By: Dr. Jerry Bergman
Montpelier, Ohio
The Global War on Terrorism began after the September 11, 2001, attacks which took 2,977 lives plus the 19 hijackers.
The suicide attackers seized U.S. passenger jets and crashed them into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City.
All 246 passengers and crew aboard the four planes were killed. Citizens of 77 different countries were among the casualties.
New York City lost 441 first responders. In less than two hours, both 110-storey towers collapsed in massive clouds of dust. The Islamist extremist network called al-Qaeda planned the attacks from Afghanistan.
Led by Osama Bin Laden, al-Qaeda blamed the U.S. and its allies for conflicts in the Muslim world. They reasoned that the attacks would solve the Muslim problem.
It actually only made things far worse. Less than a month after the attacks, President George W. Bush, supported by an international coalition, led an invasion of Afghanistan to eradicate al-Qaeda’s threat and hunt down Bin Laden. On May 2, 2011 the 54 year old Bin Laden was assassinated in Abbottabad, Pakistan by American troops.
The U.S. initial invasion of Afghanistan to demolish the Taliban and al-Qaeda terrorist organizations began October 7, 2001.
After nearly 20 years of failure against the committed Taliban, President Biden withdrew from Afghanistan. At the height of the conflict more than 130,000 NATO troops were on the ground.
The withdrawal killed 13 U.S. service members, and more than 170 Afghan civilians who supported the U.S. Approximately 7 billion dollars of military equipment was left in Afghanistan.
In the aftermath of the withdrawal, U.S. national security was degraded as Afghanistan once again became a haven for terrorists, including al-Qaeda and the Taliban.
Who are the Taliban?
Taliban is a Muslim sect that requires women to completely veil their bodies – including their faces – in thick clothing at all times in public to avoid sexually tempting men.
The Taliban prohibits girls from schooling beyond age of 11, bans women from public spaces, excludes them from many jobs, and enforces dress codes and male guardianship requirements. From a legal standpoint, these rules contradict the fundamental principles of Islam.
Women and girls are largely excluded from almost every other aspect of public life, including the justice system.
Women’s voices are also deemed to be a potential temptation for men, so women are not allowed to speak or sing in public.
Afghan women are also not allowed to look directly at men they are not related to by blood or marriage. Taxi drivers can be punished if they drive a woman passenger without a male escort.
Aside from banning women and girls from attending secondary school, they are banned from almost every form of paid employment and prevented from walking in public parks, and attending gyms or beauty salons.
The Taliban also reintroduced public flogging and stoning of women for committing adultery. Since the men were enticed by the women’s indiscretions, they were exempt from these laws.
The United Nations and the European Union, instead of opposing these inhumane practices, are attempting to normalize relations with the Taliban.
The Results of These Laws
After the Taliban takeover in August 2021, the Taliban aid-dependent economy was plunged into turmoil. An economic collapse followed.
Afghanistan is facing years of severe economic hardship, and the continued consequences of decades of war and natural disasters.
The U.N. food agency urgently needs $800 million for the next six months to help Afghanistan, which is at the highest risk of famine in a quarter of a century.
Afghanistan requires $4.62 billion in humanitarian aid from the international community this year for the nearly 24 million people in desperate need.
The distribution of this food has been severely impacted by a Taliban edict banning women from working at national and international nongovernmental groups.
Unemployment has increased enormously. Shah Mir, 45, father of four children, works at a nongovernmental organization in the health sector in eastern Nangarhar province. “We don’t know when our office will be closed by the Taliban and we will then lose our jobs,” he said.
The Taliban’s reclusive supreme leader warned Afghans against earning money or gaining worldly honor at a time when the country is in the grip of humanitarian crises and isolated on the global stage.
Akhundzada reminded Afghans of their duties as Muslims and made repeated calls for unity in his 23-minute sermon.
“We were created to worship Allah and not to earn money or gain worldly honor,” Akhundzada said. “Our Islamic system is God’s system and we must stand by it. We have promised God that we will bring justice and Islamic law to Afghanistan.”
Some Conclusions
Americans tend to ignore our blessings based on the Christian worldview which we take for granted as obvious and appropriate.
Consequently, it is enlightening to look at other worldviews and how nonfunctional they are to a nation’s welfare.
The rules against women and the assumption that a man hearing the voice and seeing the face of a woman are going to cause him to normally lose control of his ability to control his sexuality are ludicrous.
His lack of self-restraint is not due to his inability to behave properly, but because the Taliban believes that normal men do not have this control.
Thus, indiscretions are blamed on the woman, the tempter’s, fault. Therefore, the temptress should be severely punished, not the man who is the victim.
We condemn Afghanistan’s position that essentially blames sexual indiscretion on the women, but in the West we often blame the same behavior on the men. This is obvious in hearings for supreme court and major government appointment hearings.
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Dr. Jerry Bergman has taught biology, genetics, chemistry, biochemistry, anthropology, geology, and microbiology for over 40 years at several colleges and universities including Bowling Green State University, Medical College of Ohio where he was a research associate in experimental pathology, and The University of Toledo. He is a graduate of the Medical College of Ohio, Wayne State University in Detroit, the University of Toledo, and Bowling Green State University. He has over 1,800 publications in 12 languages and 60 books and monographs. His books and textbooks that include chapters that he authored are in over 1,500 college libraries in 27 countries.