Afghanistan

has anyone read Charlie Wilson's War? I'm about 100 pages in. Tombot? Much nuttier and incredible than satire (tho I'm put off my some of the author's gee-whizzing).

about to be a major Tom Hanks motion picture (casting seems way off)

waziristan!

Keep meaning to read that. Definitely would rather read it than see the movie.

I'm curious to see the angle of the film as it's written by Aaron Liberal Fantasy Wish-Fulfillment Sorkin.

http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/staffers-killed-terry-jones-stunt/story?id=13275234

Eleven people were killed, including some United Nations officials, today in Afghanistan, apparently in response to Florida pastor Terry Jones burning of the Koran last month, Afghan police and U.N. said.

The deaths followed a protest march in the northern Afghan city of Mazar-i-Sharif today against the Koran burning last month in which Jones supervised while another pastor, Wayne Sapp, soaked the Koran in kerosene and burned it after finding it "guilty" in a mock trial. Among the dead were U.N. staff and security guards who were trying to protect the staff, police said.

i dont even know how to react to this. apparently some of the UN workers were beheaded.

so much blame to go around

http://www.juancole.com/2011/08/50-us-nato-troops-killed-in-afghanistan-in-past-week.html

the Taliban have wiped out the pro-Karzai power elite of Qandahar in the past month and are killing US troops in record numbers.

No matter how one feels about the corruption of Karzai's government and how one feels about the military industrial complex and US military mistakes, these ugly Taliban actions are evil

http://www.salon.com/2012/02/26/the_causes_of_the_protests_in_afghanistan/singleton/

...just imagine what would happen if a Muslim army invaded the U.S., violently occupied the country for more than a decade, in the process continuously killing American children and innocent adults, and then, outside of a prison camp it maintained where thousands of Americans were detained for years without charges and tortured, that Muslim army burned American flags — or a stack of bibles — in a garbage dump. Might we see some extremely angry protests breaking out from Americans against them? Would American pundits be denouncing those protesters as blinkered, primitive fanatics?

yeah

*sigh*

https://x.com/sulaimanhakemy/status/1719998819189019134?s=46&t=u2ZSlsY3trRV36IPP6jNDQ

Pakistan forced expulsion of Afghans back to Taliban run Afghanistan may be largest such forced expulsion since 1950s says this journalist in tweet

Yeah been posting about this in the Pakistan thread. Utterly heartbreaking