"What???" you say. "You're in Jordan!" Well, you should know that the Middle East is moving east, and now includes Afghanistan, which means you also have to talk about Pakistan, and then of course India... basically, by the time I finish my ME Studies major I'll be studying Hawai'i. (Insha'allah.)
Anyway, if you didn't know, the Pakistani government basically just handed Swat Valley to the Taliban, where they're excitedly installing all those Taliban laws you know and love (no music, no nail polish). Everyone's been looking cautiously, but hopefully at it, since at least things have quieted down. Things aren't that simple, though. According to this post at Let us build Pakistan, no one actually likes it:
When I asked one of my interlocutors the reason for the universal acclamation of the agreement by their folk in Swat, shown ad nauseam on TV channels, they shuffled about uneasily till, that is, one of them confessed, "Because they know that if they say anything else they will be slaughtered by the Taliban".So, not good precedent for negotiating with the Taliban, as Obama is suggesting we might do (and, honestly, I agree, though we have to do some dividing and conquering first).
My hero, Sarah Chayes, disagrees, and told us so on the Rachel Maddow Show:
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
Proving, as usual, that Afghanistan is a mess and it's impossible to figure out what we should actually do from the google and blog side of the internet. Sarah is one of the few people promoting the "render the Taliban irrelevant" point of view, perhaps because she's one of the only people who's actually been living with Afghans through the whole debacle. It'll be interesting (hair-raising) to see which side of the debate ends up winning.
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