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Afghanistan Bans Internet
aristotle2000 writes: "Suprisingly, the Taliban has prohibited the use of the Internet in Afghanistan. Apparently, the Internet can deliver un-Islamic, immoral, or lewd material. Who can believe that a country that has such an open attitude towards women, minorities, religions, and the press would object to the Internet?" I guess I'm unclear on the concept here: if the government is also forswearing the internet, who is going to monitor to make sure the peons aren't secretly dialing up to AOL? On the plus side, .af domains should be real cheap.
The Taliban are extremists in the extreme. Take everything you'd consider to be religious fanaticism and turn it up to 11, then you have a general idea of what the Taliban are like. First they kill women for exposing some skin; then of course there's the destruction of centuries-old relics that don't align with their religion. They shun all forms of entertainment as far as I can tell. Why it took them this long to ban the use of the Internet is beyond me.
For those who want a really good look at the atrocities of the Taliban, check out RAWA. Be careful what you click on, though; there are VERY graphic movie files and pictures on that site. Don't go there unless you have a strong stomach. We're not talking about annoying Congressmen here; these people are killers, plain and simple.
I was born in Afghanistan, but I have lived in the US for most of my life. I would like to comment on the cultural aspects of the Internet and its relationship to the brand of Islam espoused by the Taliban.
To start off, I will try to give a perspective of what it's like as a Muslim (I'm not a Muslim, btw) trying to face American values. I quote from "The Islamic Declaration", written by Alija Izetbegovic.
"For more than a century now, many nations outside the western civilisation, have been facing the problem of which attitude to take towards that civilisation. Finding oneself face to face with it, should one assume the attitude of absolute rejection, cautious adjustment or accept indiscriminately all the aspects of that civilisation? The tragedy or triumph of many nations was decided by their answer to this crucial question."
This speaks to me, as I feel the same thing living inside the US. As a citizen of the US and forced subject of its culture, I have to discriminate between the aspects of the culture that I would rather not become, and those that are wonderful and magnificent.
This is often a very difficult process to undergo. Alduous Huxley himself wrote in the forward to the second edition of "Brave New World":
If I were now to rewrite the book, I would offer the Savage a third alternative. Between the utopian and the primitive horns of his dilemma would lie the possibility of sanity--a possibility already actualized, to some extent, in a community of exiles and refugees from the Brave New World, living within the borders of the Reservation. In this community economics would be decentralist and Henry-Georgian, politics Kropotkinesque cooperative. Science and technology would be used as though, like the Sabbath, they had been made for man, not (as at present and still more so in the Brave New World) as though man were to be adapted and enslaved to them. Religion would be the conscious and intelligent pursuit of man's Final End, the unitive knowledge of the immanent Tao or Logos, the transcendent Godhead or Brahman. And the prevailing philosophy of life would be a kind of Higher Utilitarianism, in which the Greatest Happiness principle would be secondary to the Final End principle--the first questino to be asked and answered in every contingency of life being: "How will this thought or action contribute to, or interfere with, the achievement, by me and the greatest possible number of other individuals, of man's Final End?"
I mention this source to suggest that it's not easy for people even living in the western world to address its culture. The Taliban, simply not being able to find the sanity among the modern western world, have decided to turn away from it altogether, the same thing Huxley did in "Brave New World" because he could see no possibility of sanity within the direction the west seems to be taking humanity.
So, the Taliban are certainly misguided, IMHO, but we must forgive them and recognize our own shortcomings in what we perceive as theirs. They are trying to force with law and government what they really wish would happen as a result of a transformation in the hearts and minds of people. How is that any different from what goes on in the US? The war on drugs, for example, is symptomatic of trying to use guns and force to stamp out an essentially crisis of the human spirit. In some ways, having any government providing such a "service" contributes to the problem and perpetuates the cycle since it distracts people from the root cause. People start thinking that big brother will come along and save them, and start to lose sight of their own individual will and spirit. While not particularly effective, people often commit crimes simply because they want to demonstrate that the whole approach of trying to prevent crime through negativity as opposed to positivity is misguided.
From Izetbegovic:
Since phone service in and out of Afghanistan is even worse these days than that in Pakistan (and that's saying something!), there shouldn't be too much concern about any but the wealthiest and most powerful people dialing out to AOL successfully via Afghani phone lines. And most of those people who are still in Afghanistan at all are considered enemies of the regime and under watch anyway.
