The entire student body and staff of Afghanistan’s only girls’ boarding school—about 250 people—managed to escape.
CNN reported:
“Last week, we completed the departure from Kabul of nearly 250 students, faculty, staff, and family members,” said Shabana Basij-Rasikh, who co-founded the School of Leadership Afghanistan (SOLA) in the Afghan capital
“Everyone is en route, by way of Qatar, to the nation of Rwanda where we intend to begin a semester abroad for our entire student body,” Basij-Rasikh stated in a series of tweets.
Shabana Basij-Rasikh speaks during the Girl Rising: A Rally for Girls and Women screening at The World Bank on April 18, 2013 in Washington, DC.
The school’s president said she hoped they could all eventually go back. “Our resettlement is not permanent… When circumstances on the ground permit, we hope to return home to Afghanistan. For now, I request privacy for our community,” she wrote.
Basij-Rasikh is highly decorated and co-founded the school while still a teenager, “with the mission of providing access to quality education for girls across her homeland,” according to the school website.
The founder of the school is a remarkable young woman who finished high school in the United States, then graduated from Middlebury College in Vermont. She earned a master’s degree from Oxford and received two honorary doctorates.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Phew. Godspeed.
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Good luck Ladies. Never give up!
For as “decorated” as you may become,
for as many “lessons” you may teach,
for as many votes you may cast,
for as many books you may write or read,
for as many speeches you may make,
you will encounter far too many,
stuck in the
“think with your dipstick Jimmy” mode.
Stuck in the 2/3rds of happiness is, mode.
Stuck in the
Doc smacks the newborn butt to knock
the “stinger” off the “dumb” ones, mode.
Never give up,
they’re just taller children, that’s all.
So trip them gently, they don’t like
to fall…
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The U.S. “withdrawal” (sic) from Afghanistan has certainly been a debacle. The only thing worse is every single day before that for the last 20 years.
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Not 20 years.
More.
Before the U.S., the Russians were there for 9 years, one month, three weeks, and one day.
Afghans have lived through Soviet and U.S. invasions, civil war, insurgency, and a previous period of heavy-handed Taliban rule.
And before the Russians, the civil war, and the Taliban’s first occupation of the country, there was the British Empire’s Anglo-Afghan Wars.
Anglo-Afghan Wars, also called Afghan Wars, three conflicts (1839–42; 1878–80; 1919) in which Great Britain, from its base in India, sought to extend its control over neighboring Afghanistan and to oppose Russian influence there.
https://www.britannica.com/event/Anglo-Afghan-Wars
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This is what withdrawal looks like. In fact, with more than 100,000 people safely evacuated, it is better than it could have been if an incompetent like Trump was in charge, and his people decided to evacuate from an air force base that was extremely difficult and dangerous for people to travel to and would also be a prime target by terrorists happy to destroy an American airbase (but who didn’t want to destroy the Kabul airport).
But even a “good” withdrawal looks like a debacle, which is why anti-war presidents like Obama were too cowardly to take the political hit.
Biden wasn’t. Kudos for him. I only wish I heard more people who wanted this who had his back, instead of repeating the nonsense that there was a “better” way. I doubt any of them would have condoned sending thousands more soldiers back or delaying this.
This is what withdrawal always looks like. Which is why it isn’t easy. It’s actually one of the better outcomes, but the fact that it still is a lousy outcome is why even presidents who don’t want to be there are too cowardly to withdraw.
She who must not be named quietly rescued Afghan women, but she didn’t charge them the way Betsy DeVos’ brother did.
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Well said NYCpsp. There was never going to be an easy evacuation of Afghanistan, especially with the Taliban in charge.
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I read yesterday that more than a hundred thousand people have been flown out of Kabul’s airport so far. Many more are crossing borders by car, truck, or on foot to escape. Some are staying to continue fighting the Taliban.
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The Taliban are a hideous throwback to the 12th century and a dark malignant 12th century at that. They fear independent women more than death and the Taliban is a death cult unto itself. When Afghanistan isn’t at war with a foreign power, it’s continuously at war with itself, never-ending war, car bombings, torture and slaughters of the innocent. So many searing images coming out of Afghanistan: a huge C-17 cargo plain loaded with 640 Afghanis, men, woman, children all huddled together shoulder to shoulder with no ability to move about. I am just hoping that none of these cargo planes loaded with refugees is taken down by a terrorist or by mechanical failure. It would be like having a whole village wiped out in an instant.
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Terrifying stuff. Puts in perspective the things that we complain about in America and the West generally.
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The things we complain about in the West, like private contractors — for example charter school contractors — buying undue influence with our governments, are the reasons we spent twenty years destroying all hope in Afghanistan. We were not nation building. We were privatizing and deregulating in our inimitable colonialist modus operandi. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dykZyuWci3g
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I don’t quite follow, but in any way that wasn’t my point.
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I know, but you gave me a segue. The link is to John Oliver, Last Week Tonight, I should have mentioned, by the way.
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It’s been a few years since I could stand watching scripted rants at the camera with gratuitous uses of profanity every 8 seconds.
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Me, I miss Jon Stewart’s scripted rants at the camera with gratuitous uses of profanity every 8 seconds. John Oliver will have to do. The depth of research and insight on both their shows is impactful, potty mouths or not. The fact is, neoliberal capitalism is ruining life on earth and in the oceans everywhere, from Afghanistan to Antarctica to Borneo to Brooklyn.
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Stewart was a funnier comedian, but those were different times.
I thank God I was lucky enough to be born in a neoliberal capitalist country.
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Oh yeah, it could be worse. But, it could be better.
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Aa a matter of fact, it’s good to keep the bright side in mind in the 21st century. Kudos.
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Yes, USA, USA, USA, USA!! United States of America or as the cognoscenti like to say, United States of the Italian Guy. Though Amerigo Vespucci may have taken Spanish citizenship, he was still Italian in his heart of hearts and in fact Italian born. Was he a dual citizen?
From wikipedia: Vespucci’s reputation was perhaps at its lowest in 1856 when Ralph Waldo Emerson called Vespucci a “thief” and “pickle dealer” from Seville who managed to get “half the world baptized with his dishonest name”. end quote
Lots of controversy pro and con regarding Amerigo but it’s still the US of the Italian Guy any who.
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FLERP!
What part of Neo Liberal did you like about the Fed Buying paper in 2008 with treasury notes. Or the Neo Liberal orgy we saw in 2020 when the Fed first guaranteed the notes of the oil companies and then promised to purchase as much Corporate debt as necessary to keep the bond market afloat. I guess worry about moral hazards are not for the investor class.
And what part of Neo Liberal applies to trade negotiations focused on intellectual property including for a pandemic ending Vaccine paid for with public dollars. …. While Labor standards are left out.
And if we truly lived in a Neo Liberal country the Gilens /Page study would not have found
“A proposed policy change with low support among economically elite Americans (one-out-of-five in favour) is adopted only about 18% of the time,” “while a proposed change with high support (four-out-of-five in favour) is adopted about 45% of the time.”
Your Neo Liberal capitalist economy resembles an Oligarchy that may serve you and me but leaves a majority of Americans hanging on for dear life.
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Thanks for giving flesh to my original point. I liked every one of those things more than I would like the realities of everyday life for the majority of the people on the planet.
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I’d rather be a hammer than a nail, yes I would. I surely would. Better still to Lay the hammer down.
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FLERP!
I am sure you did . And that is the point.
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Well said, FLERP!
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“Puts into perspective what we complain about”
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