President Obama’s Oval Office address this evening (6 December 2015) was redundant, unnecessary, and patronizing to the American people. Fourteen years since the Twin Towers collapsed, we’re still unable to name our enemy or fully commit to destroying it. We continue to deny the blindingly obvious reality that ISIS is not a “perversion” of a religion, but rather a perfect interpretation.
ISIL is not “Islamic.” No religion condones the killing of innocents, and the vast majority of ISIL’s victims have been Muslim.
He sees paradise.
Bullshit, bullshit, and irrelevant. Why would the religious faith of ISIS’s victims be at all pertinent to this discussion? Violence necessarily involves a victim and an aggressor. The victim is passive; he is the recipient of violence. ISIS is the active participant; they inflict violence. We need to understand ISIS’s behavior because doing so allows us to break their will to resist, and destroy their means of doing so.
Of course, we do understand what fuels ISIS’s barbarism: perfect, absolute faith in the religious doctrine of Islam. How do we know this? Because they’ve been kind enough to explicitly tell us so thousands of times. In terms of capability, the American intelligence community is unsurpassed, yet we still fail to intercept the most critical piece of intelligence about our enemy: Why they fight. We will not win this war until we resolve to overcome our reluctance to acknowledge that bad ideas produce bad consequences.
I believe that the worst ideas are those which cause the most human suffering. Religious belief is a bad idea. Abrahamic religious belief is an especially bad idea. Islamic religious belief is one of mankind’s all-time worst ideas. I came to this conclusion due to my observation that Islam causes an extraordinary amount of human suffering.
Once again, let me make this clear…
Christians live comfortably and happily in the west because they’ve greed to disregard all but the cheeriest, most humane aspects of their scriptures. Those who refuse to do so are disinvited from public discourse and, when necessary, criminally prosecuted.
Imagine the following: I have a sweatshirt printed with the words, “No One Cares About Your Stupid God.” I put on this sweatshirt to go for a walk. A Christian sees this t-shirt and commands me to repent. I command him to eat shit. He produces a firearm and shoots me twice in the chest. As I lay bleeding out onto the street, he stands above me and quotes the Good Book. He records himself doing so, and uploads the video onto YouTube. He’s arrested and charged with murder.Do we have any doubt whatsoever that the county prosecutor – himself a Christian – would eagerly characterize the incident as a religiously-motivated crime? Of course not.
Why? Because in nearly every context apart from Islamist terrorism, unless we have a truly compelling reason to the contrary, we generally believe killers when they tell us why they kill. The sooner we can apply that logic to this war, the sooner we can actually begin to fight it.
Amanda Marcotte’s byline on Salon describes her as a “politics writer,” though she scarcely addresses the art of compromise. She’s built a career on absolutist, Girls-era feminism. The woman is a standard-bearer for the very worst characteristics of American identity politics.
Smiling: You’re doing it wrong.
I’m not a journalist. I cannot credibly comment on her professional challenges. However, I can notice patterns, such as this: mass shootings are a windfall for those who pay their rent sewing contempt for select demographic groups. Ms. Marcotte usually selects men.
It makes sense, of course. By most measures, men do behave more violently. Of the various types of violence we engage in – physical assault, domestic abuse, spontaneous homicide, serial murder, even warfare – few are more uniquely masculine than the comparatively recent phenomenon of the mass shooting. Even the most generous estimates don’t assign women guilt for more than two percent of mass shootings. The mass shooting is the behavior most characteristic of my demographic.
This damning feature of American masculinity has been a cornerstone of Ms. Marcotte’s career. Mass shootings provide a very pure, distilled case study to support nearly any unflattering conclusion about American men. The roadmap to success is simple: She’s a gifted writer, and she has the work ethic to produce well-written essays within hours of a massacre. If I enjoyed either of those qualities, I’d joyfully spend the next quarter century building a career and supporting my family preaching the Good Word of violent, toxic masculinity. How frustrating must it be when such a reliable business plan fails to produce? Ask Ms. Marcotte: Insofar as it relates to her tried-and-true narrative, the San Bernardino shooting was a stillbirth.
