Well, frumps, as I perused the World’s doings with my morning coffee, today, I came across a news item (entitled Afghans protest rumored desecration of Koran by U.S. troops) that I found particularly relevant to the current political ruminations over the US’s perpetual mission in Afghanistan.
Evidently, my view of the story’s relevance was not shared by any other US news source outside of the LA Times (h/t to Laura King, the LA Times newshound who found this story newsworthy) and a very sparse handful of low-profile news aggregators and bloggers. As I conducted a quick search for more details or background or analysis – anything – I discovered that the only world news organizations that cared to cover the story were the BBC, EuroNews, Reuters and others outside the US.
Despite the fact that the US military allegedly played a starring role in the reported events, and despite the fact that the Afghan protest is a little surprising given the intelligence we’ve been fed on how “grateful most Afghans are that we have occupied their country for the last eight tears,” the media preferred to stick to safer topics like Dick Cheney’s pointless remarks about Obama’s Afghanistan deliberations and the 57 varieties of response they elicited from anyone who can spell Afghanistan, along with countless learned speculations on what that strategy will turn out to be from pundits, policy wonks, retired generals and “un-named sources close to the White House.”
All The News That’s Fit to Print
Over the past eight years, I’ve read many reports of Afghan protests over issues like women’s rights, democratic process, Taliban excesses – all of the things that cry out for a little expeditionary nation-building – but about how Afghans really feel about the protracted occupation and civilian deaths? Not so much.
We see reports of off duty soldiers playing soccer with Afghan kids and handing out American trinkets, we see pictures of Afghan men sharing a smoke with soldiers and being trained to police their country based on a Western model of civil policing. Those reports and photo ops come to us via “embedded reporters” that were, we learned recently, carefully vetted by the Bush Administration to “get the right messages” coming out of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Afghan protestors burn effigy of Obama
Now we have this unexpected view of the urban and intellectual communities of Kabul demonstrating in a very organized and full-throated protest of what is alleged to be US troops’ sacrilegious handling of the Islamic holy book, the Quran.
That is notable insofar as Afghan life is probably better in Kabul than anywhere else in the country because the current government has so far proven unable to govern outside of the capital city stranding the rest of the population in a war torn country that is essentially lawless and lacking in the most basic of public services and working infrastructure.
Signs of Wear & Tear
Like most political protests this one is about the incident that set it off at the same time that it is about so very much more and it says a good bit about the current temper and temperature of the general Afghan population.
According to the LA Times report:
“Hundreds of angry protesters in Afghanistan’s capital burned an effigy of President Obama on Sunday, acting on rumors that American troops had desecrated the Koran.”
“U.S. military officials emphatically denied that any copies of the Muslim holy book had been mishandled, and they accused the Taliban of spreading falsehoods to incite hatred against Western forces.”
“The protest — reminiscent of similar demonstrations in Iraq and elsewhere in the Muslim world in recent years — showed how easily passions involving religious sensitivities can be stirred up even with a dearth of evidence.”
We may never know whether or not the Quran desecration actually took place or not – this time. Certainly the allegation does not strain credulity since it happened at least once in the recent past that a US soldier did exactly what is alleged. That incident took place in Iraq in May, 2008 prompting President George W. Bush to issue a public apology to all of Islam.
A Confederacy of Dunces – YouTube Edition
In fact, if you are so inclined and have a high threshold for idiotic human behavior, You Tube has a growing video library of Quran abuse of various creative sorts posted by a number of US citizens and a handful of other nationals.
These seem to fall into several categories: there is the straightforward old-fashioned book-burning of the Quran; there is the explosives category in which the Quran is used for target practice or is turned into a homemade bomb that turns into confetti caught on film; there is the “Quran-placed-in-the toilet” category (a noticeably Western toilet); and there is even one mad-as-a-hatter evangelistic preacher who rants for ten minutes about God-knows-what-all with a picture of the Quran in the mouth of a dead hog for a visual.
Now, I’m not saying that I suspect this sort of mentality is common in the armed forces in Afghanistan; however it does indicate that there is definitely a sub-culture that is doing more than just thinking about it. Maybe I’m a little naïve in my frumpitude but it never occurred to me that there could be a small group of Quran desecration hobbyists out there that actually spend some of their precious time in this life setting up and filming such videos.
Given that Quran-themed videography, as well as some of the stories that have leaked out of the Middle East regarding US defense contractors behaving badly, I’m inclined to find the story more believable than not. As a matter of fact, although shooting and burning the Quran is a despicable act, it sort of fades into relative mediocrity when compared to some of the other well-documented aberrations that defense contractors have gotten up to in the Middle East. There also happen to be more contractors than soldiers in Afghanistan (but that’s another story) and I suspect that we “all look alike” to the Afghans. So, although it’s been officially denied, it could very well have happened. More important than whether it did or did not happen, this incident served as a flashpoint revealing a larger problem.
What’s The Mission, Again?
