McChrystal, Tocqueville, and the Koran: The Postmodern ‘COINage’ of a Failed Policy
Just over nine months ago, on September 20, 2009, the Department of Defense released a declassified version of Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal’s assessment of the war in Afghanistan. The Washington Post published a version of this report with minor deletions of material that officials maintained could compromise future operations, rather than a copy of the document marked “confidential.” Although Gen. McChrystal’s counterinsurgency (COIN)-based analysis, “updated” for the Afghanistan theater, at least mentioned the “Koran” (a word omitted entirely from the December 2006 COIN manual co-authored by Gen. David Petraeus), the Koran’s motivational relevance — consistent with a over a millennium of jihadism within Afghanistan (or “Ghazni”) — was completely misrepresented. Negating doctrinal and historical realities, past and present, McChrystal’s uninformed, panglossian Koranic gloss rationalized an ostensibly “more forceful” strategy:
whereby INS [insurgents] are exposed continually for their cultural and religious violations, anti-Islamic and indiscriminate use of violence and terror, and by concentrating on their vulnerabilities. These include their causing of the majority of civilian casualties, attacks on education, development projects, and government institutions, and flagrant contravention of the principles of the Koran. These vulnerabilities must be expressed in a manner that exploits the cultural and ideological separation of the INS from the vast majority of the Afghan population. (emphasis added)
McChrystal’s superficial, bowdlerized pieties on the Koran, and Petraeus’ complete neglect of this foundational Islamic text, contrast starkly with the contemplative, firsthand observations on the Koran (and Islam) made by Alexis de Tocqueville. Shortly after his return from America, Tocqueville studied North African Islamic culture and history — which included an analysis of the Koran (“Notes on the Koran,” March, 1838) — and made two visits to Algeria (in 1841, and 1846), becoming one of the foremost experts on these matters, while serving as a French parliamentarian.
Before visiting Algeria, Tocqueville studied the Koran, writing an analysis of the first 18 suras (chapters) in careful, if succinct notes, and elaborating his summary conclusions during additional private observations and correspondence recorded through his voyage to North Africa in 1841. Tocqueville opens his March 1838 “Notes on the Koran” with these two observations:
Encouragement, commandments for holy war.
Necessity of obeying the Prophet, of obeying him as one does God.
He accurately documents the Koran’s repeated references to jihad warfare, noting,
Sanctity of holy war encouraged with both energy and violence. … Permission and commandment to kill infidels. Prohibition against killing believers. … Cut off the hands and feet of those who fight God and his prophet.
This discussion culminates, appropriately, in Tocqueville’s more extended assessment of suras 8 and 9, which are redolent with eternal proclamations justifying and describing the conduct of jihad war against the non-Muslim infidel:
Spoils taken from the enemy belong to God and to his envoy. Fear the Lord. Whoever turns his back on the day of combat shall remain in hell. Fight infidels until the point when there is no more schism and when holy religion is universally triumphant. O believers! when you march on the enemy, be resolute, obey God and the prophet, fear the discord that extinguishes the fire of courage. Be firm. The incredulous who refuses to believe in Islam is more abject than a brute in the eyes of the Eternal. If the fortune of battle causes those who violate the pact they have made with you to fall into your hands, use torture to terrify their followers. God will ease your task: 20 brave believers will crush 200 infidels, 100 will put 1,000 to flight. No prophet has taken prisoners without spilling the blood of a great number of enemies. Feed on what you have taken from the enemy. You shall have no society with believers who have remained at home, until they have marched into combat. Believers who have left their country to fight under the standard of faith and those who have given aid to the prophet are the truly faithful ones. Paradise is their portion.
Believers who tear themselves from the bosom of their family to follow [God's] standard, sacrificing their property and their lives, shall have the first places in the realm of the heavens. They shall be the object of God’s kindness; they shall live in gardens of delights and taste eternal pleasures. Cease loving your fathers, your brothers, if they prefer incredulity to faith. … Young and old, enter combat, sacrifice your wealth and your lives for the defense of the faith, [for] there is no more glorious advantage for you. Some believers have let the prophet go, they have said, “Let us not fight during the heat!” The fire of hell shall be much more terrible than that heat. … O Believers! Fight your unfaithful neighbors. May they find implacable enemies.
Tocqueville concludes his Koranic analysis in the March 1838 “Notes” with these additional observations:
Everything that relates to war is precise; everything that relates to morals … is general and confused. … As in practically all of the Alcoran [Koran], Muhammad concerns himself far more with making himself believed than with giving rules of morality. And he employs terror much more than any other motive.
Prior to visiting Algeria, Tocqueville supplemented his initial reflections on the Koran with further meditations on both this defining Muslim text and Islam:
Reading the latter [Koran] is one of the most … instructive things imaginable because the eye easily discovers there, by very closely observing, all the threads by which the prophet held and still holds the members of his sect. … [T]hat the first of all religious duties is to blindly obey the prophet, that holy war is the first of all good deeds … all these doctrines of which the practical outcome is obvious are found on every page and in almost every word of the Koran are so striking that I cannot understand how any man with good sense could miss them.