We won’t admit it, but most Americans have a mass shooting ritual. Upon hearing the first reports, we struggle – with varying degrees of success – to not speculate as to the demographic of the “shooter.” While perhaps not ethically justifiable, this anxiety is certainly understandable. A mass shooting represents high-stakes political intrigue.
What race is he? Where does he worship, or does he worship at all? How does he vote? These are the cornerstones of American identity politics, and they all play second fiddle to the most durable, reliable social division: gender. Conveniently, there’s rarely much speculation on that topic.
Deviation from the norm is exciting, and a married 27 year-old immigrant mother of a newborn could not possibly deviate further from the American mass shooter “norm.” Breitbart‘s banner headline read “The Jihadette.” It featured the stoic, veiled image of a young woman who shares nothing in common with James Holmes or Adam Lanza. What’s a stunned gender critic to do?
Wholly ignoring the most sensational aspect of the story is one option. The journalist who’s scarcely missed an opportunity to opine on the relationship between gender and high-profile violence has yet to discuss the most distinctive, newsworthy characteristic of this mass shooting.
The false equivalence is also useful. About a week prior, a gunman attacked a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, CO. Apart from his age (57), he perfectly represented our stereotype of the American mass shooter: white, male, right-wing, neglected mental health problems, etc…
The two attacks could scarcely have been more different. The Planned Parenthood attack involved a single shooter. The attacker did not personally know his victims. He did not seem to have a well-thought out, rehearsed plan. He was a reclusive person with a history of petty crime.
A resting bitch face like none other.
The San Bernardino shooters operated as a team. Their plan was deliberate and coordinated. They were well-socialized, active members of society. Neither had criminal history, but nevertheless killed 14 people. By contrast, the Planned Parenthood attack doesn’t even register as a proper “mass shooting” by some metrics.
A good narrative is impervious in the hands of a talented ideologue. Two days after the San Bernardino attack, Ms. Marcotte writes,
…this country experienced what appears to be two religiously motivated terrorist attacks in the span of a week: The San Bernardino shooting and the Colorado Springs shooting at Planned Parenthood. But in a demonstration of how bizarre modern American politics really are, these two nearly identical shootings somehow are seen as entirely different in the context of partisan politics.
We see these attacks as entirely different because they are entirely different. They are different in concept, in execution, in casualties, in nearly every sense we use to differentiate mass shootings, these two incidents were different. The only sense in which they are similar is that each of the three criminals did, in fact, seem to hold some level of religious belief. That’s it. There is little compelling evidence thus far to suggest Robert Lewis Dear’s religious belief was his primary motivator.
Run to the sound of the guns.
If during the standoff, Mr. Dear had taken the time to write a Facebook post on his Christian faith, or if he’d opened fire to a war cry of “Jesus Loves Me!,” we could reasonably characterize his crime as “Christian terrorism.” In any case, Mr. Dear was captured alive, so we’re sure to learn more of his motivation in the coming months. I could be entirely wrong. We’ll see. By contrast, our faithful Jihadette and her husband explicitly declared their allegiance to ISIS either immediately before or during their attack, moments before their martyrdom at the hands of disciplined and unhesitating California policemen.
Ms. Marcotte seems disarmed and disoriented when violence does not comport with her preferred themes. White privilege doesn’t work. Toxic masculinity doesn’t work. She can’t even criticize American Christians. The San Bernandino attack represents a significant deviation from the norm. For many writers, such a deviation is fresh, fertile ground. It is an opportunity to tell a new story, one that could be a harbinger of future incidents.
It’s not an opportunity for Ms. Marcotte because understanding and telling a story isn’t what she’s trying to accomplish. Her objective is promoting a poisonous and divisive brand of intersectional feminism. She does so by leveraging high-profile violence to buttress pre-formed “conclusions” that are the foundation of her intellectual identity.
She is desperate to equate the worldwide epidemic of Jihadist violence with extremely infrequent instances of genuine Christian terrorism. She is forced to stretch and redefine terrorism so that it includes most violence perpetrated by her Usual Suspects. She defaults to conclusions that present her chosen oppressors – the West, men, and white Americans – in the most unflattering light possible.
Given an act of terrorism without precedent, she nevertheless cannot deviate from her white privilege, male privilege narrative. When the world around us starkly deviates from what we’re used to, refusing to notice and acknowledge as much is, necessarily, deviant.