There is something about the American psyche that makes it possible to persuade Americans to go along with any damn thing if one only manages to hit one or, even better, several of our collective hot buttons. National Security is one of them and evangelical democratization is another. The war in Afghanistan is a two-bagger then because we needed to pursue Al Qaeda to their mountain hideouts and we only wanted to do that once. So we offered a trade to a handful of political elites: “if you let us get within striking distance of bin Laden, we’ll get rid of the Taliban regime for you and train and finance an Afghan military and beefed up police force to help keep you in power.”
The Afghan people had never in their long, long history had (or wanted) such a government, but so what? It’s high time they learned, according to the nation-builders. Just about every element of Afghan society is a misfit as far as the American strategy for them goes. Westerners do not even begin to understand enough about Afghanistan to undertake “nation-building” there. The Russians actually probably understood the Afghans far better and they failed at great expense.
The US has no business being there and we are fools if we allow those members of our government, and our media, that insist that we do belong there to continue to pull the wool over our eyes. Those are our dollars and our children that are being wasted on a foolish administration’s fool’s errand. I understand that once the course was set, that it wouldn’t be as easy to walk away as we might like.
Nevertheless, we must do what we must to get out of the Middle East Conquest business as gracefully as possible. And we need to start right away, while the Obama administration is in place and enjoys a majority because, God help us, if the Defense Industry Booster Club regains any power we could be there for an indefinite period of time. I’m sure that’s why the GOP is putting the pressure on to forge ahead, otherwise their defense patrons might have some unexpected financial downturns somewhere along the line.
The Truth Will Set Us Free
The majority of Americans do not support continuing war in Afghanistan, it’s becoming clearer that the people of Afghanistan feel pretty much the same and now that Former Commander-in-Chief Bush is gone, the military is starting to voice more outspoken opinions on the matter as well. Just this morning this news was announced in the Washington Post:
“When Matthew Hoh joined the Foreign Service early this year, he was exactly the kind of smart civil-military hybrid the administration was looking for to help expand its development efforts in Afghanistan.”
“A former Marine Corps captain with combat experience in Iraq, Hoh had also served in uniform at the Pentagon, and as a civilian in Iraq and at the State Department. By July, he was the senior U.S. civilian in Zabul province, a Taliban hotbed.”
“But last month, in a move that has sent ripples all the way to the White House, Hoh, 36, became the first U.S. official known to resign in protest over the Afghan war, which he had come to believe simply fueled the insurgency.”
“I have lost understanding of and confidence in the strategic purposes of the United States’ presence in Afghanistan,” he wrote Sept. 10 in a four-page letter to the department’s head of personnel. “I have doubts and reservations about our current strategy and planned future strategy, but my resignation is based not upon how we are pursuing this war, but why and to what end.”
Hoh explained, in his resignation letter, that many Afghans are fighting the United States largely because its troops are there — a growing military presence in villages and valleys where outsiders, including other Afghans, are not welcome and where the corrupt, U.S.-backed national government is rejected. While the Taliban is a malign presence, and Pakistan-based al-Qaeda needs to be confronted, he said, the United States is asking its troops to die in Afghanistan for what is essentially a far-off civil war.
As the White House deliberates over whether to deploy more troops, Hoh said he decided to speak out publicly because “I want people in Iowa, people in Arkansas, people in Arizona, to call their congressman and say, ‘Listen, I don’t think this is right.’ “
Hoh’s doubts increased with Afghanistan’s Aug. 20 presidential election, marked by low turnout and widespread fraud. He concluded, he said in his resignation letter, that the war “has violently and savagely pitted the urban, secular, educated and modern of Afghanistan against the rural, religious, illiterate and traditional. It is this latter group that composes and supports the Pashtun insurgency.”
With “multiple, seemingly infinite, local groups,” he wrote, the insurgency “is fed by what is perceived by the Pashtun people as a continued and sustained assault, going back centuries, on Pashtun land, culture, traditions and religion by internal and external enemies. The U.S. and Nato presence in Pashtun valleys and villages, as well as Afghan army and police units that are led and composed of non-Pashtun soldiers and police, provide an occupation force against which the insurgency is justified.“
I think Matthew Hoh makes a very strong case and I am far more inclined to believe him, and to believe that he knows what he’s talking about.
Let’s Get It Right This Time
In the account of the “Quran burning incident” we are now seeing the beginning of a conservative backlash and a strong undercurrent of anti-American sentiment even among the urban elites of Kabul. Sunday’s rally in the capital was the largest of what has been a wave of smaller protests elsewhere in the country over the alleged incident.
The Nov. 7 face-off between President Hamid Karzai and former Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah was agreed to only after heavy U.S. pressure on Karzai to accept the results of an international audit. One spokesman attending the Kabul protest said:
“We don’t want a slave government,” he said. “We want a real Islamic country.”
Larger grievances against the West also flared into the open. A law student said:
“There should be conditions. They shouldn’t be staying here without any limits,” he said. “And the perpetrators of this action should be prosecuted and punished.”
Haven’t we been down this road before, frumps? Do we really want to do this again?
Technorati Tags: Kabul, Afghanistan, Laura King, LA Times, desecration of the Quran, Matthew Hoh, anti-US protest, Obama burned in effigy
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