What I see in different shades of gray, from behind my reading glasses
Amid news that Hamid Karzai scuttled the planned meetings between the US & Taliban in Qatar (!), Richard Stallman has a radical idea for another Afghan problem:
The US should have armed Afghan women. Who knows what sort of gun a woman has under her burqa, and if a woman kills a talib, there will be no way to identify her afterward. Eventually the Taliban would be forced to order women not to wear burqas.
Kathy Gannon discovers Afghan villagers flee their homes, and blame US drones.
“These foreigners started the problem,” Rasool said of international troops. “They have their own country. They should leave.”
These incessant drone attacks don’t impact those living thousands of miles away. All we see is text or an occasional graphic about the tragedy that’s unfolding there (as well in other places around the world). Will we ever care?
Her son was to have served in Afghanistan, but Claire Felice ended up there instead – as a photo-journalist, clicking pictures of her country’s Marine lads, before, during & after their time there.
American apologies are falling on deaf ears in Afghanistan and neighboring Pakistan, where anger over the burning of Qurans is boiling over.
Really? Why don’t they see this is just the tipping point, not the cause???.. When your nation’s been invaded on the pretext of hunting down ONE man, & been occupied for over 10 years, & when you, a nation that’s been thriving when not invaded (think a few centuries ago), is now struggling for survival, when you see the murder & subsequent desecration of your fellow citizens, & your constant worry the life for your little children (who by the way, are forced to pitch in to earn the pittance that can not even fetch you a single meal) lest they be killed by drones in the sky..
The one thing you turn to to give you some solace in the middle of this agony they call life is not spared either. Burned. Symbolically.
& you, you are surprised they are angry??
As if ever I doubted it, we live in a strange world.
Where it’s okay for the government to order its men to shoot & kill another human.
But it’s not okay to drink without permission.
Diggers caught drinking sent back to Afghanistan [via abc.net.au]
Maybe because they have more sense than men?