The House Church movement in Afghanistan has grown beyond all expectations in the last 2 years. Today one of their leaders sent an email to churches in the West calling us to prayer. He wrote this line - “most of us expect to meet Jesus face to face in the next two weeks.” Please pray that God will fill the hearts and minds of His children currently trapped in the horrific situation with His incredible peace and ease their minds. Their witness is an incredible reminder of what really matters. Pray for conflict resolution in this devastated region of our world. And always, without ceasing - pray for peace. Amen
all those lives lost and ruined...a lot is being promised but how much can we trust our (or any) leaders now? i just cannot understand why everyone needs to be 'at each other', just accept that there are differences, shake hands and enjoy your life...also, think if you have to force your beliefs onto others maybe that is a problem?
Just another crazy situation in the Middle East. It doesn’t matter how many times we interfere out there, things will just go back to how they were before. How a militia, which is basically what the taliban are, can take over a whole country in a few weeks is ridiculous. The west spent trillions training and equipping the Afghan army, and they surrender without a fight. It makes you wonder if they actually believed in the cause, or just joined the army for a job in a country with limited opportunities.
I never thought that America could make as much of a cluster **** of leaving a place as they did in South Vietnam, but give them their due they have really taken the prize this time. If (and it is a bloody big if) we are lucky The Taliban have smartened up and won't crack down too much on secularism and will cosy up to China for infrastructure investment - but I don't expect this to happen because Afghanistan would have to function like a state. In Afghanistan there is no loyalty beyond tribe and if you ever look at an ethnographic map of that country then you can begin to understand why - it's like a pizza chef has gone mad with every topping they could think of! Much of the country is secular Sunni (like most of England was nominally CofE, but not practicing) and they are the ones that joined the Afghan army and police forces. The trouble is they don't believe in the state any more than they believe in Santa Claus so they don't have anything to fight for. The Taliban are formed from the Sunni and Shia idealogues who will fight for an openly Islamic state using terrorist and organised military tactics. In a few weeks they will start to re-establish sharia law and begin victimisation of the westernised and the educated women. Then we will start to see tensions between Sunni and Shia. Then in a few months the Taliban Command will start to fall apart along ethnic groupings and there will be civil war again. As long as neighbouring countries keep out of things then things would start quite intense for a few years then rumble along at low intensity indefinitely. No one group will ever win because no tribe will ever consent to be ruled by anyone from another tribe. Unfortunately, since the days of Communist influence and then Soviet invasion East and West have been pumping more and more weapons into the area so expect quite a lot of noisy conflict for at least 2 - 3 years. And this is without Iranian, Pakistani or Saudi interference.
How many times is this going to happen in the middle east after our "intervention?" We need to learn to do things differently because we keep leaving these countries ripe for this sort of clusterfuck.
Bush and Blair should be tried as war criminals. Bastards have got away with this. We need to stop trying to tell these middle eastern countries how to live. It's their lifestyle regardless of our views. Stop meddling and leave them alone to sort out their own troubles and way of living.
Aye, trouble is half the fookers will probably flee over here now for free accommodation, free food and money, then proclaim how shìt this country is and try and turn it into a backwater shìthole from whence they came
Aye but there's nothing like a bit of tragedy to stir the liberals up into a frenzy of "we need to let these poor unfortunate hoards of oppressed tortured 23 year old blokes stream into the country for their safety" .
Every version of the sky fairy should be banned. There'll be hell on here when we inevitably have to pile in there again. The forces will quite rightly have gigantic reservations about it.
It's our bombs that bring them here, mate. We can't flatten folks countries and livlihoods and then blame them for looking for a better life. I've got an issue with the Afghani men of fighting age leaving their homeland, however. They should be marching to the frontline to hold the Taliban up so the women and children can be evacuated. It would take a brave government to kick off in the middle east now. The UK and US public have no appetite for any of it. It went on too long and we know it was all a waste of time, money, effort but sadly more importantly, lives..
Its not religion that's the problem, its people's desire to persecute anyone that doesn't agree with them/behave like them/think like them. Religion is just a convenient vehicle to use to create the 'us and them' scenario. The Nazis did the same thing using national identity, some people seek to do it using football clubs.
If we never meddled they'd not need to leave their country. We have helped cause this ****storm so we need to do the right thing and take some of them in.
