Hey! Someone is still paying Ann Marlowe to churn out standard fare crap you barely even find in blogs anymore! What is she on about now? Well, she doesn’t like Mosques, or madrassas, or Muslims (we can infer), and it’s a Very Bad Thing the U.S. is building those in a Muslim country it invaded. What is is her solution, then? Something like this:
You probably thought I was kidding:
In Khost Province, the model for US counterinsurgency [and the site of a 40% rise in insurgent attacks], we built 50 schools last year alone and broken ground on a 200-bed hospital. But we’ve also finished four mosques, with four more in the works, plus three madrassas, with plans for one in every district (typically areas of 60,000-120,000 people)…
We can tweak their society in useful directions – more education, more rationality, more economic activity – by providing them the right resources and showing we care about them. Let’s build real community centers, even if the culture obliges us to build separate ones for men and women. Let’s offer vocational-training programs, not madrassas.
Not a single hard-earned dollar of the US taxpayer should be going to keep Afghans in the Middle Ages.
There really is nothing more to say. Ann Marlowe is asserting her right to re-engineer Afghan society in her own image, and discard their centuries of religious practices because she finds them unsuitable and we have lots of money. Is there any more reliable way to turn the entire country against us? And is there any better way for her to demonstrate her utter contempt for its people?
Previous Ann Marlowe Zaniness:
They Say We’re Winning in Khost, Part IV: Marlowe Hearts Custer Edition
The Power of Propaganda in the Hands of Hacks
Ann Marlowe Thinks Afghanistan Is Doing Awesome
Is the Human Terrain System Worth Its Spit?
This post was written by...
Joshua Foust – author of 1801 posts on Registan.net.
Joshua Foust is a Fellow at the American Security Project and the author of Afghanistan Journal: Selections from Registan.net. His research focuses primarily on Central and South Asia. Joshua is a correspondent for The Atlantic and a columnist for PBS Need to Know. Joshua appears regularly on the BBC World News, Aljazeera, and international public radio. Joshua is also a regular contributor to Foreign Policy’s AfPak Channel, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Reuters, and the Christian Science Monitor. Follow him on twitter: @joshuafoust
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Check out this article at the bbc.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7506146.stm
I’m all for preserving the wilderness. But it’s perplexing for the BBC news website to produce an article about reviving the tourist industry in the midst of this surge in instability.
I guess then along with rec centers, Afghanistan needs swan boats.
Inkan,
I saw that, and there have been other stories about Band-i Amir and how nice Bamiyan is to visit. In fact, I’d love to go there sometime too.
At the same time, I don’t find it perplexing at all. There are some areas in the country that are, in fact, pretty stable and have been trying to develop economically, Bamiyan among them. I not only don’t begrudge them trying, I think we should encourage it, and show that there is a real chance for the country to go back to being wild and beautiful and mostly safe.