remembering the attack on my people by muslims from various towns

[rockriver]

every week and many times every day i remember various aspects of the
vicious and successful attacks on my country by muslims who came from
various villages/mosques/learning centers from various countries.
--
i try to imagine their situations before they attacked us.
as they grew up their mothers and grandfathers influenced them. taught
them the ways of their people, and their religion. taught them their sense of
manners and how to act around peoples from other nations and other religions.
the community sent them to their version of boy scouts and religious camps
during the summer. the dads took them hunting and discussed values.
the community gave them morals and taught them about history. the reliigious
leaders taught them the history of their religion and all of the aspects of living
before their god.. (note the small g)
--
then when they grew older they stepped to the plate to carry out the fulfillment
of all that they had been taught.
and the parents, brothers and sisters, neighbors, religious leaders, the town mayor
and council, all associates from their town, county and state heard about the
fulfillment of all the influence and training and its fulfillment of the plans and desires
of
the WHOLE DAMNED TOWN COUNTY AND STATE
(in this usage the "D" word is not a cuss word. it is a state of fact)
--
here's what i've been waiting to hear for 10 years.
and maybe it has occurred - i just haven't heard about it.
--
have we in the middle of the night or in bright sunshine
took out the whole damned village where each of the muslim fighters
were sent from.
and if they got special religious training in the next town over, have
we caused the whole corridor of training to go up in smoke.
--
if you had a pit of snakes down the road that were going out and
biting folks in your community, how long before the community would
rise up and go destroy the whole pit.
--
if you knew that the village was sending out the soldiers, but they were
all being financed by the state's chief governor and he had a big ole mansion
on the hill. or a big ole yacht down in the boat basin. seems to me that the villlage that got
hit, would go down and take out the big ole yacht and everybody on board.
--
were the soldiers for careful to limit their attack on the soldiers of my country?
or were they taught to go after the men women and children?
ahh. o.k. that means to get their attention, the response should be after the
men, women and children and leaders of the attacking force....
--
sorry for the length of this. but thanks for listening. i feel better having
gotten to express myself! if i've offended any, i won't be offended if it's best to
delete this.
your comments are welcome. words of correction and instruction are welcomed

[Matt In Oklahoma]

The atrocities and horror of this vicious and cowardly attack brings a gamit of emotions that are difficult and trying. I don't believe any of them are wrong because we have all faced diffent things since that day and are still ongoing pain and suffering with current battles being fought. Action as well as prayer for guidance and resiliance are called for to deal with this. I understand what you are saying and where you are coming from however I'm not the one to send for erradication because I am humanistically weak in that I am a free thinker unlike them and as a father it was and is not in me unless being directly attacked and I believe that having been extremely close to the dark side once that it is the easy route to become like them. You are very correct in them being incorrectly and directly taught as illiteracy run rampant and this is what makes it easy to misconstrue the truth and teach hatred from a book that in many chapter resembles our own. I also know that before this incident I was in a place such as this and it was quickly learned that we were not of the devils spore by our actions.

[Klayton]

In Vietnam, the enemy often used women and children as tools of war. After enough Soldiers died or were maimed, Soldiers remaining started to realize them as a threat. How were they treated when they returned to the states? They were spat on at the airports...

America is full of different mind sets, unfortunately we have allowed the ones that will NOT stand to protect our freedoms to become leaders and outnumber us at the voting booths...

**steps off his soapbox**

[snarlbuckle]

Where to start?

I'm a type of person who likes to find what some would call 'patterns' and what I would call 'truths' in complex things. It is all cerebral, but sometimes these 'truths' end up being very useful and can give the wielder significant power. I've used these to my advantage in the past, and often with astounding results. What follows is the pattern I'm following for Afghanistan. I still haven't distilled it down as much as I would like just yet.