The progressive response to the Paris Massacre was equal parts depressing and unsurprising. Much of the political left reflexively assigns any motive to Islamist terrorism except that which the terrorists expressly articulate. This cowardice has already been highlighted and condemned by our most eloquent champions of liberal values. We should amplify this message and celebrate those communicating it.
Dave Rubin is one of those dudes.
Those critiques are urgent, but incomplete. Criticism of these apologists has mostly taken place within secular social and intellectual circles. To borrow a term from an unlikely source, the argument between classical liberals and regressive leftists on the nature of Islamist terrorism is a struggle for the “soul” of the secular movement. Each camp wants to establish their stance as the default position of the broader secular movement.
“Glenn Greenwald is a regressive leftist. He is also an asshole.”
We fail to appreciate how petty and irrelevant our internecine conflict is to anyone else. Particularly in United States, we live in communities in which most of our neighbors still believe in gods. Even if we only consider Christians, those neighbors represent a broad spectrum of political opinion.
For “movement” atheists like myself concerned about political Islamism, it can be awkward and demoralizing to find ourselves allied with conservative Christians. Opposing people like Pat Robertson and Ted Cruz galvanized us. Our unifying contempt for Bush-era Christian conservatives fueled a new brand of secular politics. Conversely, we have become comfortable allying with progressive Christians on issues ranging from LGBT equality to prison reform. Their political agendas closely resemble ours, and they politely ignore or “reinterpret” the more noxious passages (i.e. >95%) in their Good Book.
Nevermind that.
This pragmatism is useful, but also hazardous. The most politically influential apologists for radical Islam are not secular leftists, but rather progressive Christians. As acolytes of a more palatable cult of human sacrifice, they are eager to dispel any notion that simple religious belief can be the root cause of human misery. We often associate these voices with the “interfaith” movement, but the most influential among them are squarely rooted in progressive Christianity and Judaism. In a recent essay on Sojourners (“Faith in Action for Social Justice”), Jim Wallis sketches out what he argues is a workable plan for defeating ISIS:
The best way to defeat bad religion is with good religion, and the better way to defeat religious fundamentalism is from within rather than trying to smash it from without. That means we also need a global religious coalition of Christians, Muslims, and Jews to unite together to undermine and defeat ISIS with our own religious public proclamations, demonstrations, and authority, especially with the younger generation. ISIS is not only a distortion of Islam, it is a blasphemy. And a unified and courageous assertion of our sacred scriptures, which all condemn their irreligious atrocities, would be the best spiritual weapon against ISIS.
Not a syllable of this passage should go unchallenged. ISIS is a real-world threat that has produced human suffering on a scale unrivaled since the fall of the Khymer Rouge. Its ranks are filed with young men ready to fight, kill and die in order to secure an eternal heavenly fuck-fest.
They actually do believe this. No amount of “religious public proclamations, demonstrations, and authority” will defeat the resolve of a young man who believes these claims. The best antidote to “bad religion” is reality; certainly not with a rebranded, impotent version of the same mythology.
The suggestion that Abrahamic “sacred scriptures” condemn violence may be handily disproven by nearly any passage in said scriptures; namely, the >95% Mr. Wallis and his brethren seem to ignore. Indeed, Christianity’s core belief is that an act of first-degree murder was, the most moral act of all time. Islam has trumped Christianity in terms of ability to inspire real-world violence, but we certainly cannot accuse Muslims of celebrating the torture and murder of Mohammad. Christians? That’s the whole point.
Don’t martyr me, bro.
We should, however, pay careful attention to his charge of “blasphemy:” To insult a religious belief system that justifies massive human suffering in our present, he levels a charge that has historically been brought against those brave enough to ridicule religious belief in our past.
Faith-based initiative.
Finally Mr. Wallis’s proposed “spiritual weapon” could scarcely have been better crafted to invite my contempt. Was this the weapon used by the French soldiers and policemen who secured Paris on 14 November, or did they bear arms that were more tangible?
