Taliban And Shuffle: A War Short Story

In response to the September 11 attacks, the United States should declare war on the responsible group. As a nation, we should do only the actions that bring about the best consequences, and the best consequences would occur by bringing the responsible group to justice. In this case, killing the Taliban and its supporters is the right action because it produces the greatest amount of good.

Violence, war, discrimination, and poverty: these issues have long been a part of Afghanistan’s history. Even though things in Afghanistan are getting better, war fills the country, and women and children have to learn to endure abuse, caused by men and the Taliban; they also learn to endure poverty. Considering this, it is no wonder why Afghanistan is in the terrible position it is in now. Many Afghan cities like Kabul are filled with things like violence and discrimination, and the book A Thousand Splendid Suns, by Khaled Hosseini takes place in Kabul. This book follows the lives of two Afghani women, Mariam and Laila, as they suffer pain and discrimination received from the Taliban and their

Have you ever been hesitant to share a true story because you suspected that it would appear as a fabricated anecdote to your audience? Well, most of the time we add bunch of things or change a true story to make it sound genuine to our audience. We live in a judgmental and complex world where lying has become a part of our daily lives. Because of this habit, it is hard to differentiate the truth from a fabricated lie. Since I was a child, my parents always talked about battle of Adwa and many events that took place centuries ago. It is always amusing to listen to those stories because it is about heroic act that most of the kings of Ethiopia accomplished. Although I heard different versions of these stories, I always tend to believe my parents’ version. The reason is not simply the credibility of my parents’, but the way it was presented. According to the short story, “How to Tell a True War Story” by Tim O’ Brien, a true war story is hard to accept as true because some of the most agonizing parts are true, while some of the natural parts are not. Tim O’Brien’s narrative shows that a storyteller has the power to shape listeners’ views. We can change our perception because of the story teller, and neglect the fact that we are avoiding the actuality. Therefore by listening to different versions of a story, it will actually help the reader find greater truth of the story.

One of the most radical religious groups in the world today are known as the Taliban. The Taliban is a “fundamentalist Muslim group that controlled much of Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001” (Maley NP). The Taliban took power after the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan. When the Soviet Union left Afghanistan, the Taliban rose to power and took much control of the country. The Taliban leader is Mullah Mohammad Omar. The Taliban in Afghanistan are an Islāmic group, that uses harsh rules against Afghanistan’s women and helped attacked the United States.

A true war story is rather difficult, if not impossible, to share when it goes beyond one’s imagination. Regarding such a story, one morally sound aspect about it is that it lacks morality or meaning to it. Extracting facts from a true war story is a daunting task because what seems to happen is what actually occurs. In what is to follow, I will tell one awful true war story.

The War in Afghanistan has been an all consuming conflict for the US government since we started to launch air strikes on October 7, 2001. This is a conflict that’s been brewing since before the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. This war has the continuation of past conflicts in it, conflicts that can be connected a good deal to the interference of other large powers, such as the USSR. From keeping an eye on the oil reserves, pressuring Iran, and keeping Pakistan stable, our interests and motives for occupying Afghanistan are undeniably laced with many ulterior motives, providing us with the issue of unfavorable opinion and our interests being the source of terrorist attacks. Afghanistan is a country that has been plagued with

Tim O’Brien reminds us that true war stories are never moral. A war story is true if it is obscene and evil, with no virtue. A true war story will have no examples of the way humans should behave (514). The contributing authors absolutely influence the perception of the war, their works are meaningful, powerful. Further, we have the luxury of 20/20 hindsight and a PBS documentary that took 10 years to complete to consider when forming our opinion. Personally, I am grateful for the influence media and writings have on perceptions of warfare. I am coming to understand my grandfather who served in the Navy and the biases he brought home from the war. While I disagree with them, I am beginning to see where they originate from and why even at the

The Taliban founded in the year of 1994 by a man named Mullah Mohammad Omar. It originated in Afghanistan and was created with the purpose of destroying the foreign military in Afghanistan and to reestablish the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan under strict Sharia Law ("Taliban Narrative"). The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan would then be brought back into play in the year of 1996. However, the event that led to the creation of the Taliban happened almost a decade earlier in the year of 1979. In 1979 the Soviets began invading Afghanistan, they were there for about ten years and then withdrew late in the year of 1988 and early 1989. Mujahedeen forces then removed the soviet government in the year of 1992 and led to rivalry between groups. A year

