From Tarnished Perspectives

How would you feel about a society that mandates that women be sexually objectified, force to present themselves in public in revealing clothes to their utter humiliation? What would you say about a country that is hell bent on eradicating one of the largest religions on planet earth, even if slaughtering innocent men and women are an obvious result? Would it matter that it is your religion that is being targeted? New York Times reporter David Rohde and two associates were held captive (for ransom) in a Taliban-held town in Pakistan; his story has consumed many serial pages in the Times, incredible reading for anyone interested.

But the most fascinating items revolve around the perceptions of the ragtag army of “soldiers” who regularly crossed the border to fight Americans in Afghanistan. One of David’s many observations: “One morning, [Abu Tayyeb, the commander of the Taliban force that abducted David] wept at news that a NATO airstrike had killed women and children in southern Afghanistan. A guard explained to me that Abu Tayyeb] reviled the United States because of the civilian deaths. .. One evening, Abu Tayyeb declared that the Taliban treated women better than Americans did. He said women in the United States were forced to wear revealing clothes and define themselves solely as sex objects. The Taliban protected women’s honor by not allowing them to appear in public with their faces unveiled… My captors saw me — and seemingly all Westerners — as morally corrupt and fixated on pursuing the pleasures of this world. Americans invaded Afghanistan to enrich themselves, they argued, not to help Afghans.” October 19^th NY Times (Part Three of David’s Series)

When Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and brought World War II to American shores on December 7, 1941, when Al Qaeda irregulars (back back by Taliban training grounds) slammed hijacked civilian jets into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, Americans were both stunned and outraged. We swore that we would destroy the perpetrators of such horrific acts and bring them to their knees, if it were the last thing we ever did. They attacked our homeland, slaughtering innocents, including women and children, in the process. They were strange foreigners who skin color, religious practices and culture were miss-described in the press; people who were vilified in every corner of the land. How many Americans, to this day, know that the Japanese bombing was a direct result of the American denial of oil shipments to Japan because of their occupation of China? Doesn’t make the bombing right, but that might explain why it happened better.

Right or wrong, it is this passion that inflames the hatred that allows people to hurl themselves into battles with little concern for their own survival. It is this passion, whether justifiable or not, that we face in Central Asia as we fight on. These are religious fanatics, well indoctrinated by their highly manipulative leaders, lacking education and believing that their fight is a heavenly mandate.

The passion is clear as Rohde notes: “My captors railed against the evils of a secular society. In March, they celebrated a suicide attack in a mosque in the Pakistani town of Jamrud that killed as many as 50 worshipers as they prayed to God. Those living under Pakistan’s apostate government, they said, deserved it… One commander declared that no true Muslim could live in a state where Islam was not the official religion. He flatly rejected my compromise suggestion that strict Islamic law be enacted in Afghanistan’s conservative rural south, while milder forms of Islam be followed in the comparatively liberal north. … Citing the Taliban’s interpretation of Islam, he said it was every Muslim’s duty to try to stop others from sinning. If one person in a village commits a sin, those who witness it and do not stop him will also be punished by God.”

This is the battle we have chosen to fight in Afghanistan (a very different religious background from what we faced in Iraq). The title of David’s October 19^th article? “You Have Atomic Bombs, but We Have Suicide Bombers.”

I’m Peter Dekom, and knowing the other side is just as important as believing we are right.