Jihad: Holy war, is an obligation for all believers. … The state of war is the natural state with regard to infidels. Only truces can be made [meaning...can only be interrupted by a truce, not ended]. … After the victory, 4/5 of the booty — land, buildings, and other property — of the defeated I shared out. Two motives: fanaticism, cupidity.
Muhammadanism is the religion that most thoroughly conflated and intermixed the powers in such a way that the high priest is necessarily the prince, and the prince the high priest, and all acts of civil and political life are more or less governed by religious law. … [T]his concentration and this conflation of power established by Muhammad between the two powers … was the primary cause of despotism and particularly of social immobility that has almost always characterized Muslim nations.
And following his first sojourn in Algeria, Tocqueville compared Islam’s lasting impact with that of Christianity (and the latter’s possible disappearance), in an October 1843 letter to Arthur de Gobineau:
If Christianity should in fact disappear, as so many hasten to predict, it would befall us, as already happened to the ancients before its advent, a long moral decrepitude, a poisoned old age, that will end up bringing I know not where nor how a new renovation. … I closely studied the Koran especially because of our position with regard to the Muslim populations in Algeria and throughout the Orient. I admit that I came out of that study with the conviction that, all things considered, there had been few religions in the world so dreadful for men as that of Muhammad. It is, I believe, the major cause of the decadence today so visible in the Muslim world and though it is less absurd than ancient polytheism, it’s social and political tendencies, in my opinion much more to be feared. I see it relative to paganism itself as a decadence rather than an advance.
Nearly 170 years later, it is a bitter, tragic irony that the harshest and most valid critiques of Stanley McChrystal — leveled by military officers in Michael Hastings’ now infamous Rolling Stone essay (“The Runaway General“) — hinge upon the general’s ignorant and willfully misconceived formulation of the same timeless Islamic doctrines so plainly elucidated by Tocqueville.
Retired Col. Douglas MacGregor, an accomplished military strategist who attended West Point with Gen. McChrystal, remonstrated:
The entire COIN strategy is a fraud perpetuated on the American people. The idea that we are going to spend a trillion dollars to reshape the culture of the Islamic world is utter nonsense.
MacGregor’s plaintive statement reiterated the essence of Marine Corps Sergeant Major (Ret.) James Sauer’s criticisms elaborated with meticulous detail — doctrinal, historical, and hands-on experiential — in an October 2009 essay. But perhaps even more revealing — and damning — was the impassioned comment about the prohibitively restrictive rules of engagement (ROE) McChrystal has imposed upon U.S. combat forces in Afghanistan. A Special Forces soldier with years of experience in Iraq and Afghanistan opined:
Bottom line? I would love to kick McChrystal in the nuts. His rules of engagement put soldiers’ lives in even greater danger. Every real soldier will tell you the same thing.
With a combined wisdom and intellectual honesty almost absent in journalism today, Diana West has been chronicling, tirelessly, the dangerous absurdities of our “See-No-Islam” COIN strategy, pitted against the menace of global Islamic jihadism. Following McChrystal’s resignation, West, in her singular clarity, further identified the Gordian knot intertwining COIN doctrine and our troops’ hideously self-destructive ROEs — which she aptly termed “a post-modern form of human sacrifice” — in Afghanistan.
It is this COIN theory that is directly responsible for the unconscionably restrictive ROEs that have been attracting media attention, a postmodern form of human sacrifice staged to appease the endlessly demanding requirements of political correctness regarding Islam. There is no separating the two. If we have COIN, we have these same heinous ROEs.
West also reminded those engaging in wishful speculation that Gen. Petraeus, now re-assigned to McChrystal’s former command in Afghanistan, would somehow alter the current ROEs:
And there is no sign of the COIN nightmare ending anytime soon. Alas, the new commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David Petraeus, is the man who literally wrote the COIN book.
Subsequently, Pentagon analyst Anthony Cordesman concurred with West’s assessment, noting:
Gen. Petraeus has been in the loop during the formulation of these [ROEs], has been sitting in on weekly satellite conferences, has been part of most of the major monthly and quarterly reviews. So this is not somebody coming to this with a new set of attitudes.
Moreover, while he commanded U.S. troops in Iraq, Petraeus (re-)stated during a 2007 interview with National Public Radio the standard mantra of COIN enthusiasts: that this mode of warfare featured “protecting the Iraqi population,” ostensibly to avoid actions which “create more enemies than you take off the streets.”
