I did human intelligence. It was literally my job to interact with the people. And we did. And not just to hear what they say to our face, but to get sources and find out what people say behind our backs too. I can, with high confidence, say that close to 90% of the population wanted the taliban gone. It was the other 10% that were the issue. And they were the very loud minority that news stations loved to interview just to claim “accurately showing both sides”.

Under taliban rule Afghanistan was economically devastated and the second poorest country in the world. They had one of the lowest literacy rates in the world. And they had no healthcare system to speak of other than what was gifted to them from Iran or Pakistan depending of what half of the country you were in. No to mention their lack of infrastructure with the not even completed one highway ring around the country.

That all changed under ISAF and the people noticed. And now their past is about to become their future.

Lol. I did two tours over there. The people loved us. They loved the government. They loved the schools for women. The problem is culturally, they didn’t see a need to fight for it because of apathy. They figured “ISAF was always going to be here, so why need to fight for ourselves? And is ISAF isn’t here anymore, then we can’t support our selves, so why try?” As far as the schools go, they are voluntary. There are no truancy laws. They don’t even take attendance at most of the schools. It was completely up to the family if they wanted to send their boys OR their girls. Under pre-ISAF taliban the literacy rate was about 15% and at the time of withdrawal it was almost 40%. The people wanted to go to school, the taliban just didn’t let most of them or the schools that they did keep open were so severely limited in what they could teach.

The biggest red flag of this post, to me, is the use of the word Afghani. Any time someone says it with an ‘i’ at the end, you know they don’t know what they are talking about. Afghani is a currency, Afghan is a person.

While I understand the resentment of saying an institution is a person, and I agree- they still have constitutional rights. To say that private institutions don’t have a right to free speech is the same as saying that the government is allowed to dictate what companies can and can’t say. Authoritarians would love for you to push that idea.

Under your same thinking (Harvard isn’t a person and has no right to a first amendment? OK): Then Harvard resisting against the trump administration is illegal and we find it treasonous to be funneling in possible spies from adversarial countries under the guise of education. We need to lock up anyine who works at any higher ed institution unless they can swear loyalty to America (trump) because they might be complicit in this spy ring. And don’t forget, the universities can be searched at any time for evidence and assumed guilty without trial because they aren’t a person and don’t have constitutional rights! Can we charge the university entity with state laws or federal laws? Both! They don’t have rights to protect against double jeopardy!

I find it funny that the tankies still think Russia can hold their own in a fight against NATO when they let can’t even beat up on their smaller neighbor with NATO hand-me-downs and previous generation surplus gear.