Individual, your pseudonym suggests that you are a thinking person yet its contents shows clearly that you are one of the sheeple.

Please make up your mind!

Hi individual.

Yes I am familiar with the culture of academia, particularly because I am part of it. The culture is one of negation. Witness the complete lack of solutions to any of the problems they believe exist. It's crippled with a disease that thinks if you simply deconstruct and morally criticize others this then makes you "intelligent" and/or "morally superior."

Since 1990, during the brutal reign of the various Islamist and fundamentalist groups and warlords, from the mujahidin to Hekmatyar to Abu Sayyaf and Haqqani to the Taliban, women in Afghanistan were driven back into the home, reduced to menial domestic work and with little future but to be traded from one man to another.

Before those times, under the pro-Russian governments - and even before that, under the old royalist regime - women could come out into the street, girls could go to school, women could work for themselves, they even had the right to divorce.

Since the overthrow of the reactionary, fundamentalist regime in 2001, and perhaps inadvertently, the Coalition has encouraged women to lift up their heads again and hope for better future. Some three million girls have gone to school, and many are now either at universities - as they used to do before the reactionaries took over - or in the workforce.

What will happen to them if the Coalition leaves prematurely ? All those women who have actively encouraged their sisters to seize opportunities - will they survive ?

Let's get something straight: Afghan traditional culture, like culture in most tribal and backward societies, is a vile thing as far as half the population is concerned. Not all cultures are 'equal', what a moronic idea. Any set of cultural practices which oppresses half the population does not deserve to continue: human rights HAVE TO trump culture.

On the other hand, I haven't kept up with what is the unspoken truth on the Left these days: perhaps the abandonment of Afghanistan's women is seen as a small price to pay for being able to stick it up the US, for the luxury of being able to say 'Nyah-nyah-nyah.'

Just let me know, and I'll vote Liberal for the first time in my life, and evermore: it will have become the 'progressive party'. Christ, who would have ever thought ?

Cheers,

Joe

David G,
Just because you feel cornered doesn't mean I'm wrong. One thing you need to understand that there's a huge difference between some Academic & a learned person/scholar.
Engineers (real ones) quite often get called academics by those engineers with no discernible substance & who like to call themselves academic. An educated person with an ounce of pragmatism outweighs dozens of intellectuals any day.
Doctors too have academic education but I refuse to call them Academics because Doctors are of benefit to society unlike leftist garbling intellectuals.
Academia was designed to be a stepping stone for bright minds not for certificate collectors.