Past, both distant and recent, as prologue, Afghanistan’s present manifestations of Islamic irredentism — jihadism and dehumanizing, often lethal persecution of non-Muslims, especially “apostates” from Islam and Muslim women — reflect a readily discernible continuum also ignored by the avatars of COIN. Indiana University Professor Nick Cullather (noted here by Diana West), for example, described in a 2002 essay how during more than three decades, between 1946 and 1979, the U.S. engaged in precisely the kind of sustained, non-military “hearts and minds-winning” utopian efforts advocated by today’s COIN doctrinaires, to no avail. This doomed “Helmand Valley Project” — Helmand being a present day Taliban stronghold — even featured a massive dam designed by the builder of the Hoover Dam (in addition to Cape Canaveral, and the Golden Gate Bridge), Morris Knudsen. As Cullather observed, instructively, the Helmand Valley Project:
…was lavishly funded by U.S. foreign aid, multilateral loans, and the Afghan government, and it was the opposite of piecemeal. It was an “integrated” development scheme, with education, industry, agriculture, medicine, and marketing under a single controlling authority. Nation-building did not fail in Afghanistan for want of money, time, or imagination. In the Helmand Valley, the engines and dreams of modernization had run their full course, spooling out across the desert until they hit limits of physics, culture, and history. … Proponents of a fresh nation-building venture in Afghanistan, unaware of the results of the last one, have resurrected its imaginings.
Some 25 years after the Helmand Valley Project terminated in 1979, between October 2005 and October 2006, Holly Barnes Higgins worked as a public information specialist for a U.S.-funded aid project, also in Helmand, seeking to inspire local citizens to commit themselves to economic progress, including the “repudiation” of poppy cultivation. Higgins left embittered by the project’s failure, which she attributed in large measure to the region’s Islamic irredentism:
Aside from a lack of security arising from the informal local poppy alliance, the barriers to shifting the local economy toward licit crops also included the absence of the rule of law, widespread illiteracy, corruption and fiercely conservative interpretations of Islam that seemed to oppose all change, especially change introduced by foreigners.
The 16-year experiences of Dr. Theodore Leighton-Pennell (1867-1912), originally published in 1909, provide sobering, if disquieting evidence that Islamic religious fanaticism has been a continuous phenomenon among a defining element of the Afghan Muslim population — its frontier tribal peoples spanning the present day border with northwestern Pakistan — since at least the latter half of the 19th century. Pennell was a noble physician and Christian missionary who founded the Bannu hospital, and died (of septicemia, likely contracted from a patient) serving the region’s indigenous Afghan Muslim population. Although devoted to his patients, and sympathetic to their culture, Pennell objectively documented the anti-infidel jihadism and brutal misogyny he witnessed firsthand more than a century ago. Pennell’s references to the profound societal influence of Afghan “mullahs,” and the sway they held over their “talibs,” or students (and in contemporary parlance, “Taliban”), remain depressingly relevant in our era.
There is no section of the people of Afghanistan which has a greater influence on the life of the people than the Mullahs, yet it has been truly said that there is no priesthood in Islam. According to the tenets of Islam, there is no act of worship and no religious rite which may not, in the absence of a Mullah, be equally well performed by any pious layman; yet, on the other hand, circumstances have enabled the Mullahs of Afghanistan to wield a power over the populations which is sometimes, it appears, greater than the power of the throne itself. For one thing, knowledge has been almost limited to the priestly class, and in a village where the Mullahs are almost the only men who can lay claim to anything more than the most rudimentary learning it is only natural that they should have the people of the village entirely in their own control. Then, the Afghan is a Muhammadan to the backbone, and prides himself on his religious zeal, so that the Mullah becomes to him the embodiment of what is most national and sacred. The Mullahs are, too, the ultimate dispensers of justice, for there are only two legal appeals in Afghanistan — one to the theological law, as laid down by Muhammad and interpreted by the Mullahs; the other to the autocracy of the throne — and even the absolute Amir would hesitate to give an order at variance with Muhammadan law, as laid down by the leading Mullahs. His religion enters into the minutest detail of an Afghan’s everyday life, so that there is no affair, however trivial, in which it may not become necessary to make an appeal to the Mullah.
Frequently the object of the mullah is to egg the people on to acts of open violence:
The more fanatical of these Mullahs do not hesitate to incite their pupil ["talibs"] to acts of religious fanaticism, or ghaza,[jihad operation] as it is called. The ghazi [jihadist] is a man who has taken an oath to kill some non-Muhammadan, preferably a European, as representing the ruling race; but, failing that, a Hindu or a Sikh is a lawful object of his fanaticism. The Mullah instills into him the idea that if in so doing he loses his own life, he goes at once to and enjoys the special delights of the houris and the gardens which are set apart for religious martyrs. When such a disciple has been worked up to the degree of religious excitement, he is usually further fortified by copious draughts of bhang, or Indian hemp, which produces a kind of intoxication in which one sees everything red, and the bullet and the bayonet have no longer any terror for him. Not a year passes on the frontier but some young officer falls a victim to one of these ghazi fanatics. Probably the ghazi has never seen him his life, and can have no grudge against him as a man; but he is a “dog and a heretic,”and his death a sure road to Paradise.