I’m not obfuscating Mr. Wallis’s point: The notion of a “spiritual weapon” really is nonsense. Is this weapon based in the air, land, sea, space or cyber domains? What’s the caliber? How does a soldier employ and maintain a such a weapon? What effects does it produce? What is the maximum effective range of a spiritual weapon?
Run to the sound of the guns.
I would also be curious to learn what Mr. Wallis cites as historical precedent for his claim that a “global religious coalition” can reduce human suffering. Indeed, ISIS is undoubtedly the strongest such “coalition” on the planet today: It is a community of the faithful united by their commitment to execute the Will of God. In the strictest sense of the term, ISIS is a “faith-based organization.”
True believers.
Mr. Wallis is well-versed in faith-based organizations. He served on the White House Council on Faith-Based and Community Partnerships, and remains one of President Obama’s five “spiritual advisors.” He has direct access to the President of the United States. The Commander-in-Chief of mankind’s capable formations and fleets is advised by a man who declares that, “the hardest thing about confronting evil is the painful human tendency to only see it in others.”
He looks down the barrel of your gun and sees paradise.
These are the declarations of a person who has not personally confronted the pure, distilled evil characteristic of the organizations he’s discussing. I do not know about Mr. Wallis’s personal history with violence. However, I do know how violence shaped my friends and family. I also know how it shaped me. Given this admittedly anecdotal context, I find it difficult to believe Mr. Wallis fully grasps either the nature of armed conflict or the consequences of defeat. “The hardest thing about confronting evil” is summoning the courage to do so in the first place.
I don’t get it.
Mr. Wallis’s characterization of the problem and his proposed solutions are absurd. His access to the halls of power make them dangerous, yet he does not represent the views of any specific Christian denomination. A recent opinion piece in the Huffington Post absolutely does. In “They Will Know We Are Christian by… Our Fear,” Rev. Adam J. Copeland reminds us how,
(We’re) called to imagine, welcome, and embrace the kingdom of God. In the reality of God’s reign it is the poor, the merciful, the hungry, the peacemakers, the persecuted, and the mourners who God blesses.
Reverend Copeland is a professor at Luther Seminary, the flagship seminary of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. He is by all accounts a bright and compassionate human being. He is also promoting policies rooted far more in the Christian martyr fetish than in reasoned concern for the well-being of the American people. Each of the monotheistic Abrahamic faiths emphasizes suffering as a means of achieving communion with God.
Progressive Christians usually support compassionate public policy. They oppose the death penalty, draconian criminal penalties, and military adventurism. They support social welfare programs, universal healthcare, and atonement for historical injustices. However, this compassion is informed by a belief that any suffering they may experience as a result of those positions will only serve to bring themselves closer to God.
Do not follow St. Sebastian’s lead.
As you may have deduced, I believe this god is imaginary. I also believe human suffering carries no intrinsic moral value. Secular progressives should maintain our political alliance with progressive Christians, but we must not allow their spiritual masochism to obstruct our campaign against an existential threat. We do not lose moral credibility when we forge alliances with those against whom we usually fight, nor when we speak out against the flawed and reckless ideas of those whose support we typically welcome.
My foundational moral assumption is that suffering is bad. I believe we can quantify suffering precisely enough to guide our moral decision-making, and that we should select courses of action which produce less suffering than they cause.
This doesn’t mean we’re “together.”
Given those assumptions and ISIS’s sadistic enthusiasm, I believe we are morally obligated to destroy ISIS and discredit their uniquely toxic mythology. We need all the help we can get.
I struggle to understand why the 14 November attacks on Paris continue to impact me so deeply. I have no relationship with the victims, nor with any French citizens at all. I live about a third of the way around the globe from Paris.
I’ve only visited the city once, in late summer 2008. I had completed an Army training course, and had a few weeks of leave to burn before reporting to my next duty assignment. I chose Paris because I wouldn’t need a visa, because I somehow found an inexpensive direct flight from Denver, and because I was at the apex of one of my recurring Hemingway binges. I was at Charles de Gaulle airport 96 hours after getting my leave approved by the Army.
Ne pas tread on Papa Hemingway.
