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Comment by nkmnz | Hacker News Reader

Funny list of countries. Ask women in Afghanistan how they were treated with US presence vs. now. Ask jews in Palestine how Hamas treated them vs. Israel. Ask people in Yemen how they are living right now, but be sure to talk to them directly instead of writing to them, because barely anybody there can read. Their leaders just love them so much, they don't want them to read any bad news.

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Ask women in Afghanistan how they were treated with Soviet presence vs. now.

I don't have many good things to say about the USSR, but they are 100x better than the Taliban.

That's a fairly low bar.

It goes back to the core issue: which nations have the moral right to tell others how to conduct domestic policy.

This probably doesn’t make the point you think it does.

If you ask women in Afghanistan you will hear different views. People in the cities had a better life during the American occupation but in rural Afghanistan women were often worse off than under the Taliban. The US propped up warlords, some of them real monsters, and those controlled a lot of the country side. There was no good side in Afghanistan and the US should have stayed out, instead of propping up one group of oppressors to try to defeat another.

So what you say is that there wasn't too much western engagement, but too little. I agree.

> There was no good side in Afghanistan and the US should have stayed out, instead of propping up one group of oppressors to try to defeat another.

I mean... The Taliban caused 9/11... What did you exactly expect the US to do?

They didn't. They helped the organizers to hide after the fact.

And that's OK?

Fair and just societies thrive in refugee camps after all

I don't think I understand what your point is? Are you implying that the US should have what? Stayed in Afghanistan forever? What solution would you have proposed there?

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