The Afghan noblemen maintain the strictest parda, or seclusion, of their women, who pass their days monotonously behind the curtains and lattices of their palace prison-houses, with little to do except criticize their clothes and jewels and retail slander; and. …The poorer classes cannot afford to seclude their women, so they try to safeguard their virtue by the most barbarous punishments, not only for actual immorality, but for any fancied breach of decorum. A certain trans-frontier chief that I know, on coming to his house unexpectedly one day, saw his wife speaking to a neighbour over the wall of his compound. Drawing his sword in a fit of jealousy, he struck off her head and threw it over the wall, and said to the man: “There! you are so enamoured of her, you can have her.” The man concerned discreetly moved house to a neighbouring village….The recognized punishment in such a case of undue familiarity would have been to have cut off the nose of the woman and, if possible, of the man too. This chief, in his anger, exceeded his right, and if he had been a lesser man and the woman had had powerful relations, he might have been brought to regret it. But as a rule a woman has no redress; she is the man’s property, and a man can do what he likes with his own. This is the general feeling, and no one would take the trouble or run the risk of interfering in another man’s domestic arrangements. A man practically buys his wife, bargaining with her father, or, if he is dead, with her brother; and so she becomes his property, and the father has little power of interfering for her protection afterwards, seeing he has received her price.
…The two greatest social evils from which the Afghan women suffer are the purchase of wives and the facility of divorce. I might add a third — namely, plurality of wives; but though admittedly an evil where it exists, it is not universally prevalent, like the other two — in fact, only men who are well-to-do can afford to have more than one wife.
Consistent with Tocqueville’s learned approach to understanding Islam — based upon actually studying the creed’s foundational texts, and living history of jihad — Major Stephen Coughlin, a trained lawyer and the Pentagon’s only expert on Islamic law, wrote a magisterial thesis on the contemporary jihadist enemy’s threat doctrine. Coughlin concluded his analysis, published in July 2007, with this warning — and challenge — to the advocates of COIN:
Islam is not just a religion but a way of life. As a way of life for all Muslims at both the individual and community level, [they] are bound by Islamic law. Islamic law understands jihad exclusively as warfare to establish the religion. In the doctrinal trenches of jihad, while Current Approach advocates and the national security community consistently message adoctrinal notions of Islam and jihad, the “extremists” will always be able to counter with the requirements of jihad that are grounded in Sacred Islamic law emanating directly from Allah and His Prophet.
Finally, the juxtaposition of COIN-based Islamic negationism to Tocqueville’s writings — both on Islam, and his renowned two-volume Democracy in America — also reveals the post-modern immoral equivalence between Islamic and uniquely Western values promoted by the avatars of COIN.
(The discussion of Tocqueville relies upon Professor Michael Curtis’ insightful analysis, “Orientalism and Islam — European Thinkers on Oriental Despotism in the Middle East and India,” chapter 6, “Alexis de Tocqueville and Colonization,” Cambridge, 2009. Translated extracts of Tocqueville’s letters and observations from his “Oeuvres Completes,” Paris, 1952-1995, were kindly provided by Nidra Poller, or reproduced from Professor Jennifer Pitts’ “Alexis de Tocqueville — Writings on Empire and Slavery,” Baltimore, 2001.)
A friend asked that I write a post-script to this essay, listing strategic aims for Afghanistan and Pakistan. The U.S. has these two main, legitimate strategic interests in so-called “Af-Pak”:
- First and foremost, seizing and destroying or removing Pakistan’s nukes.
- Second, destroying Afghanistan’s — and the Taliban’s — odious “cash crop” – opium.
If the U.S. is unwilling to pursue these two basic strategic aims, we should withdraw, lest our brave combat soldiers — subjected as they are to our heinous, COIN-based ROEs — become victim to the hopeless malaise characterized so aptly by Rudyard Kipling in his “The Young British Soldier.”
Kipling wrote, “When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains, And the women come out to cut up what remains, Just roll to your rifle and blow out your brains.”
Dr. Bostom: Thanks for another interesting post.
“Know your enemy” is a key to victory. Question: Do they read Sun Tzu in West Point?
Truly illuminating. It is not often that a single article can change my mind. I have been dubious about the prospects in Afghanistan: you have opened m eyes to the fatal flaw – the intractability and total intolerance of Islamic zealots, especially in a primitive culture.
Few things disturb me as much as the application of the “moral equivalency” principle to spread of this evil faith. There is no such thing as a “moderate” muslim. The most unthretening of them will never speak out against jihadist terror. They all believe that Islam is destined to rule the world and they must do all they can to hasten that day. The Quran is a military instruction manual – 10,000 Commandments, right down to how to deal with sheep-shafters, None of this “love thy neighbor” nonsense; just how to dismember them.
