7 Million (58%) Afghans Just Dealt a Blow to the Taliban

[kpete]

7 Million Afghans Just Dealt a Blow to the Taliban
The country's election was full of surprises. Will the euphoria last?


Despite Taliban threats to attack polling stations nationwide, the same percentage of Afghans turned out to vote—roughly 58 percent, or 7 million out of 12 million eligible voters—as did Americans in the 2012 U.S. presidential race. Instead of collapsing, Afghan security forces effectively secured the vote. And a leading candidate to replace Hamid Karzai is Ashraf Ghani, a former World Bank technocrat who has a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from Columbia University, a Lebanese Christian wife, and an acclaimed book and TED talk entitled “Fixing Failed States.”

“Relative to what we were expecting, it’s very hard to not conclude that this was a real defeat for the Taliban,” Andrew Wilder, an American expert on Afghanistan, said in a telephone interview from Kabul on Monday. “And a very good day for the Afghan people.”

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/04/7-million-afghans-just-dealt-a-blow-to-the-taliban/360373/

[snooper2]

1. best thread of the week, fuck the taliban girls school blowing up raping fucking assholes

[get the red out]

2. Exactly!

Good to see the people are rejecting these monsters.

[rollin74]

3. good news

[Comrade Grumpy]

4. Ah, the spin room is open.

The Taliban didn't go anywhere. Check back next year.

[LanternWaste]

5. perceive this as spin rather than good news for the Afghan people

I suppose many of the overly-biased would perceive this as spin rather than good news for the Afghan people; and that a defeat as mentioned in the story would be mistranslated as completely destroyed (necessary I imagine, to better validate the self-fulfilling prophecies of our modern day prophets sans sandwich boards)

“Relative to what we were expecting, it’s very hard to not conclude that this was a real defeat for the Taliban,” Andrew Wilder, an American expert on Afghanistan, said in a telephone interview from Kabul on Monday. “And a very good day for the Afghan people.”