The Dressmaker of Khair Khana, is a book about what people in Afghanistan experienced throughout the Taliban and the war in Afghanistan. The book opened my eyes to see what people experienced during these events. The events that were happening were completely changing all aspects of their lives. The Taliban changed the lives of all people in Afghanistan. All of this information was all foreign and unfamiliar to me and I imagine it would be to most Americans. It is important to attempt to understand the changes and experiences people went through, even if they do not directly relate to us. Although all residents were impacted during this time, it is important to understand how the Taliban altered the lives of women residing in Afghanistan.

With the Taliban beginning its reigns on Afghanistan, darkness took over the nation. Terror became a more common installment into the minds of the citizens. Hearing the rumble of the jeeps, the bangs of the AK-47s, and the bombs setting off can send a shiver down anyone’s back. Families are torn apart, children forget what play time is, schools are destroyed. The injustice that the Taliban brought is defined through the cruelest of actions. “There are a lot of children in Afghanistan, but little childhood.” (Hosseini, 1) With their regime, the Taliban established radical rules that limited the country to all but making the essential function of speaking, barely legal. The effect of the Taliban begin to spread specifically towards Amir and his family. With the beginning the war, Amir sees his

In the chapter “How to tell a true war story” the author Tim O’Brien explains why war stories are complicated to tell and why they are so important to understand what the men actually went through. In order to make his point O’Brien uses the example of how a fellow soldier died and what occurred when the soldiers best friend and fellow soldier wrote to the dead man’s sister. O’Brien explains how each of the men experienced the death of the friend and how each point of view creates a blurred line between what happened and what felt like it happened. The story wraps up by describing the pain the soldier’s friend goes through and how he brutally takes it out on a young buffalo.

Tim O’brien, an American novelist, has a complex, but creative meaning in his story “How To Tell a True War Story”. My interpretation of the story is that the person telling a story has the power to create the connection between the reader's opinion, emotion, and the story being told. Throughout the text O’brien proves this by making statements to support his claim, but then contradicts himself afterwards. In this story O’brien uses a war story because of the conflicting information giving from the story and what actually had happened. To make a connection between the reader's opinion and the story Tim O’brien uses examples of what he is trying to interpret within the story.

Rajiv Chandrasekaran, is a Washington Post reporter and editor. He has spent three years in Afghanistan and reported extensively about the operations conducted by the ISAF and NATO forces in the post troop’s surge period. He is also the author of Imperial Life in the Emerald City: inside Iraq’s Green Zone, one of the New York Times’s 10 best books of year 2007. Interestingly the author was a guest speaker at the USAWC and presented his thoughts to the students of class of AY 14. His talk at the USAWC and relevance of situation in Afghanistan to Pakistan prompted me to select his book “Little America” for writing the critical book report.

Tim O’Brien’s short story “How to Tell a True War Story” details memories from O’Brien’s time in the vietnam war. It explores the concept of truth, and challenges its definition by asserting that there are certain truths about war which are more important than the actual facts and details of the event. O’Brien tells the story of his friend Bob “Rat” Kiley witnessing the death of their friend Curt Lemon. He also shares the story told to him by his friend Mitchell Sanders about a group of listening post soldiers that grow hysteric listening to the vietnamese jungle. He uses these war stories as examples to show how even when the exact facts are misconstrued, they are still true stories because

Islam and Women The synopsis of My Forbidden Face: Growing Up Under the Taliban by Latifa is that of a sixteen-year-old girl who calls herself Latifa, because the use of her actual name could get her and her family either beaten or punished severely, or even death, even today. The book talks about how Latifa and her family react to the Taliban invading Kabul, the city where she lives it also talks about how she survives and eventually escapes to France through Pakistan. They have to suffer while the Taliban ignores that a woman “‘has the same right as an Afghan man to exercise personal freedom, choose a career, and find a partner in marriage’”(Latifa 53). The Taliban ignores that law and thinks what they are doing to women is just, and that makes Latifa angry and upset that she cannot attend college like her sister and mother, nor can she do anything anymore.