Their faith is in a Theocracy. No separation of mosque and state. The mosque IS the state, and Sharia the only law. They are unassimilable, by ideology. They have no allegiance to any state. Total unquestioning obedience and absolute intolerance are their central precepts, hammered into them every week by the mullahs.
To make a case for tolerating, nay, favoring, psychopathic, murderous, intolerance is suicidally insane. So, I recognize is any effort to defend it with arms or “win over their hearts and minds”.
“The U.S. has these two main, legitimate strategic interests in so-called “Af-Pak”:
1.First and foremost, seizing and destroying or removing Pakistan’s nukes.
2.Second, destroying Afghanistan’s — and the Taliban’s — odious “cash crop” – opium”
Wait a minute! You write three pages instructing us about the hateful Koran and the evil of Mohammedism and you can’t add De-Islamification to the list of legitimate strategic interests. That makes you guilty of the very offenses you’re accusing McChrystal and Petraeus of committing.
“De-islamification” is impossible.
It happened in Spain.
El Cid happened in Spain, and the Islamic leaders and their armies were driven back to Morocco.
“The idea that we are going to spend a trillion dollars to reshape the culture of the Islamic world is utter nonsense.”
No. What is nonsense is the idea that we will undertake our only other option in preference, which is to kill so many of them that they quit of their own accord. That’s nonsense when the other course is open to us.
” 1. First and foremost, seizing and destroying or removing Pakistan’s nukes.
2. Second, destroying Afghanistan’s — and the Taliban’s — odious “cash crop” – opium.”
The first cannot be done unless we are prepared to occupy Pakistan until it is pacified from the outset, or we are prepared to go back into Pakistan to clean up the mess afterward.
The second is no legitimate war aim at all. Far, far better and in keeping with the Constitution to end the idiotic prohibition of recreational drugs which makes it the Taliban’s cash crop.
I know a goo-goo paleo-progressive when I smell one, and the thug who is ready to kill so someone else can’t have a lump of hash will next be shooting me because I want a drink.
Mind your own business you repulsive nanny-stater.
“Goo-goo paleo-progressive?” Nanny stater? You need a relity check, Tom. And opium (a poppy derivative) and hash (derived of cannabis) are two different drugs.
Instead of destroying the poppy fields, we should grow poppies intensively here in the US, radically improve potency and flood the Muslim market with it.The price, which the Taliban and other terrorists depend on for financing would go through the floor and a great many Muslims would be too stoned all the time to do anything but dream of Jihad.
The British used opium effectively against the Chinese. We need to take a page out of their book to wreck Islam.
Meanwhile, Tom, have another drink and stop insulting your betters.
“”go-goo paleo-progressive?” Nanny stater? You need a relity check, Tom. And opium (a poppy derivative) and hash (derived of cannabis) are two different drugs.”
Firstly, it isn’t far out on a limb to think anyone who would call opium odious in this context is a nanny stater and a “good government” paleo progressive–that they honestly think efforts to prohibit the drug are worth it at the same time those efforts are putting our soldiers in greater immediate peril and making our strategic position in Afghanistan more diffcult. Secondly, while I have no doubt the poster feels hash and opium are rightfully in the same category as a drug legitimately to be prohibitied–I didn’t actually write they were the same thing, did I? Reading comprehension must not be your strong suit, sir.
“Instead of destroying the poppy fields…but dream of Jihad.”
The Afghani farmers have an incentive to support the Taliban because the Talib promise to permit them to continue to grow their cash crop. Nothing we do which puts that cash income in peril is something which will endear them to us, so your plan is at best half wise.
“The British used opium effectively against the Chinese. We need to take a page out of their book to wreck Islam.”
I do not think that a culture possessed of what it feels is the moral courage–or just possessed in any case–to cut off the hands of thieves, stone raped women to death, bugger boys and hang homosexuals is a culture which will have great difficulty in dealing with drug trafficers whom we attempt to sponsor. This part of your plan isn’t even half wise.
Meanwhile, I have yet to imbibe in relation to this thread and am writing here as a gentleman, not unintentionally giving offense.
Mr. Boston wastes our time.
Reshaping the Islamic world must happen, because the only other options we have are a defense which if successful is not sufficiently differenced from genocide, or that they win.
Reshaping the Islamic world one sandbox at a time is by far the better course.
Additionally abandoning prohibition of recreational drugs is also by far the better course. When they were legal, they did not cause nearly so much trouble.
There is no reason in particular to think that the Prophet Muhammad had anything to do with the compilation of the Koran. The best evidence points toward the Koran being pieced together over a period of decades using material plagarized from Jewish, Christian, and Zoroastrian writings, supplemented with poorly written Umayyad propaganda passed off as the word of God. The book ‘Hagarism; the making of the Islamic World’ by Cook and Crone, has a very interesting theory on the origins of Islam. They propose that it started as a heretical kind of Judaism that held the Arabs – descendants of Abraham through the slave woman Hagar – were legitimate co-inheritors of the Holy Land along with the descendants of Abraham through his son Issac. When the real Jews rejected this heresy the Arab adherents to it evolved it into a new religion, and concocted the Koran as their own Holy Scripture.
