A Great Time to Attack

The Taliban are brutal. It was a Taliban bullet that lodged in the brain of a teenaged Pakistani girl, Malala Yousafzai, who was punished because she blogged against Taliban opposition to educating women and girls. It is Taliban fighters who execute local officials, even ordinary people, and sometimes their families, because they engage in any kind of support for their elected government. They ban music and entertainment, women in public unless they are veiled and with male family members, women getting education and apply the most vicious brand of Sharia law under their Sunni Muslim code.

The only group they hate more than Americans or Israelis is Shiite. Iran, a Shiite state, is their enemy and the murderous and marauding Islamic State their ally. Nigeria’s Boko Haram and Somalia’s al Shabaab are their Sunni brothers. They admire Hamas as it challenges Israel. They draw guilt money from ultra-conservative regional billionaires, from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, etc., and even though they once opposed the practice, sell tons and tons of opium grown in Afghanistan to the West (the overwhelming bulk of opium and opium derivatives like heroin come from Afghanistan) to finance their cause.

They have sheltered al Qaeda, including those who fomented the 9/11/01 attacks on the United States. We entered Afghanistan to crush their power, and while we pushed them from office for a while, they are slowly coming back, all the while mounting new attacks aimed at subjugating neighboring Pakistan, a nation with over one hundred nuclear warheads and the missiles and aircraft to deliver them.

They feel as if they have defeated the greatest powers on earth, the United States which could no longer tolerate the battle and through their Mujahedeen predecessors, the Soviet Union. They also believe that the time of their brand of Sunni Muslim control over much if not all the earth is coming. The made their original inroads into political control, before the U.S. invasion, by championing the elimination of corruption in one of the most corrupt regions of the world, corrupt leaders once financed by outside global powers. They believe their religious purity justifies their actions.

Like Iraq’s military, which might even be stronger and better trained than the mainstream Afghan National Army, the Afghan force is not remotely up to the task of controlling their own countryside. They’ve never really had clear supremacy against the Taliban and local warlords anywhere other than in and around the capital city of Kabul. And as NATO is pulling back, the Taliban are on the move more than ever. Sensing that the world is focused on and distracted by the Islamic State’s butcherous war across northern Syria and Iraq, Taliban everywhere are sensing opportunity.

“Local Afghan officials say more than 200 police officers and soldiers have been killed during a fierce Taliban offensive in Helmand Province in southern Afghanistan that has lasted all summer and now threatens to overwhelm a key district.

“Officials at the national level have played down the violence and even, in some cases, flatly denied that there is a problem. But local military, police and government officials, including two Afghan generals, have said in recent days that they are unsure their forces can continue to hold out against the offensive, which has been underway since June in the Sangin district in northern Helmand and more recently in neighboring Musa Qala, unless they get more support from national authorities and international forces.

“The authorities are particularly worried about Musa Qala, a traditional Taliban stronghold and a source of revenue from the lucrative opium poppy trade... ‘The situation is deteriorating and the Taliban are almost in the bazaar,’ the governor of Musa Qala district, Haji-Mohammad Sharif, said Friday night when reached by telephone in the government center in Musa Qala. ‘If the situation remains the same, the district will soon fall to the hands of the Taliban.’…

“Both Musa Qala and Sangin have been heavily contested throughout the war because they are in green areas particularly suited to opium cultivation, with many places for insurgents to hide… ‘Sangin is a key crossroads, the last place where the insurgent can grow, harvest and process poppy,’ Lt. Gen. Richard P. Mills said in 2010 when he was the Marines’ commander in Helmand. ‘It is the last bit of important terrain in Helmand, and he is fighting hard to hold it.’

“The last of the American Marines left the area in May, with their commanders declaring Sangin and Musa Qala largely pacified, but the Taliban began probing attacks in Musa Qala soon afterward, and a full-scale offensive in Sangin the following month.” September 6^th. Make no mistake, the Taliban are not loved or admired by the bulk of the Afghan people. Like the murderous Islamic State they use intimidation and brutal repression to control the cowering masses, many of whom are simply exhausted by war and willing to accept any regime if only they stop the bombs and the bullets.

Like Nazis in World War II Germany (who had vastly more genuine local support among the German people than do the Taliban or the Islamic State among their locals), these barbaric Sunni extremists get their way over millions of people by torturing and executing the slightest dissent. Cowering populations learn to embrace these fierce combatants simply to avoid being tortured and killed. It is not that local Muslims love or even like these new mega-extremists… they hate them more than we do because it is their lives that intersect with this brutality ever day of their lives… but lifting finger to oppose these horrific ideologues, belonging to any group that are defined as apostates, brings certain and often gruesome death. Without anyone there to save them, these massive of depressed and repressed people simply accept their miserable fate.

Anti-Islamic feeling is mounting all over the Western world, China and large parts of Sub-Saharan Africa. As terror cells are found in places like England, Germany and even the United States – sympathizers and second generation immigrant children rebelling against their parents – we become even more suspicious of anyone practicing Islam. We fear the Qur’an, and very few of us even know the difference between Sunnis and Shiites (unless they read my blogs). Trust of anything Muslim is at the lowest point in most of the non-Islamic world.

But all is not quiet in the Shiite world either, and in Iran (on Afghanistan’s other flank), you may assume that millions of citizens are crushed by a brutal regime that has been solidly in power, with a pretty powerful army, navy and air force, since 1979. And as horrific as the Islamic State beheaders are to most, there some sophisticated thinkers who think Iran, which always seems on the verge of becoming a nuclear weapons power, still poses a greater threat. “Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger [in the Richard Nixon administration] said that Iran ‘is a bigger problem than ISIS.’

“In an interview with NPR … Kissinger explained that because Iran has a stronger footing in the Middle East, it has a greater opportunity to create an empire… ‘The borders of the settlement of 1919-'20 [referring to the post-WWI division of the Ottoman Empire] are essentially collapsing,’ he said. ‘That gives Iran a very powerful level from a strategic point of view. I consider Iran a bigger problem than ISIS [the Islamic State]. ISIS is a group of adventurers with a very aggressive ideology. But they have to conquer more and more territory before they can became a strategic, permanent reality. I think a conflict with ISIS — important as it is — is more manageable than a confrontation with Iran.’” Huffington Post, September 6^th.

All the while, the people – Sunni or Shiite – who suffer the most under these brutal Islamic extremist regimes are, of necessity, the apolitical subjugated human beings who just want to be left alone to live their lives… millions and millions of souls who don’t understand why the world thinks that they support the brutal bigots who actually threaten them more than anyone else. In a world of suspicion and intolerance, it is particularly hard not to lump in the innocents with the brutal beast who hover over them with guns and knives, ready to extinguish their lives at the slightest sign of dissent. To maintain our own humanity, we need to be aware of the difference between crushing subjugators and those being crushed and subjugated.

 I’m Peter Dekom, and we need to hold our sympathy and empathy for true innocents wherever they may be.