I stayed in The City of Lights for two weeks, intent on keeping absolutely no agenda. I was coming off more than a year of indoctrination into an organization (in)famous for its insistence on a neurotic level of planning detail. I wanted to step out of a hostel in the morning, groggy and hungover, with neither a map nor a watch and wander miles through the city, eating and drinking and imagining until, exhausted, I begrudgingly navigated my way back. I faithfully kept to this (lack of) plan.
You’ll find what you’re looking for.
Wandering the city, my internal conscious narrative frequently returned to the morality of armed conflict. I had recently qualified as an armor officer of the US Army, and was quite aware that I’d likely be in combat in Afghanistan within the year. That experience was one I envied, and for which I’d fiercely competed. By this point in my life, I had already seen much of the world. I had lived and worked in often chaotic, even violent parts of the world. I grasped the extent of human affliction. I appreciated that, as an American, I had been fortunate to experience a childhood as distant from the “nasty, brutish, and short” state of nature that still described the daily experience of much of our species.
Waging war, I reasoned, is the most uncivilized effort that a civilization can undertake. It is the only instance in which modern nation-states intend to create widespread human suffering, to be architects of misery. We do so as a means of destroying our enemies’ ability and means to resist our imposition of political, economic, or social objectives. While often dishonest and hypocritical, the liberal democracies of the world have concluded that we may only wage war in order to defend the natural rights enjoyed by their citizens and, by extension, the political integrity of the nation-states that guarantee those rights. Clearly, our governments vary in how successful they are at actually “secur(ing) these rights.” I was well aware that my own nation – the one I’d recently agreed to kill for – had often failed to secure the natural rights of her own citizens.
Combattant de la Liberte.
In retrospect, I think I went to Paris because I wanted to see and hear and smell the city that I most associated with the practical advance of human dignity. While I was not naive regarding human persecution in French history, I felt that this city, more so than any other I could visit, could most credibly claim to have nurtured the ideas that spawned the greatest moral accomplishments of our species.
I feel many of my fellow Americans believe something similar. This is the reason, I believe, that the invasion of Normandy is perhaps the proudest, most storied accomplishment of the US Army: Because a war to liberate the world’s most civilized nation – the nation who has contributed most to the advance of human dignity – is, almost necessarily, the most just war we could fight.
Follow me.
It follows that a war to destroy such a nation is, almost necessarily, the most unjust possible. Such a war is exactly what Friday’s barbarians are fighting. They have made abundantly clear that guarantees of human dignity are unforgivable affronts to their god’s will. Held in isolation, an attack against such a stirring city and such an admirable nation distills a uniquely sharp blend of grief and anger. Hearing so many otherwise wise minds refuse to acknowledge the blindingly obvious root of this misery inspires nothing short of despair.
Some of my fellow Americans have predictably declared Friday’s attacks to be “France’s 9/11.” While I do not fault their instinct to express sympathy, our respective tragedies occurred under vastly differing circumstances and will have equally divergent effects. I am certain that the best and brightest – not to mention the worst and dullest – of both our nations are now struggling to make sense out of this chaotic mayhem. While I do have my opinions on those questions, I’m under no illusion that they’d be either unique or helpful. I’ll pass on that discussion for the time being.
What I would like to offer are some thoughts on how to mourn such a perverse act of violence. Before I continue, I want to assure you that I’m under no illusions that your nation is either naive or passive towards the civilizational cancer of Islamist fundamentalism. As a young cavalry officer in Afghanistan, I learned to value and anticipate the soothing roar of Mirages over the orchards of Kandahar. Thank you.
However, I suspect most of the French people would agree that Friday’s attack on Paris represented a new frontier of violence. While these attacks would have been traumatic anywhere, I’d imagine this effect is magnified in a society as devoid of violence as almost any in recorded history. To contrast, when my classmates and I contemplated the future on the afternoon of 9/11, we did so through psyches well-prepared for the task: We had listened to news reporters update us on the Oklahoma City bombing and the Waco siege. We had watched video of two young men similar to ourselves merrily gun down their classmates in a high-school cafeteria. And many of us had experienced some form of the banal, routine daily violence that, sadly, makes our nation so “exceptional” in comparison to the rest of the developed world. What I want you to know is this: You have built an otherwise tranquil nation. You’re so stunned, so anguished because your values could not be further from those of these barbarians.
