IT SHOULDN’T HAVE ENDED THIS WAY – ANGELINA JOLIE

IT SHOULD NOT HAVE ENDED THIS WAY – ANGELINA JOLIE

“Right now, the people of Afghanistan are losing their ability to communicate on social media and to express themselves freely, so I’ve come on Instagram to share their stories and the voices of those across the globe who are fighting for their basic human rights.

It is sickening to watch Afghans being displaced yet again out of the fear and uncertainty that has gripped their country.

To spend so much time and money, to have blood shed and lives lost only to come to this, is a failure almost impossible to understand.

See Also: Afghanistian Taliban; Protest Rocks Parts of Kabul, People Die.

Watching for decades how Afghan refugees — some of the most capable people in the world — are treated like a burden is also sickening.

Knowing that if they had the tools and respect, how much they would do for themselves.

And meeting so many women and girls who not only wanted an education, but fought for it.

Like others who are committed, I will not turn away.

I will continue to look for ways to help. And I hope you’ll join me.

I think of injured American servicemen and women I met at Ramstein Air Base—some who’d lost limbs fighting the Taliban— who told me how proud they felt to be a part of helping the Afghan people gain basic rights and freedoms, every Afghan girl who picked up her book-bag and went to school in the last twenty years even though she risked being killed for it—as so many were. It diminishes us.

We have lost leverage to influence what now happens in Afghanistan.

We lack a strategy to monitor and support women and civil society in Afghanistan, who the Taliban have a history of targeting—banning girls from school, confining women to the home, and inflicting brutal physical punishments, including public lashing, on any woman perceived to have stepped out of line.

Whatever your views on the war in Afghanistan, we probably agree on one thing: it should not have ended this way.”—American Academy Award-winning Actress, Filmmaker, and Humanitarian, Angelina Jolie; recipient of numerous accolades, including and is most noted for her advocacy on behalf of refugees as a Special Envoy for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

Jolie has undertaken over a dozen field missions globally to refugee camps and war zones; her visited countries include Sierra Leone, Tanzania, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Sudan.

See Also: Afghanistian War; Reno Warns Nigeria to Learn from Afghanistan.

In her statement, Jolie called the manner in which the U.S. appeared to “cut and run” while “abandoning our allies and supporters in the most chaotic way imaginable, after so many years of effort and sacrifice” a “betrayal and a failure impossible to fully understand.”