Wrong. See Jihad Watch, Islam Watch, and any scholarly book on Islam. The Sunnah, or the “Way” of the Prophet Muhammad was compiled “primarily from the hadiths (“reports”) about Muhammad’s life, which were passed down orally until codified in the eighth century AD, some hundred years after Muhammad’s death”. While the Koran wasn’t compiled into its present form until Caliph Uthman the words were those passed along by Muhammad.
A magnificent essay and must-read for US leaders who, though ignorant of mohammedanism as they could be, perhaps could be persuaded to see the facts and drop the oh-the-likes-of-bin-Laden-have-perverted-their-religion nonsense, such as Joe Lieberman and Rudy Giuliani. But there’s still no guarantee that they’d get it if they did read this and, after that, studied the texts and tenets of islam, plus its bloody history of plundering, conquest and rape, for themselves.
After all, as quite a few commentators have pointed out, not everyone might be willing to see the horrible truth on this subject for what it is; which is probably the reason that makes individuals like Charles Krauthammer babble about how Geert Wilders supposedly doesn’t known the difference between “islam” and “islamism” (which is the same as that between CO2 and carbon dioxide.) It’s likely that the thought that jihad is inherent to the cult of the giant black cube might be just too scary for such folks to accept and, therefore, they have to remain firm believers in the existence of this “islamism”, supposedly so different from the allegedly “peaceful” islam they so foolishly believe to exist, so that their notion of things doesn’t undergo an utter meltdown.
“…cult of the giant black cube…” – that’s a wonderful description!
“…know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the results of a hundred battles…” Sun Tzu
Having read this at Bostom’s blog earlier, I am glad to see this is getting expanded circulation through PJM. Bostom exposes me to lessons and sources I should have explored years ago in college. Thank you.
Interesting and thorough article. But to the oikophobe facts, reason and common sense mean nothing. The New York Times just published an article on the Times Square Bomber that simply blames the United States and the internet (!) for “radical” Islam: Wars Fought and Wars Googled, “Managed deftly, such a deal conceivably might allow Mr. Obama to exit Afghanistan without fear of a Qaeda haven. But since the notion of an American-led war on Muslims has gone viral, the virus would take years or perhaps decades to burn out.”
In other words, blamef the police (i.e. Great Satan). And, in addition, the internet. The NYT knows all the facts concerning Islam. But they, like many Westerners, are incapable of emotionally connecting the dots. The World Trade Center mosque is the most obvious symbol of the hatred many people in the West feel for their own culture. They identify with Muslims since both they and Islam wish to destroy what’s left of Western codes of honor.
Until the West reclaims its historic understanding of what constitutes honor it will never have the self-confidence necessary to defeat Islam.
I read the Koran and commentaries on it as a young man.
Then I re-read (scanned) it again in middle age along with reviews of some historians.
Today’s Euros and Americans have not got the education — due certainly to centrally planned education systems AND really really rotten teachers — to comprehend the terminal catastrophe to the West and the enlightened East that the Caliphate overhanging us represents.
You, sir, do a Cicero-like favor in the twilight of the republics.
You can’t civilize savages. Full stop.
After de Toqueville’s day the French ran Algeria for a century and a half- and nothing changed whatsoever. Evfen the civilised British, masters of enlightening the unenlightened, failed to make a dent in the barbarity of the Muslim regions they once ruled (they did however at least keep them caged, back when mustachioed men in pith helmets understood their duty to mankind).
Israel is the only country that doesn’t have to be multicultural yet the Jewish controlled American congress and big business demands it of America – meanwhile our country is quickly starting to look very third world. Its time to stop this now – AIPAC owns the American congress. I’m speaking as a non-muslim American here. America needs a third viable political party that is going to represent the rights of middle class Americans. AIPAC secures 3 billion dollars of American taxpayers money to fund Israel’s war of genocide against the Palestinians. Christian American youth are dying in the middle east for Israel and don’t even know what they are fighting for – they think its for a terrorist threat to America. What idiots we are – wake up America and take your country back from both AIPAC and the government that has been bought by them. Israel is a tick on our back…lets take back our country.
Free me from ALL that I may be freed of the one………
What a stew of hate. A true Jew-hater, with ideas identical to those of jihadis, which helps explain why you deny utterly their existence and aims, and those of the clerics and rulers in the Islamic sphere who send them. This is like all the virulent anti-Semitism – there is no evil in the world but that which ‘the Jew’ creates; without Jews, all would be peace and kindness between peoples. Truly a genocidal attitude. And the evidence of ‘genocide’ against the Palestinians, who are said to number ten times their number at the time of the Independence War.
Israel is a ‘tick’ on your back. No, it is covered with boils of your own making.
