Well as the saying goes “It is impossible to win the hearts and minds of the heartless and the mindless”. The thought that so many Westerners and Israelis have that the Muslims and/or Arabs will start to loves us and ignore the commands of the Koran because we give them indoor plumbing are condescending and naïve. As Mohammed Hassan Yousef (the son of a Hamas founder who left Islam for Christianity after serving as an Israeli agent for many years) said the other day in an interview “The cruelest Muslim terrorist has more humanity and morality then the God he serves”. He also rejected the notion of a difference between “moderate” and “radical” Islam because as another heroine Ayaan Hirsi Ali has said “there is only one Koran”. These people can never be placated or bought off, only defeated.
by Ralph Peters
A good first step in waging war is to figure out why your enemy is fighting. For over eight years, we’ve refused to do that in Afghanistan. In the recent Marine offensive against the Taliban in Marjah, this resulted in a clear geographical objective, but a vague pacification mission targeting a stick-figure enemy. Tactical success is built on strategic quicksand.
We’re mired in Afghanistan because successive administrations in Washington have conflated the hayseed Taliban with al Qaeda’s cosmopolitans. These organizations have different ethnic compositions and profoundly different goals: The first is a regional actor with local aspirations, and the latter an international force with global ambitions. Instead of exploiting the differences between them, our policies encourage them to cooperate.
To regain our strategic footing, we need to see Taliban cadres as they are, without ideology or emotion clouding our vision.
Our reluctance to understand the Taliban on its own terms is strikingly evident in our insistence that Islam isn’t a factor. A confederation of franchises, the Taliban has multiple interests, from a regional power-struggle to local issues that vary between valleys. But the common identity of Taliban fighters is that they’re 100% Muslim and overwhelmingly Pashtun, members of a stateless ethnic group of 40 million straddling the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan.
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Our current hearts-and-minds approach that seeks to avoid “unnecessary” combat gets it exactly wrong: Religious warriors can’t be bought with new roads, wells and vaccinations. On the contrary, over two millennia of religious revolts tells us that fanatic uprisings can only be subdued by killing the true believers.
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Before we open fire, it’s helpful to open our eyes. In Afghanistan, we’re imagining the enemy we want, rather than seeking to understand the enemy we face.
Read the rest here:
You can’t win hearts, minds of radical Islam
Tags: Ralph Peters
