{"id":569,"date":"2001-12-18T14:40:00","date_gmt":"2001-12-18T18:40:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.meehawl.com\/Blogfiles-wp\/?p=569"},"modified":"2001-12-18T14:40:00","modified_gmt":"2001-12-18T18:40:00","slug":"hopelessly-ignorant-taliban","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.meehawl.com\/Blogfiles\/2001\/12\/18\/14\/40\/hopelessly-ignorant-taliban\/","title":{"rendered":"Hopelessly Ignorant Taliban"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Taliban were hopelessly ignorant. They always buried the bodies too quickly for western cameras<\/a>
\nWhat has been strikingly absent is the humanisation of this war. Unlike in Bosnia and Kosovo, our screens and newspapers have not been filled with the terrible trauma of recognisable individuals and their families. The cameras haven’t hovered on the faces of shocked tearful children, and the impotent anguish of their parents and grandparents … estimates of the dead are always circumspect; there has been no sense of outrage about these atrocities. Yet the number of Afghan non-combatants reported killed … in this war is edging close to those who died in the World Trade Centre. The latter has provoked global outrage, the former is accepted with an astonishing equanimity as a necessary price to pay
\n…
\nthe Taliban were hopelessly ignorant. They always buried the bodies too quickly for western cameras. Just compare them with the Kosovo Liberation Army, which ensured a storm of western moral outrage at Serbian ethnic cleansing by taking the cameras to remote villages to show them the dead bodies. Nor did the Afghans flee into Pakistan in sufficient numbers to provide the kind of disaster footage always inexplicably described as “biblical”.<\/i><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Taliban were hopelessly ignorant. They always buried the bodies too quickly for western cameras What has been strikingly absent is the humanisation of this war. Unlike in Bosnia and Kosovo, our screens and...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-569","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t