BTW, AIPAC is an organization whose clear loyalties are to the policies of whatever Admin is currently intimidating the leaders of that organization. The ‘aid’ is returned in kind in the form of technology, and is used to prevent Israeli defense industries from fairly competing with – and even overtaking – American ones. But I agree, I wish that Israel would stop taking American aid, partly to utterly sever the ties and even indirect connections to vile attitudes such as yours.
I also wish that Louisiana would quit accepting money from a corrupt Government!
The U.S. Army is a secular organization governed by increasingly secular elites. While many of the rank and file may be Christian and hold to articles of faith, much of the upper ranks have been purged. COIN deals with ideology and insurgency movements. It does not address religion because it is a non-factor to the elites. Another factor that may perhaps explain the absense of a serious discussion of Islam from COIN is the committment to political correctness in the political elites.
Regardless, as long as the U.S. military, the ruling elites, and the American public fail to grabble with reality, all prospects of victory are lost.
I AGREE!
Dr. Bostom: so what is your point here? or better yet what is your solution?
Islam, is violent, Jihad and Islamists are real. and then some guy went to Algeria and figured this out in the 1800. and some retired office went to west point, and decided that Islam promotes Jihad. well no kidding Dick Tracey!
I was bron and raised a muslim and I expirenced this first hand… but it is here
like it or not….you suggestion od gasing up 2 billion muslims just like hiter gassed up 6 million Jews is no longer viable
so let’s hear you solution, not your racist views..
did you even know a country named Afghansitan and Iraq didn’t even exsit 150 years ago..
The U.S. strategic interests in Afghanistan and Pakistan
Ends and Means, Mr. Bostom:
1) Prevent Pakistan from using its nukes, particularly against the US.
___Rule zero of the Nuclear Age is that one does not make existential
___threats to a nuclear power, even a minor one such as Pakistan;
___They might decide to use them rather than lose them.
___The US gave the USSR the plans for its nuclear weapon protection
___and control system out of enlightened self-interest; Pakistan
___could likewise benefit from a system which added a ‘safety’ (or 3)
___to the trigger on its weapons of mass destruction.
2) Get the Afghani opium off the market by _buying_ it all; Bound to be
___less expensive and annoying to the Tribes than destroying it.
3) Get the remaining terrorists out of action by _buying_ their heads
___from the Khans; Again, a cost effective exchange in the marketplace.
_OR_ follow your forceful approach, which maximizes the probability that
a Pakistani nuke will be stolen by the Taliban and used as a vengeance
weapon against the US _AND_ leaves the Afghanis, and their natural resources
vulnerable to takeover by the Chinese, instead of allied with the US
against Chinese invasion.
P.S. KIpling original, _complete_ advice is still good:
When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier.
Strange; Is there an echo of Islam in that last line, the one you left out ?
Greetings:
I’ve become convinced that our strategy must include actions to diminish the impact of Islam worldwide. The way forward is to confront Islam, the ideology, directly and often. I’ve read about an Egyptian Coptic priest, Zacarias Botros, if I remember his name correctly, who broadcasts radio programs that elucidate and discuss some of Mohammed’s sexual proclivities such as having sex with his 9-year-old “wife” and sucking on the tongues of children. While understanding the “jihad” part of Islamic doctrine in useful, I think that exposing the depravity, murders, thievery, lying, throughout the muslim scriptures is a better way to erode the thin veneer of religion and reveal the supremacist, political ideology that is the core of Islam. I believe that is why the muslims put so much effort into preventing, precluding, and/or punishing criticism of Islam or Mohammed. What they want to protect is what we must attack.
Good comment. I know a few educated Muslims here in Turkey who can at least agree about the faults of Mohammed, which is a good starting point. The next is to finance projects that go about doing this in much the same way as the Arabian oil money is being used to finance mosques in the West. How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.
Dr. Bostom dissects the minds of our eminent strategists, despite their minds being located in a dark, odorous and anatomically inconvenient place, where only a skilled proctologist could readily examine them.
For our own survival, we must rapidly abandon the absurd notion that we can impose the concepts of Western democracy on a people who have enshrined, for over 1300 years, the totalitarian theology of Islam that has now condemned thousands of our youth to futile sacrifice. Our young and dedicated soldiers have now struggled and fought for years to enable construction of newly constituted Islamic republics in Iraq and Afghanistan, in which sharia law righteously dominates unbelievers, where apostates, Jews and Christians are executed, and which intrinsically regard us as the enemy of Dar al-Harb – the World of War – ultimately to be conquered by jihad.
That you Dr. Bostom and Diana West for all that you do to try to educate Americans about the evils of Muhammad’s deeds and sayings.
I wish that you could get time on one of our so-called “conservative” talk show hosts to set them straight. They are still talking about some nonsense about a “war on terror”, “radical Islam” and “Islamofscists” when it it is simply Islam that is at war with us.
