Status Updates From I is for Infidel: From Holy...

“Even when the mujahedeen government ruled Afghanistan there were public executions, but under the Taliban the executions were given the same weekly schedule as in Saudi Arabia. Even today in Saudi Arabia, the guilty are beheaded every Friday in the town squares... Yet despite the violence of their punishments, Saudi Arabia has escaped the Western hysteria that has been directed at the Taliban.”

Day 1 of writing this essay:

I have a fascinating research question and a great opening paragraph but absolutely no way to actually prove my point.

This is going great.

“Unsure how to make a graceful exit, Britain let Muslims and Hindus decide.”

Surely this will end well.

The West has to take a critical look at itself and examine the apparent double standards at work that allow it to attack Iraq for possessing weapons of mass destruction but not North Korea, whose leader shared Saddam Hussein's megalomaniacal qualities.

Afghanistan's tragedy is that to the world's powers, it has never really mattered—or has not mattered for long. It has never been valued for itself.

The United States also pumped out inspirational literature of its own for the Afghan refugee camps, where U.S.-printed school books taught the alphabet by using such examples as: J is for Jihad, and K is for Kalashnikov, and I is for infidel.

I was struck by the irony of the fact that the only Western reporter that the Taliban, the most misogynistic of regimes, had allowed back into Kabul was a woman. I remembered a comment from a Taliban visa officer at the end of a particularly heated discussion. He stopped talking, looked at me, and said: "We have a name of a person like you—a man."

So, yet again, Afghanistan got nothing. Nor did America. In 1999, the only apparent winner was the unopposed Osama bin Laden.

There is one truism in Afghanistan: Strength equals respect, weakness equals fear.

"I change, you change, he changes. Everyone changed," said Hekmatyar without a hint of remorse. That was the extent of his explanation. But some things could never be changed: My mind filled with images of his victims and of the victims of all the mujahedeen leaders.