    1157·
    17 hours ago

    Guess we shouldn’t have bombed a random country to the point where they’d rather have the Taliban than anything approaching western values since they associate all western values with indiscriminate slaughter

    • Maggoty@lemmy.worldEnglish
      12·
      9 hours ago

      There was a lot wrong in Afghanistan but it wasn’t the use of force. The people there absolutely wanted a chance to get out from under the Taliban. Bush fucked it from the beginning though, trying to give them the world’s most corrupt western style government, lying about reports of the Taliban resurging, and letting the DEA loose on their cash crops. You could easily see just how badly the country wanted the Taliban back with the massive waves of people fleeing them. We failed them badly, but not in the way you guys think.

    • capital@lemmy.worldEnglish
      201·
      11 hours ago

      Watch your back. You might hurt it contorting that much to make every world problem the US’s fault.

      As if this religion (and many others, yes) didn’t always have this problem.

      • eacapesamsara@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        37·
        7 hours ago

        It’s weird seeing bigotry normalized to the point you people think what you just said is an okay thing to say.

        • capital@lemmy.worldEnglish
          71·
          7 hours ago

          Sorry. It’s not okay to oppress women (or anyone else). Don’t give a fuck what any religion says.

          • eacapesamsara@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            15·
            5 hours ago

            That’s nice dear. We were having a different conversation, but I guess with Biden and Trump as examples you were just having a presidential moment.

    • xmunk@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      312·
      16 hours ago

      I think you’re confusing America bombing Afghanistan into the ground with the Soviet Union bombing Afghanistan into the ground. Since the Soviets invaded, and the US propped up the proto-Taliban in response, Afghanistan’s government has been fundamentally broken. The US bears a lot of responsibility for that but the invasion of Afghanistan arguably made things better for a brief window.

    • Fondots@lemmy.worldEnglish
      12·
      12 hours ago

      The impression I’ve always gotten (and I’m sure no political guru or social scientist or anything of the sort) isn’t so much that the country overall prefers the Taliban as much as most of them just don’t really give a rat’s ass about the country as a whole or who’s claiming to be in charge of it at any given time, they don’t have a strong sense of national identity, they care for more about their tribe or village than anything going on outside of it. American, Russian, Taliban, doesn’t really matter too much to them, when the guys with better guns roll into town, you pay them lip service until they go away then continue right on doing things more or less the same way you have for the last 2000 years.

      It does happen that the Taliban probably aligns with their traditional values more closely than the other people who have tried ruling it as a unified country over the years, but day-to-day, they’re still probably mostly only going to the Taliban when they need something from them and deferring to village elders or local warlords or whoever for everything else.

      There’s variation I’m sure, those in cities probably have a stronger sense of what a country is and what it has to offer in the modern world than those in rural areas, but it’s a largely rural country, almost 75% of them are living in rural areas and some of them are super rural where some of them have probably never even seen a city.

      • Maggoty@lemmy.worldEnglish
        6·
        9 hours ago

        If we had installed a tribal council with a few elected positions to counterbalance it; not let the DEA burn cash crops, (buy it and give it to the pharma companies); and installed basic corruption controls, (including among our own reporting lines); the Taliban would never have been allowed back into the country. They were the best alternative in 1991 and remain so in the people’s eyes. They have been ripped apart by fighting since the late 1970’s, they’re tired and want the peace more than they want rights. They would have taken both if we had been even halfway competent and not hellbent on creating USA II: The Middle Eastening.

      • eacapesamsara@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        816·
        16 hours ago

        The people the us spent millions making sure was in charge to fight those evil commies, who were clearly so much worse than the Taliban, with their equal rights for women and such.

          • Fondots@lemmy.worldEnglish
            4·
            10 hours ago

            I think you’re misreading the comment of the person you’re replying to here, it’s worded a little wonky and I don’t know if you picked up on a bit of a sarcastic tone there, I think you also may not be reading far enough into the history to really have a handle on the situation but frankly neither of you are doing a great job of explaining your positions so it’s a little hard to say what point either of you are trying to make

            Tl;dr of modern Afghan history:

            Around the 80s, Russia invaded Afghanistan and installed a socialist government

            The US backs Islamic militants, essentially the Taliban or the groups that eventually morph into them, to oust the Russian backed government,

            The Taliban also likes to style themselves as the Islamic emirate of Afghanistan

            Some power struggles ensue, by the 90s sometime the Taliban is in charge of the country

            9/11 happens, US invades, tries to set up their own government, pulls out, Taliban quickly takes back over

            • AbidanYre@lemmy.worldEnglish
              2·
              10 hours ago

              Yeah, but if you go back to the 80s it doesn’t make sense to say we bombed them so much that the Taliban was a better option than Western values. Unless the USSR is being counted as part of the West.

              I was just pointing out that the Taliban was already in charge when the US started wrecking up the place, so they aren’t really a response to the US occupation. More a return to the status quo of the 90s.

              Which is not to say that the US is blameless. I have a good enough handle on the situation to remember when the Taliban were the good guys in a Bond movie. But I’m not going to claim to be an expert on the region.

          • otp@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            101·
            16 hours ago

            I think they were saying that the US funded the Taliban to fight the USSR (aka. “commies”)

          • eacapesamsara@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            21·
            11 hours ago

            Reread and try again little buddy. The US is directly and solely responsible for the Taliban existence because the commies were somehow worse to the US. Try reading your own articles if you’re going to be snippy while defending the indefensible US.

    • catloaf@lemm.eeEnglish
      11·
      17 hours ago

      I don’t think the two are related. I’m pretty sure that the root of the current Islamic rule is from the US funding the mujahideen against the Soviet Union back in the 70s.

      Afghanistan isn’t really a cohesive country in the first place. There have been a lot of warring factions in the past few hundred years, both foreign and domestic, and none of them have brought all the people under one flag.

      It’s not that they’d rather have the Taliban, it’s that they want to be left alone and they don’t care who’s in Kabul.