BTW, don’t forget to remind people that we need to not only stop letting Muslims immigrate into our country but also to start deporting all those who wish to follow Muhammad’s commands to impose Sharia Law and wage jihad against all Americans.
Barack Hussein Obama would be a good start.
We shouldn’t try to reshape the Islamic world because it is impossible. What we must do is do what is neeeded so the name of Muhammad (thief, oath breaker, murderer, genocider, rapist and paedophile) is spit upon from Morocco to Indonesia. And support those who break with Islam in the period where they will be a minority.
“We shouldn’t try to reshape the Islamic world because it is impossible.”
And then Anonymous goes on to say how the Islamic world should be reshaped. That’s about the level of Bostom’s thinking.
I thought that it was obvious the sentence meant “impossible as long as it remains islamic” and that the sentence implied the destruction of the “islamic world” and the birth of a free world over its ashes, so there would be no reshaping. I thought it was obvious to anyone with an IQ above room temperature. In Celsius.
The Americans will surely fail just like every other army because they have ignored the key to victory.
“chop off the head and the body will die”
What is needed is the “annexation” of the entire priest cast..!!
What you are talking about, John, is a “holy war” Not that I disagree with your solution, Islam has already declared holy war, why shouldn’t we get with the program? Of course, panty waisted “leaders” of the West will never allow it or even admit there is a war going on ’til their sisters or mothers murdered in the town square for not covering their hair. If then!
I have been saying since 9/11 that we have two foundational mindsets we can adopt towards Islam: coexistence, and use of our military power to kill all Muslims. These are ends of a continuum that can’t, practically, be pushed all the way in either direction. Some Muslims will always hate us, and the political will to kill some 100′s of millions of people does not and presumably never will exist.
With respect to Afghanistan, we are there, remember, to prevent the reemergence of the terrorist training camps from which the 9/11 attackers emerged. If they develop, we want to be able to hit them. If we don’t have the goodwill of the government, we have nowhere to “land”, nowhere to stage, and without Pakistan we have no good land or air route in there anyway. Look at a map.
I supported the surge in Iraq. I did not support the surge in Afghanistan, since they are two different wars. As someone with two degrees in South Asian Religion, I can tell you, too, that if you want to understand a faith, look at what people do, not what their books say.
What Afghans want, more than anything, is to be left alone. They want to live in their little backward villages, and not have anybody from anywhere screwing with them. They don’t want Afghan troops there. They want Americans even less. They don’t want the Taliban, since as fanatics they take everything too far, and most people just want a proverbial beer and ballgame come the weekend, not religous zealotry. Yes, they beat their wives, and molest young boys, but we are not there to right the wrongs of the world, so much as prevent them from coming to us.
In my view, we can never “occupy” Afghanistan. We don’t have the troops, the money, or the time. Given this, what we should have pursued was a minimalist strategy. We need to accept most of Afghanistan is going to go “native” again. We need to develop a modus vivendi with Kabul. Our shared interest is no more terror training camps. No more open planning of terrorism. This is in Kabul’s interest, since they are as likely to be targets as we are.
This point warrants underscoring. De Toqueville pointed out that believers are not to be killed. Modern Islamic supremecists kill Muslims. This IS categorically un-Koranic, and contrary to most historical patterns, although internecine violence goes back at least to Ali.
We need to avoid idealism, but we need likewise not fall prey to cynicism. No matter what their books say, Muslims are capable of exercising moral judgment in ways with which we are familiar.
Our task is to retain a wanted presence in Afghanistan, do what we can to deny the Taliban sources of funding and means of expansion, but equally to accept that we can’t change the cultural patterns of thousands of years, in countless thousands of hill-billy hollers, by any means other than expending lives and money that could go to better causes.
As far as the rules of engagement, obviously we are trying to be perceived as good guys. If we start shooting everything in sight, that won’t happen. What we need to do is just pull back to the cities, and defend defensible perimeters, and stay close to those who are our natural allies against the religious zealots. I really believe we should start pulling troops. We may wind up with an array of de facto fortresses in a sea of indifference and hostility, but if that is going to be the end result anyway, why not ratify it now?
And if we are unwilling to accept that reality, then we just need to leave, period, unconditionally.
Back around the days of the Barbary Pirates’ War, an Islamic Ambassador was asked by what authority his people were to raid, pillage and take prisoner/slaves, by an American Diplomat.
His answer WAS more or less “The Qua’ran.” A brutality of that sort, backed by faith, can only be defeated by superior force, liberally applied. When Europe and the US WERE willing to do so, the “POOP” stopped from about 1683 until the late 20th Century – Not a Bad Run! Amazingly, we are further ahead of “THEM” now in technology than we were in the 17th – 20th Centuries. What is missing is the WILL to FIGHT and PREVAIL. -S-
That book on Afghanistan by T.L. Pennell is available free for Kindle at http://www.amazon.com/Frontier-Sixteen-Intercourse-Natives-ebook/dp/B004UJH91A