Are the Taliban Really That Much Different From Us? The Rise (and Respectability) of Fragile Masculinity in the US

Trump supporters gestured to U.S. Capitol Police in the hallway outside of the Senate chamber at the Capitol in Washington on Jan. 6. Doug Jensen, an Iowa man at center, was jailed early Saturday, Jan. 9, 2021 on federal charges, including trespassing and disorderly conduct counts, for his alleged role in the Capitol riot.

Published July 12^th, 2021

By John Freivalds

Minneapolis Star Tribune

Recent news reports have been full of stories about the vicious, male-oriented Taliban on the verge of taking power in Afghanistan. The Taliban exert their masculinity-on-steroids by having full beards, carrying heavy weapons and relegating women to a subservient role. Historical facts, science, democracy, shaving and public education are a no-go. We bask in the thought that we Americans are nothing like that.

June 14, 1941:  Latvia’s Day of Infamy

Russian tanks entering Rîga 1940.

By John Freivalds

Published 6/11/2020

Minneapolis Star Tribune

Every country recognizes its day of infamy. The United States recalls President Franklin Roosevelt’s words that December 7, 1941 was a day of infamy for the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor killing thousands. Latvia, whose democracy was ended by the Soviet invasion a year earlier, had its first day of infamy when the Stalin’s Soviet troops rounded up and deported 15,000 Latvian citizens to concentration camps in Siberia. On June 14^th their names will be aired over Latvian media and thus remembered.

By John Freivalds

Published 5/9/2021

Roanoke Times

A dating game is now raging across America as to which dates better define America.  Conservatives say it is 1776, the declaration of independence from England.  African Americans say it is held by 1619 when the first slave ships put ashore from Africa.

Furthermore, conservatives referring to the “1619 curriculum” should not be taught that America never did any evil things “for to do so otherwise would be divisive.”  Yeah sure, slavery was not divisive nor the civil war that it caused.

But I have listed some other dates which defend today’s America. 

Unable to make cats into dogs, US right to leave Afghanistan

By John Freivalds

Published 5/11/2021

Duluth News Tribune

To understand Afghanistan, all you must do is watch “The Horseman,” the beyond-moving 1971 movie starring Omar Shariff and Jack Palance. I did when I first went to Kunduz in Afghanistan that same year, and little has changed since — nor has it for hundreds of years. 

Afghanistan is one country to us in the West. But it is really nothing more than a collection of distinct feudal societies run by warlords. Not one singular language predominates, and the two main ones are mutually unintelligible Pashto and Dari, the latter a form of Farsi, the main language of Iran. 

Corruption is beyond rampant, and you could say that its capital is Dubai where much of the money we give to Afghans is absconded. 

The future of Afghanistan, I fear, will be like Yugoslavia when it fell apart after the death of Tito, its strongman. Civil war ensued and in the end seven countries came out of one. The same seems destined to happen in Afghanistan, with total chaos and the educated fleeing to wherever they can.

President Joe Biden wants us out of Afghanistan after being there for 20 years and logging 2,500 dead, 20,000 wounded, and the loss of much lost treasure. The whole logic was that Osama bin Laden set up shop there and developed the 9/11 attack on the U.S. But why? He hated that the U.S. had sent soldiers to Saudi Arabia.

Before Osama, the Taliban (“students” in Pashto) were our friends, invited to the U.S. and to Houston. Oil companies wanted to build a pipeline across Afghanistan. This headline appeared in a Houston newspaper on Dec. 14, 1997: “Oil barons court Taliban in Texas.” 

The Taliban, Afghanistan's Islamic fundamentalist army, is about to sign a $12 billion contract with an American oil company to build a pipeline across the war-torn country. 

The Taliban ministers and their advisers stayed in a five-star hotel and were chauffeured in a company minibus. Their only requests were to visit Houston's zoo, the NASA space center, and a Super Target discount store to buy stockings, toothpaste, combs, and soap. 

The men, who are accustomed to life without heating, electricity, or running water, were amazed by the luxurious homes of Texan oil barons. Invited to dinner at the palatial home of Martin Miller, a vice president of Unocal, they marveled at his swimming pool, views of the golf course, and six bathrooms. After a meal of specially prepared halal meat, rice, and Coca-Cola, the hardline fundamentalists — who have banned women from working and girls from going to school — promised to start building the pipeline immediately, despite the region's instability. 

There is fighting just 87 miles from the planned entry point of the pipeline in the northwest of the country. The Taliban has offered assurance that workers and the pipeline will be safe, but it cannot guarantee that it will not be attacked by opposition forces. 

Celebrities like Jay Leno’s wife Mavis have opposed the U.S. doing anything with the Taliban. Thus, we joined forces with one feudal lord and ended up supporting, in essence, the mayor of Kabul. Now, Ashraf Ghani sort of runs the whole country as its president.

Billions of dollars and the best of our human lives went to this effort, hoping to make a feudal society into a modern democracy. Ashraf does all the right things to appease the Americans: educating women, giving glowing speeches in the U.S., and building schools and roads. He speaks wonderful English and Pashto (but not Dari), all in the hope others will catch the bug of democracy. 

These days this is a typical headline from the Carnegie Institute: “The Kabul to Dubai pipeline: Lessons learned from the Kabul Bank scandal.”

For almost two decades now, billions of dollars in corruption proceeds have been funneled from Afghanistan, a country devastated by four decades of conflict, to Dubai. They have also largely negated the effects of huge sums of development aid and stabilization funds spent by the international community in Afghanistan. 

The Taliban does have its followers, as they are not engaged in the levels of corruption you find in some levels of government. Forget geopolitics. Do we really want to spend any more time here when the British tried and failed, as did the Russians? You can’t make cats into dogs.

John Freivalds of Wayzata, Minnesota, is the author of six books and is the honorary consul of Latvia in Minnesota. His website is jfapress.com. He wrote this for the News Tribune.