So mourn. Grieve publicly, as a unified nation. Grieve privately, and fully entertain the darkest visitors to your psyche. Cry and drink too much and express your seething anger but do not – and I cannot emphasize this enough – do not get used to this shit. It is not the status quo and it will not be our future. In the coming months, your leaders will likely argue ad nauseam over the question of how best to defend your nation from this threat. These discussions will be tedious and divisive, yet they are absolutely necessary. But do not, at any point, believe that acquiescence is part of any valid strategy. Do not submit, in any sense. For a quarter of a millennium, your Republic has authored the ideas that have enabled such a stunning advance of human dignity. Hold this lead. Do not submit.
Putting aside my confused, perhaps even condescending thoughts on grief, politics, and the rights of man, please know this: I am sorry for your loss.
If they intended to provoke, the jihadis could not have chosen a better target. 9/11 inspired global sympathy, but it was easy for Europeans to compartmentalize a tragedy that was both politically and geographically distant. The 7/7 bombings, too, could be understood as the violent byproduct of flawed immigration and education policy.
But Friday’s coordinated attack against the French people, like the Charlie Hebdo massacre ten months prior, could scarcely have been better conceived to provoke the collective grief – and fury – of Western civilization. More so than any other city, Paris exists as a habitable monument to the values of the Enlightenment. Despite France’s fussy political relationship with even her closest allies, the nation – specifically, her capital – remains an emblem of our most admirable common values.
Those values – their very existence – were squarely in the gunsights of Friday’s barbarians. The City of Lights is, as ISIS explains, “the capital of abominations and perversion.” Admittedly, the “state” did reference French interventions in Libya and Syria, but these grievances are not rooted in concern for suffering, but rather that those interventions have slowed ISIS’s progress towards a pan-Arabic Islamist caliphate.
Like many leftists, I’d love to blame this mayhem on my ideological enemies. It’d be splendid if, for example, disaffected young men commenced such massacres ranting about economic inequality or great-power hubris. I suspect that, were this the case in Paris, leaders of the world’s liberal democracies would collectively exhale in relief. They’d do so because those issues, while complex and tedious, ultimately result from flawed public policy. These problems can be remedied by adjusting those policies. Real problems – those that actually do exist – can be remedied by specific, quantifiable actions.
Yet ISIS has clearly explained to us that their grievance does not pertain to the world of living, feeling human beings. Those who executed the attack, in fact, deliberately divorced themselves from reality, “and advanced towards their enemy hoping to be killed for Allah’s sake, doing so in support of His religion, His Prophet (blessing and peace be upon him), and His allies.” This world, the world which hosts our conscious experience, is rarely the leading concern of those who aim to inflict the most suffering on the most people. With the notable exception of the Oklahoma City bombing, the worst acts of terrorism in our lifetimes have stemmed from allegiance to supernatural authority. In other words: gods.
Orienting Kalashnikovs towards rock & roll fans, young men proclaimed their god’s glory. Innocent women and men slipped out of consciousness on bloodied floors hearing True Believers declare the greatness of the God of Abraham. These faithful – these True Believers – were sadistic and deluded. They deserve our most fierce, ruthless response, and I have no doubt they’ll receive it shortly. However, they are neither vague nor dishonest. In no uncertain terms, these True Believers told us – those of us who value this world and this life – why they kill and what they hope to accomplish.
This morning, my friend Eiynah posed the question I posted below. Unsurprisingly, my thoughts on the subject exceeded 140 characters.
I had been back from Afghanistan for almost a year when my nation killed Osama bin Laden. The story broke on a Sunday night, which I regarded as the height of rudeness considering what an epic weekend would’ve ensued in military towns across the nation. Perhaps that was one of the planning considerations. Few soldiers in my battalion were remotely surprised to learn that bin Laden had been hiding in Pakistan; that was where all our enemies went to rest, to hide, and to prepare.