For another thing, the Taliban is pretty good at using severe punishments as a deterrent. Beatings, reeducation camps and death at the hands of the morals police have brought Afghanistan's heroin-smuggling routes to a halt. Not a trickle, but a halt.
It's hard to imagine anyone risking internet access. You might see a trickle of UUCP-relayed e-mail continue below the radar via 2400-baud modem connections, but that's about it.
Make all the jokes you want from the comfort of your developed country re: how they'll monitor this, but in a country with only a few hundred outbound phone lines in working order, if that--prehistoric analog ones switched by hand--it doesn't take much to eavesdrop on all of them at once and listen for carrier tones.
One of the great passions in my life (one that has led me away from organized religion, oddly enough) is having conversation wih people about the hypocrisy shown by religions throughout history. "God" and "Jesus" in the Judeo-Christian religons, Muhammed, Buddha, et al-- they all stood for peace, love, humanity, and understanding. And oh yeah... righteousness.
The concept of "righteousness" has led to the "My God is bigger than your God" shit that has been going on for oh, about 4-6,000 years now. Invoking God to justify murder and destruction, all becuase you think your God is right and the other guy's God is wrong.
I submit that Gods are all the same. A creator, life-giver, a spiritual leader... we just choose to worhip them in different ways. Americans probably have no problem with this, since most of us are pretty open-minded about religious differences. Except, of course, those crazy rabid Christians who like to call Catholics "Mary fetishists," claim that the King James Version is the "Only True Version" of God's Word, and anyone who disagrees should either be converted or damned to hell by their hand. But I digress...
The point is that in other parts of the world, specifically the Middle East, Religion is everything. Which God you worship and how you worship him determines where you will live, how you will vote, and oftentime whether you will live or die when a particular "party" comes into power.
Take for example, Isreal and Palestine. There's no reason in the world why this little piece of land can't handle people of two differing sets of religious beliefs. Oh, except of course that the Palestinians believe that they own the land by rights, and it was taken by the Israeli's when they claimed it in the name of "The God of Abraham." And the same Israeli's belive that since God gave THEM the land, they should be able to kick the Muslims the hell out.
Maybe that's oversimplification, but the fact is that it's a big pissing contest. Since the governments and religions are one in the same, the diplomatic approach is little different than the religious approach; with neither side wanting to give.
Wanna know how the great King Solomon would have handled the situaion? Drop a 20 megaton nuclear warhead square on the Gaza Strip or the West Bank, and let them sort out the resulting mess. Nothing unites people like working together to recover from Armageddon, eh?
And if you can't play nice, nobody gets the toy!
SlashSigTheorem: Humorous, Political, Critical, Constructive- If you have a
> Apparently, the Internet can deliver un-Islamic, immoral, or lewd material. Who can believe that a country that has such an open attitude towards women, minorities, religions, and the press would object to the Internet?"
And then there's the USA, where lots of politicians would also be happy to censor the internet if they could get away with it.
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Well, i guess i'm probably more or less an authority on afghanistan, since i've lived there as an aid worker. the Taliban, a strict hardline Islamic regime, basically rule their country by fear. i know you've probably heard about the way they treat women, etc, but as it stands, all media (except for the Taliban's own Radio Shariat) is banned, and listening to or watching anything else is banned. Honestly though, i don't see why this is something that the talibs need to worry about. There is no telephone system in Afghanistan, and when i was there as an IT consultant, the best hope of "internet" was a dial up connection at 2400 baud to a mail server in switzerland. My theory on this, however, is that the taliban want to make themselves appear in "control" of their people to the outside world. any well informed person will realize that the only hope an afghan has of accessing the internet is to travel to neighboring Pakistan (i don't even mention Iran, since they're limited in internet access anyway.) This is not a realistic possibility though, as most afghans that travel to pakistan, do everything in their power to NOT return. In short, the Taliban are making another one of thier hollow threats, that in reality doesn't have any true effect on their people (especially since the only true internet users will be going through Inmarsat A or B, and the only people with that are the UN) so, i don't see the point. the really sad thing though, is that 2 companies - one chinese and one british - have just recently established a long distance (international) telephone service in the Afghan capitol of Kabul. while i was there, i was actually able to connect to a server back home at roughly 14000 bps (SHOCKINGLY good)! I wonder if that will be a possibility anymore...
