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Comment by jvrossb | Hacker News Reader

Oh where to start... Afghanistan is hardly in the middle east and there are hardly any Arabs in Afghanistan. You may or may not be right about peace in the middle east being a cruel joke, but if you happen to be right it'll be for all the wrong reasons...

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Actually there are/were a lot of very bad Arabs (and other non-indigenous people) in Afghanistan, at least as the backbone of AQ and some of the other forces. A small number vs. the overall population, but a high percentage of the hardcore bad guys. Less true of Taliban or local gangs (who are who we fight now, for no particularly good reason -- the Taliban is "bad" from a liberal Western perspective, but not bad enough, IMO, to justify invading/occupying. We're in Afghanistan now because we were in Afghanistan yesterday; it's the sunk costs fallacy in blood.).

No doubt, I was (perhaps incorrectly) assuming that the parent him/herself was assuming that afghanistan was an arab country in the middle east. The finer details (that Afghanistan has no majority ethnicity, that many arabs came to fight the soviets during the soviet-afghan war, that by some definitions afghanistan is a middle-eastern nation) are not lost on me, but given the seemingly sweepingly ignorant nature of the post I was replying to I was going for a more high level rebuttal.

If you're concerned about semantics...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Middle_East

And I said, 'Arabs and Muslims'. I am aware that Afghans and Pakistanis are not Arab.

What about the 350M muslims in Bangladesh and Indonesia? Do these fit into your 'and Muslims' as well?

Please stop characterising multiple demographics with such simple terms. It's as meaningless as saying Americans are fat and loud, the French are smelly and arrogant, so on and so forth.

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