The story you linked to and are now so sanctimoniously hectoring us about is an every fucking day occurrence in Afghanistan. It has been a typical Afghanistan non-story for as long as Obama has been President. It has been a typical Afghanistan non-story for as long as the US has been stumbling around Afghanistan's wastelands. It predates Obama. It predates Bush. It predates Clinton. It predates the other Bush. It predates Reagan. It has been a typical Afghanistan non-event since the Soviets invaded, occupied, massacred, lost, left and were then replaced by the Northern Alliance, who then lost, left for the hills, and were replaced by heroin warlords, who then lost and were replaced by the Taliban, who then lost and were replaced by Hamid Karzai and the heroin warlords again. A story like that would barely make the newspapers there, if they had any papers. And since the US had the pigheaded stupidity to attempt to invade and occupy Afghanistan in 2001, it has become a depressing and monotonously typical non-story coming out of Afghanistan in our press. It's an everyday occurrence there and if you went back 300 years it would still be an everyday occurrence there.
You want people to get worked up about it and rally to your flag. It's boring as shit. No wonder nobody "cares" like you want them to. You're not "confused" at all about the depressed silence you get, you're just grinding your nicked and bloodsoaked axe, and persisting in a murderous folly which is older than all of us combined.
When I was young I read stories of two games that centered on brutality. They didn't have anything to do with one another directly, except they were both played from horseback and seemed like the same kind of game: not just violent but intentionally gory. Since I learned about them around the same time I have always remembered them together. One was the sport of polo that was
allegedly first played by Europeans during the Crusades. What I read purported to be the origin of polo in the west. They didn't invent the game themselves, but they adapted it after contact with the Islamic world, where it was already established, to a style they liked. Christian knights on horseback would attempt to shoot on a goal line using their swords or lances in place of mallets. They would pass the "ball" and defend against advance of the other team and try to seize control of it in order to mount their own attack on the other team's goal. In their westernized adaptation, the role of the ball was fulfilled by the severed head of a Saracen (Muslim). The other sport I learned of and remembered in association with this probably apocryphal tale about polo was Afghan
Buzkashi, which is said to be that country's national game. In this game, sometimes called "goat polo", whose origins are lost in the mists of Afghan time, the players on horseback struggle for possession of a bag that contains the carcass of a kid goat that has been freshly beheaded and de-hooved in the opening ceremony. Of the two games, the first seems far more barbaric and brutal to me now. I don't know what I thought about the relative brutality of them when I was eight. Regardless of whether I have matured and changed in my estimation of the brutality of Crusader polo, it is certain that the countries which invented this parody of polo would blanch and utter scandalized denunciations against the Crusaders if their noble ancestors were return to life somehow and do again today what they did back then. The West has changed in its views of brutality, and yet we still send Crusaders to remote parts of the world to "bring to the natives the Light" a light which apparently we alone represent and embody. Or else bring the natives to the Light forcibly, if the Light won't come spontaneously out of the natives of its own accord. Or else just kill the natives, if they are so stubborn as to refuse our gift of
a morally superior culture. Oh certainly, we have changed! The West is even full of vegetarians now. However, buzkashi is still the national sport of Afghanistan, and they have not learned yet to make shamefaced apologies for the way they are. Goat polo is still goat polo there, and war is still war. Want to do the people of Afghanistan a big favor? Stay the fuck away from them. You'll be doing your own country an even bigger favor. We, the victors, aren't changing Afghanistan nor Iraq nearly as much as they, as our victims, are changing us.
If you are so concerned about awful brutality as you want us to believe you could easily find stories several times worse happening all over the globe.
According to multinational peacekeeping forces in the Darfur region of Sudan, 107 people have been killed in tribal clashes since March, and the govt and rebel forces both appear to be massing for possible renewed fighting in this place that has seen so much slaughter already. But I suppose they were killed much more politely than the awful Taliban would do it. True,
machetes are one of the most common weapons in that part of the world, but still- it's not Taliban stuff and ergo just not worthy of notice. Did you know an important Thai General was shot in the head by the other factions of the Thai military yesterday, and that anti-military demonstrators, who previously had received a measure of protection from this General, will now be facing troops with machine guns and tanks in the streets of Bangkok after today? Stuff is happening everywhere. But maybe you don't know about it because it doesn't coincide with the current imperial objectives of your government and its glorious leader.