>First they kill women for exposing some skin;
They don't just kill women for exposing skin, they also kill women for getting raped (no, I'm *not* making this up.) If a woman is raped in a Taliban-controlled part of Afghanistan, she's likely to be done in by stoning, while the perp gets to claim that she tempted him to do it, and gets off with a beating, or with no punishment at all.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
So, if I were to say that the Taliban leaders wallow in their own piss, shit, jizz, blood, wine, beer, and the sweat of a camel that had eaten a soup made up of the same gunk, and that they ate dog-and-pork sausage in the morgue with infidels, it might be regarded as un-Islamic? ;-)
(Unclean? Sounds like a great weekend! I cut my finger pretty bad during the wee hours of the morning, and was worried about the bleeding, so I got a stich put in by this cute Jewish med student interning at the hospital... we hit it off and met at the zoo later that morning after she got off her shift, on which one of her patients died, which was a bummer... we went to the zoo, walked around a bit, grabbed a sausage from the sidewalk vendor, saw the camels (he was looking hungry, so I fed him some sausage, even though the sign said not to, while petting him on the nose, poor thing was burning up, it was so hot outside that day), then went out for Chinese food, then went bar-hopping... then I got really drunk... Never mix beer and wine. Anyways, I remember getting laid, but I'd had waaaaaay too much to drink and I really embarassed myself. But I was too drunk to really give a damn. In fact, I was so damn drunk, she got worried, and she had to go to work anyways, so she took me to the hospital at 3:00am and left me to get my stomach pumped, which I think was a subtle signal that the relationship was over... but that's OK, 'cuz while I was getting my guts pumped out, I met this cute Hindu med student...)
The Taliban really needs to get its priorities straight. I mean, there could be much more productive things the Taliban could be doing, like:
1. Ensuring widespread deprivation, poverty, starvation.
2. Smashing a few more statues.
3. Playing host to more terrorist organisations.
4. Finding imaginative ways of abusing women.
etc.
Banning the Internet should be waa-aay down its list of priorities.
The ISI was the primary conduit for western aid to the mujahadeen in their war against the Soviet invasion force of the late 1980s. (It should also be remembered that the Soviet invasion killed over 1 million Afghanis.)
After the Soviets left Afghanistan with their tail between their legs, Pakistan funded and trained the Taliban, and in some cases Pakistani regulars even lead them in battle. Taliban is also made up of ethnic Pashtunies, which are a minority group in Afghanistan, but are heavily represented in the Pakistani military.
The extent to which Pakistan is still pulling the Taliban's strings is unclear. Some feel the Taliban have slipped Islamabad's control.
The rteason none of thiis rarely (if ever) reported in the press is that: A.) Most western readers don't give a rat's ass about Afghanistan; and B.) Since it was a big egg on the face of the Clinton-era CIA, since Pakistan is still officially an American allie and the CIA worked closely with the ISI to arm the mujahadeen. Another problem is the lack of reliable, unbiased news from the region, as various news outletss (Afghan opposition groups, official media in India, Iran, etc.) who have reported the ISI connection all have their own agendas to push.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
That means they banned .NET too!
I am !amused.
On the plus side, .af domains should be real cheap.
.af domain I could register like goatse.cx, but all I can come up with is rice-pil.af...
Hmmm... I was trying to thing of a clever
There was a documentary (I think it was called Undeer the Veil) shown on british telly recently made by the reporter Siras Shar (Not sure about the spelling). Her parents come from Afghanistan and she sneeked into the country with the help of an underground movement. The footage that was shown was very sobering, some of it showed a football stadium (ironically built by the international community to help return normality to the country) being used for very brutal executions, hangings, stonings, shooting etc.
:->
The people in Af are under the complete control of the Taliban. They are ruled with the proverbial rod of iron (which is normally used to beat to death 13 year old girls for daring to read a book). Their interpretation of Islamic law is so extreme that most other Muslims, even the most 'orthodox'(*) ones consider it over the top.
It is seeing what can happen in a country like this that puts life in the west into perspective. We may whine about companies protecting IP, or governments introducing face recognising CCTV, but thats nothing compared to what these people are living through.
If it ever shown where you live, try and watch it. It certainly made me realise just how lucky I am. At least I have the freedom to live a normal life, go to school (although I have just finished Uni but you know what I mean), walk down the street, without risking beating, or death. And I have some say, no matter how small, in the way my country is run, I have a voice. People in Afganistan have no voice, not even a small one, especially not women, who are basically non-people.
