Whose side are the Afghans on?
David:Originally Posted by davidbfpo
Coughlin's article sounds objective to me. The Afghan tribals, and for that matter the Pakistani FATA tribals, are about as "basic" as life gets. They are fundamentalists in terms of their religion. For the most part they are genuinely illiterate, nearly 71% of all Afghanistan is illiterate. What the story omits, one can say due to space are a few salient facts:
1. The Taliban literally until a time in 2006 were both defeated and withdrew from this area of Afghanistan.
2. Local Afghans then became friendly with US/UK/NATO forces and building as well as rebuilding was on going at a basic level.
3. Girls schools were either started or restated, having been shut down in years past by the Taliban terrorists.
4. Then with the dumb moves by Musharraf in Pakistan, treaty(s) were signed allowing jiirgas and tribal leaders to take over in FATA (Pakistan) where many Afghan Taliban fighters had taken refuge when defeated inside Afghanistan.
5. New generations of Taliban terrorist fighters have also been coming to replace killed in action Taliban from the madrassahs inside border and other parts of Pakistan, who are if you will the "replacements" and "reinforcements."
How do you know which side Afghans are on and how do you get a handle on the situation? If that was a clean answer it would have been done by now.
We are faced with the most backward culture, or non-culture, except for perhaps some area such as Darfur in Africa. The few who are literate are essentially "the ruling elite." Saudi Wahabbi terrorist version of Islam are funding the madrassahs, the syllibus, and in some cases both the teachers in madrassahs and some of the al Qaida fighters and trainers of Taliban and al Qaida fighters.
6. True story to end: One day some now peaceful Afghans had former residents, Taliban, return to a village. The returning Afghans, thought to be ex-Taliban now, accepted exisitng core Afghan's help, hand outs of food and material goods from NATO forces and such. Then one day the returned presumed former Talibans burned the peaceful Afghans homes, shot the local police and Afghan army posted there, and resumed fighting NATO. POINT: They were taught to take the time to get accepted back into local society, see who the "collaborators" were and then to simply kill them all.
Two oversimplified answers exist:
1. Hugely garrisoned, long term garrisoned, areas of most, if not all, of Afghanistan. Garrisoned by who? One woud prefer the newly emerging Afghan Army.
2. Greatly increased use of PSYOPS via Voice of America and related TV, radio, and short wave broadcasting to the largely illiterate population of the moderate voices of Islam, not just news programming and music. Messages on TV and radio from outside of Afghanstan local dialect fluent speakers of Pashto, Dari, and Farsi about peaceful Islam quoting from the Holy Quran on air on TV, in particular, in respectful and peaceful manner.
While we cannot reform an archaic society as compared to a modern day society, we can deal with it one day at a time. Folks looking for fast answers to then get out of Dodge are only human, this happens in all wars.
Here we are as much dealing in an ideological war as in a hot war. The facts of even a 12 year old boy being beheaded for accepting a flashlight from a NATO/UK soldier may or may not be true. If true, it only epitomizes the use of raw terror to enforce "control" over the free spirit of man, which in all circumstances will always, at all ages, basically wish and hope for freedom.
Getting to freedom of religion, which involves outside missionaries, from fellow majority Muslim nations but of kindred ethnic origins, not us "white faces" could help except that in Afghanistan Christian missionaries are against the law, even under President Karzai. Go figure that one.
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