Nevertheless, finding America’s most wanted criminal and the subject of history’s grandest manhunt well inside Pakistani borders made it nearly impossible to ignore the most blindingly obvious political hypocrisy in lifetime: That the nation who was publicly our most staunch ally in the Global War on Terror was, in fact, perhaps the chief sponsor of our enemies. In scattered and fitful “order”, here are my thoughts on the incident:
Old News. The Afghan/Pakistan border has long been one of the most volatile and “kinetic” regions in the Afghanistan War. To the severe indignation of Kandahar veterans like myself, the most well-known battles in the war have occurred within sight – and often within range – of Pakistan. The Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of northwestern Pakistan only ostensibly exist as a part of the Pakistani nation-state. The region effectively serves as the political and social capital of the Taliban. For the military arm of the Taliban, FATA is a logistical, training, and command hub from which the organization supports their operations in Afghanistan. Correspondence and logistical supplies captured by NATO and Afghan security forces are often regularly marked as being of Pakistani origin. During a “clearance” operation in August 2009, my platoon found a cache of medical supplies helpfully accompanied by neatly printed business cards for a physician in Quetta. My point is this: For a very long time, it’s been very clear that a significant portion of the Pakistani government supports what the Taliban aims to accomplish in Afghanistan. For me and nearly all of the Afghanistan War veterans I know, there was no love lost for the Pakistani government, because nothing but contempt existed in the first place.
Vicarious Jihadists. Pakistan maintains a highly trained, well-equipped modern military. Through the struggle for independence and partition from India, the Pakistani military retained the structure and many of the values of the British military. Furthermore, much of the modern Pakistani officer corps has been educated in the West. The effect of these influences is a secular military serving a fundamentalist government. Many senior leaders in the Pakistani military somehow reconcile the values of a fundamentalist upbringing with lifestyles and politics similar resembling those of some of their more libertine Western peers. Supporting jihad against the faltering “secular” Islamic Republic of Afghanistan is, I speculate, one way they can have their whiskey and their 72 virgins too. A Pakistani infantry officer who enjoyed six months of Atlanta nightlife while attending professional education at Fort Benning is unlikely to be content with reverting to a lifetime of pious self-denial. He’s more likely, I think, to conduct “Vicarious Jihad:” Providing logistical, intelligence, and sometimes operational support to the Godly Young Men fighting infidels in Afghanistan and elsewhere. They provide valuable support to Islamist causes, while not subjecting themselves to Islamist lifestyles. If we accept this characterization of the Pakistani officer corps, it’s unsurprising that bin Laden would find solace and security a few hundred meters from a major Pakistani military base.
No Rest for the Wicked. Killing Osama bin Laden in his home was great. It was wear he felt safe and immune from the most concerted efforts of the world’s most capable military. Killing him in that place, in that manner, felt like what it must feel like to win a war. Of course, that’s probably as close as my generation of American veterans will ever come to such a sensation. Three years after bin Laden’s body was wrapped, weighted, and discarded into the Indian Ocean, the Afghanistan War is far from “won.” The earth still explodes, dawn still breaks with the persistent thud of helicopters, and soldiers still defend remote outposts, guarding against the Taliban, against the heat, and against their own apathy. I cannot predict how long this will persist, or when the Afghan people will finally know peace and normalcy. However, I firmly believe that the longer NATO maintains the fiction that the Pakistani government and military is an ally in that search for peace, the longer it’ll be until it’s realized. Over the past fourteen years, no branch of the Pakistani government has demonstrated a reliable and substantial commitment to the stability of Afghanistan or to crushing the Islamist terrorist organizations that take refuge within her borders. The fact that Osama bin Laden lived in relative comfort and security deep in a part of Pakistan firmly under Islamabad’s control made this abundantly clear. Further skepticism as to the loyalties and alignment of the Pakistani government is, at this point, an exercise in deliberate self-delusion.
As should be apparent by now, I have strong “feelings” on this subject. The Pakistani government’s collusion with the Taliban has deeply affected me and many of my closest friends. Considering as such, I readily admit that my opinions on the topic are deeply biased, and far from objective. That said, I do believe that bin Laden’s refuge in Pakistan is the most compelling evidence we have to date of the current Pakistani government’s loyalties in the global clash between secularism and Islamism.
Acknowledgements: You can find Eiynah’s fun and engaging blog at NiceMangos.Blogspot.com. She’s also very active on Twitter, using the handle @NiceMangos. She uses a pseudonym for reasons that have #NothingToDoWithIslam.
Fierce Humanism 