Afghanistan is unique. It is a rare place where a deadly mix of 'patterns' combine and form what has been called 'the graveyard of empires'. Call me what you will, but I find a little beauty in the unique mix that makes that place so unique, lethal, and seemingly indestructible. Some of the 'patterns' that mix in that place are the terrain, religion, local culture, and history. I can't explain how those factors mix together all at once, so I'll try to explain them one at a time.

The mountainous terrain gives the locals a serious defensive and logistical advantage against invading forces, and for one simple reason. It is almost impossible to maintain a supply line in those mountains against any well armed guerrilla infantry. Arm them with surface to air rockets, and even airborne supply lines become risky. Conventional armies can't operate without supplies, but the locals live there without any supply lines at all. The locals can therefore continue to live and fight while they sabotage the logistical backbone of whatever force attacks them. That's the perfect hometown advantage, and it isn't surprising that they call it the graveyard of empires. But to fight there, you have to have a populace that both sustains itself, is violent enough to attack 'intruders' and at the same time has a source of modern weaponry. The People that live in those mountains live there because they like the isolation, and because they are some of the only people capable of living there. Those mountains are their homes, and like any isolated people, it isn't surprising that they don't want to be bothered. One should note here that this is probably one cause for their resistance to accepting the sovereignty of the Afghan Government.

We've established that they live in a very defensible area of the world, but the next step is to look into their culture. It is easy for a small and isolated group of people to hold extremist views when they don't make contact with other cultures on a regular basis. To the average citizen of that culture, they seem 'normal' and everyone else is an 'infidel' because they are different. In many isolated cultures like this around the world, violence is still used to solve basic problems. They will often murder members of another village or tribe over a goat, a land dispute, or something we would find not worth killing over. It is just part of their way of life, and as long as the culture stays mostly isolated, it stays violent. What makes Afghanistan different is that extremist Islam (and more importantly, sharia law) has taken root there. Islam itself isn't the root of the problem here though, the other monotheistic religions have similarly brutal laws. As a reference, according to the Gospel, Jesus was crucified as a result of one of these ancient Jewish laws, or at least an interpretation of them. The difference now is that modern society doesn't practice any of these laws and has moved past the violence that used to be common 2000 years ago. Here is where extremist Islam and sharia law become a serious problem: they multiply the violence factor significantly.

What would normally be a harmlessly isolated violent culture is now one that has just enough access to the rest of the world to hate it with a burning passion. Witchdoctors from the Amazon don't care about you enough to hijack a plane and crash it into a tower. They are happy enough with the separation they have from you, and they feel no need to even pay any attention to modern society. So, why do people from the mountains of Afghanistan feel the need to do so? That's one question I don't have a good answer for, but I do have a good guess. I think that there are powerful men who have lived in a modern Islamic society, but who hate the rest of the world. These men use the middle east in general as a recruiting ground for people to do their bidding. They also use the territory involved in the drug trade to make money for themselves. They are very clever too, because it is obvious that they use religion very effectively as a brainwashing tool.

So in a nutshell, we have an otherwise harmless people in a very isolated and defensible area that are being brainwashed into attacking the enemies of powerful religious figures. Sound about right? If this model does accurately describe the situation in Afghanistan, how can it be solved? We can kill the leaders themselves, which certainly helps, but it won't solve the problem completely because they have injected their ideology into the cultures they recruit from. We could resort to genocide, but I there are obvious reasons why we do not. What I really find interesting here is that this isn't a unique cultural problem. It looks very familiar if you've ever lived in a big city. The Taliban and the groups like them are essentially a massive international Islamic gang. All of the attributes match up almost perfectly. So how do you defeat a gang? You eliminate any part of it that rears its ugly head, but you also get the indigenous culture to root it out. Ever notice that gangs never go away until the locals want them gone?

I wouldn't begin to know the specifics about how to do it, but this is how I would approach the global problem of terrorism. Treat terrorist groups like international gangs. I've seen projects that used a similar approach, and they all seemed to have major progress.

Anyway, that's my two cents.