Low cost of reducing evil: Afghanistan Iran and Pakistan

I was going to write a review of the sneakers exhibition at the Design Museum in London.

Instead:

Afghanistan and the rounding-up of wives

Wikipedia says that the Afghan Army payroll has varied over decades and is quite low at the moment, for a country that is always at war. AFN 717,857 or GBP 6,600 is an average salary, a bit below average salaries overall in the country but with a pay-rise promised out of despiration.

To fund an Afghan soldier you need to work well and hard or have £6,600 x 10 invested at 10%: £66,000 or half the cost of the cheapest house in the UK. If you have the cheapest house in the UK, and no costs or debt and somewheere else to live, you have the money to fund two Afghan soldiers if you can invest at 10%. Ask me how. You need an expert intemediary or to trust whatever the Afghan embassy suggests.

There might be someone who could add noughts on the end of that figure and is looking for something to do with their money, other than funding political parties of sponsoring the Olympics. Suppose that politicians in the UK declared a halt on all party funding, and urged donors to fund other causes instead, that might release one who could fund a lot of Afghan soldiers. If the situation is too dire in the non-taliban parts of Afghanistan for many soldiers to be recruited or trained and show value for money, there may be a way of paying for help from over the border if the Pakistani government is forced to allow. I crossed those paragraphs out as US and European taxpayers already pay a bit towards the Afghan army, according to an Al Jazerrah article on my phone today

There is another problem. People in Pakistan and Iran are doing exactly the same thing, individually and via their governments I suppose. There is no way to hold Taliban prisoners in a more stable country like Pakistan, so there's a risk of their prisons being in areas where they are released and allowed to kill more people and round-up more wives. Countries like Pakistan Iran are run for monotheists who has no respect for other opinions and minorities; it's obvious that a proportion of people there will go further, and be the crusaders or the violent puritans or just fund such people from beige living rooms while watching MTV

if the UK's new tariff system fined countries where this happens, such as Iran and Pakistan, the problem would be made more obvious and there would be bit of tax revenue coming-in from tariffs. It might even fund something good in whatever country
https://www.gov.uk/search/policy-papers-and-consultations often has pages where you can put a reasonable point of view on record, maybe informed by facts, and demonstrate how little I have done the same. I thought there was one on the general direction of UK trade deals for example, but can't even find it, for all my talk of funding Afghan soliders.

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Update: people who are better-informed than me in Afghanistan do this:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/8/11/sanction-pakistan-twitter-trend-afghanistan-taliban Meanwhile the UK
https://www.gov.uk/search/policy-papers-and-consultations?keywords=trade&content_store_document_type%5B%5D=open_consultations&order=relevance
...shows open consultations on trade, and with a bit of a search I see that there's an open consultation for India and for "developing" countries. It think there has also been a UK government trade sanction on Belarus, but no mention of it on the trade pages. Sanctions and trade deals are worked-out in different offices, and in different parts of the brains of the people who make these decisions in government. UK government trade pages write about deals with Myanmar and probably even Belorus as though sanctions didn't exist

A better scheme would mix the two. Sanctions on Myanmar have not much effect, I think, because the regime there is past caring. Sanctions on Pakistan would have an effect because civil society, the economy, and the thing goverment says when it is trying to sound western, all might influence decisons there.

One such sanction could be a low extra tariff on countries that promote monotheism in schools. The UK might have to sanction itself, but it's still a good idea. That way of thinking can justify anything; the reward is in heavan. In someone on the borderline of violence, it is an added factor, like heroin use and a peer pressure, which can over-ride concience. In the Pakistan religious acadamies, boys might have all three. According to Al Jazeera -
"The Taliban militia emerged as a substantial player in 1994. Many of its members had studied in conservative religious schools in Afghanistan and across the border in Pakistan."