(*) I don't like the word extremist, it smacks of American cliches about Muslims, most of whome are peaceful, honest, friendly, well educated and moral. The combative tendancy in the area is like that in europe up to about 50 years ago (ignoring the balkans), not a product of religion, just of the situation, religion just tends to fan the flames (the religious wars of europe, papal intervention in politics, the holy roman empire etc)
Here endeth the lesson
Paul Leader
I read this chain and I was surprised that all I could see was ISLAM and Taliban...ISLAM and Taliban. All I could see what how the ISLAMIC Taliban think its ok to stone their daughters, cut off heads in public. How these religion fanatics badge everyother non-ISLAMIC person. ISLAM ISLAM ISLAM.....whats up with that???
When I read about Hitler...I never read he was a Roman Catholic. I never read that what he did was just follow his religion and that it was OK in his religion to wipe out a whole race of people. I never read that Hitler sent Jews to concentration camps because he was a Roman Catholic.
My friend...this is western progoganda at its best. An attempt to dissallude people about Islam to the extent that the people who follow Islam don't know what their religion is all about. Taliban are an evil group of individuals and their activites are NOT endorsed by ISLAM. Similarly Hitler was a devil and his activities are not endoresed by Christianity.
So for the sake of GOD....don't talk confuse the activites of Taliban with the teachings of ISLAM. I don't think there is any religion in the world that teaches us to harm other beings/be disrespectful to others.
Let me remind you that ISLAM was the first relgion in the world that actually gave women a status. Before that women used to be buried at birth and were thought of as a liabilty. Islam changed the status quo.
Today these illiterate idiotic piece of waste Taliban are doing everything AGAINST the teaching of Islam.
So stop commenting or defending their activities or associating their activities with the preachings of ISLAM.
Thank you for bringing up another one of the things about Afghanistan that frightens me. How is it that so many people didn't consider it a big deal when the Taliban began destroying ancient religious monuments? When they announced that they would be requiring minority religions to display an identification of their faith? When all the other things that have been going on have happened? Yes, there was an uproar, but it didn't seem like nearly enough.
These people have proven themselves to be diligent, determined and successful at defeating others against all odds. They show all the signs of proceeding past their current level of extremism to absolute genocide. They still have tons of expensive weapons, left over from the Afghan war and also new ones supplied by terrorists and even (possibly) other governments. The level of terror that they inflict on their own people continues to grow and grow.
If they finally defeat the United Front and other so-called rebels in the north, who says they're going to stop at their own borders? Yes, it would be insane to attack in that heavily armed area of the world, but the Taliban has shown itself to not behave sanely. There's many countries around them full of people that to them are heretics. Talk about a chance for a holy war!
This isn't like the problems in the Balkans or anywhere else that has had religious conflicts recently (I'm not dismissing these events either). It's not "just" two religions or two ethnic groups fighting. It's one group, fighting for systematic destruction of everything it disagrees with. *cough* Sound familiar at all to anyone? How about exterior religious identification? Hmm?
I'm reminded of this quote:
First they came for the Communists, and I didn't speak up, because I wasn't a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up, because I wasn't a Jew.
Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak up, because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me,and by that time there was no one left to speak up for me.
- Rev. Martin Niemoller, 1945
I know that people probably think I'm insane to compare the Taliban to the Nazis, but you know what? Germany was considered a laughable threat too at one time. They'd been destroyed by WWI, they were never going to rise again.
It just seems to me that not enough people (or countries) care about what's happening in Afghanistan. It's the country's issue, let them deal with that. The problem with that is that it could very easily become our issue.
Think about it.
'crow
The Taliban have destroyed ancient religious monuments, returned women to servitude, enforced the islamic laws and persecuted non islams out of the country and proceded to commit religious genocide and we should be surprised they have banned the internet ?
The fact is the goverment control all of the Telephone services and montitoring is normal, the TV, Radio and Media a government controlled and thus no criticism is allowed and anyone who dares to stand up to them dies.
The mujahadeen have been fighting guerilla wars first against the russians and now the taliban and the country is split into warzones, the taliban now run the most fundamentalist islamic regime on the planet and provide aid and succor to terrorists - so the internet is about the easiest thing to control.
He who controls access to the world controls the world - the populace of afghanistan after the russian occupation would consider acccess to clean water and electricty a bonus - they would put computer access very very low on their interests - it remains a toy for the rich and there aren't that many of them. Most of the population would like to have enought to eat.
How about a comment on their human rights record, or their treatment of women (this is a country that condones murder as a punishment for disobedience of a wife toward her husband).
The sad thing is this is a government the Americans helped put in power with weapons and funding to fight the russians - yet they now hide people like Osama Bin Laden - US public enemy number one.
I refuse to argue with Anonymous Cowards - if you want a discussion get an account....