“Not content with depriving girls and women of education, employment, and free movement, the Taliban also want to take from them parks and sport and now even nature, as we see from this latest ban on women visiting Band-e-Amir,” Human Rights Watch’s Associate Women’s Rights Director Heather Barr says.
Yes, when I think of the ANA I always think back to this short doc segement from the war, and the absurdity of ever expecting that it would become an actual motivated fighting force that would stand against the Taliban.
The whole ANA wasn’t like this, there were more specially trained groups and those who are ideologically “present”, but I think we got a grim reminder of just how few in number they were when the US pulled out. The motivation to prevent the Taliban taking over simply isn’t there in the population. The people might even suffer under the Taliban rule, but there’s just kind of this complete apathy from huge swaths of the population.
I feel most bad for the girls who grew up in the brief time where they actually had access to education during the occupation, only to have it taken away and be left with this knowledge of how fucked things are for them now, how they’ve been dropped on their ass by their own people.