Look, you and a lot of others in this thread, need to understand when you say things like, terrible, oppressive regime, you’re not really any better than what you’re condemning. You’re simplifying an issue that is extremely complex and taking something with a lot of different perspectives and historical adaptations and making it into your own narrative. Just because you read one book, from one person’s perspective doesn’t really give you the right to comment on a country of over 83 million people.
Now I’m not saying the Taliban or Iran are a positive presence, it’s just that you have to understand the historical reasons that these countries decided to popularize some intense form of Islam governed by sharia law. These historical pieces would take novels to write out but most of it starts with the objective history of western drawing out of countries like Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, etc. These countries are extremely diverse and often times you have different groups (ethnic, tribal, religious) living next to each other that have thousands of years of bad blood and are all of a sudden expected to live next to one another and unify under the label “Afghanistan” or “Iraq” that never was really theirs to begin with, just a British/American/French interpretation of how the land should be separated.
Imagine it this way...if the Native Americans had not been completely subjugated by disease and had been able to hold their own, the US would look a whole lot different. We would have a lot of the same striations that exist in these countries about who’s land it really is and simmering tensions from before. I’m speculating on this obviously so it could all be BS. The Maori in New Zealand integrated very well and is another example.
The US has a history of enabling pro-war people who at the time were enemies of our enemies (Soleimani against the Taliban in 2005, Saddam Hussein against Iran in the 80s, Bin Laden against the Russians in the 80s...see a pattern yet?) This alone is pretty common knowledge across the Arab world, but somehow Americans just seem to parrot the same Iran bad, terrorism bad, mantra, without ever really empathizing with the historical fallacies of US foreign policy. Again, not saying this is all the US’s fault, but for the purpose of moving forward with a more harmonious world, it is imperative that Americans (who vote in the politicians that send the voters and voters’ wallets to war) start figuring this stuff out to avoid the perpetual debt machine that is the “War on Terrorism”.
Anyway, spark notes: there’s a lot to this shit and it’s silly to call things good and bad without ever having been to these countries or having a limited window of perspective on the matter
