Protected?
Sat up half the night watching Al Jazeera’s live coverage from Kabul – helicopter after helicopter after helicopter, back and forth in the sky ferrying people from the US embassy to the airport.
Same helicopters. Same scramble. Same broken promises to the people of the country who helped them. Same shameful shit.
Half the homes in Kabul are apparently overflowing with relatives who have fled to the capital from other parts of the country. The city’s parks are packed with women and children who have no family to take them in.
The Taliban have suggested women move to “protected areas”. Where the fuck in Afghanistan are women likely to be protected from these rabid bastards?
And then I wake up to the news that that useless toerag Ashraf Ghani has fled the country. Yet another occasion when I wish there really was a hell for him to rot in.
As his opponent Abdullah Abdullah said to Al Jazeera: “The former president of Afghanistan left Afghanistan, leaving the country in this difficult situation. God should hold him accountable.” No shit. (I wish there was a God to actually do this.)
Today the Taliban is once again in control of the country.
I honestly don’t know which is worse. For two decades the women and girls have been free of the Taliban and its sickening misogyny. Was it worth it? That has to be better than no relief for the past 25 years. But to see it snatched away from them almost in an instant – I just can’t imagine the horror. I just want to weep.
Anne M. Holmes 
This is more than just sad. It’s sick. I find myself wondering what the men think? But there are ages where thinking at all is too risky. Also our species has been traumatized too regularly.
And I cried my way across the water on my way to Chemainus this morning; just listening to what the Taliban are doing, and knowing it’s only a fraction of the real horrors. Not many of my friends want to discuss this; maybe on top of the IPCC report it’s too much, I dunno.
Our UK Foreign Secretary has been missing for a week. Johnson is on holiday and the entire, pathetic entity that calls itself a government is missing in action. It’s beyond anything I’ve ever witnessed and I am lost for words…
I’ve borrowed that image of helicopters for Facebook because so many weren’t born then and need to understand that this is not just a defeat, but a complete abandonment of any humanitarian principle.
This is the lowest of human behaviour, entrenched despair, sadism. A power structure where only one person has a voice and everyone else must obey is a slow agonizing death for humanity. That it’s acted out on the gender that incubates and gives birth is a signal of the greatest contempt for all life.