Afghanistan Is Saying Goodbye

When will we get the message? We don't belong there. Many of our soldiers are either Christian zealots, or clueless about the Muslim society in which they're posted. They shouldn't be dying there.

Long ago, in India, there were a bunch of boys, playing a chase game in one of the large markets in Ahmadabad, in Gujarat. Some of the boys were Hindu; others were Muslim. One of the Hindu boys, running through a tiny Muslim bookseller's stall, accidentally knocked a Quran off a shelf; it fell to the ground. That simple mishap started Hindu-Muslim riots that lasted for weeks, and resulted in over a thousand dead.

Muslims in Ahmadabad are urban sophisticates compared to Muslims in Afghanistan. Islam, unfortunately, has never had a Reformation, so its culture is more like the era of the Catholic Inquisition, at the cusp of Europe's modern era, when The Faith was under siege by the Protestant Reformation. In Islam, the besiegers are secular westernizers, and maybe, missionizing Protestants, like American soldiers.

That is the context: the Quran is hallowed by Muslim believers the way the Bible was treated in Medieval Christian Europe, the way the Talmud was viewed in Medieval Judaism. Is it any wonder that Americans are being killed for the intentional burning of many Qurans on a refuse pile outside America's largest, most notorious prison for Afghan terror suspects?

Yes, intentional. Generals and our President have tried to apologize, and have tried to mollify, by claiming the burning was a mistake, but it wasn't a mistake: the burning was intentional. Terror suspects, to communicate with each other, had written notes in the Qurans, according to early accounts. They had also used them to promulgate jihadist messages. In a war like this, the Qurans had to be destroyed.

American soldiers burning the Qurans may or may not have known that they shouldn't broadcast what they were doing, but it's hard to conceal burning sacks of Qurans, when you have Afghans working with you.

Two Americans, working in the inner sanctum of the Interior Ministry, advisors to the Afghan security forces at the highest level, were shot dead by Afghans, probably incensed by the burning Qurans. Other Americans, more exposed, have also been killed. If Americans can be shot behind Interior's layers of security, there is nowhere they can be safe if Afghans are present. So, Americans are confined to their bases. There are riots, protests and killings all over Afghanistan.

So, what does that tell us but: we don't belong there. We never did. The Soviets discovered the same thing in the 1980's, helped, ironically, by our allies, the mujahedeen, who have transmogrified into our enemies: the Taliban.

Afghanistan was the end of the Soviet Empire; it could well be the end of the American Empire, as well. Can we withdraw gracefully, the way the British did after their second try in 1880, or will we be driven out like the Soviets?

Occupy Poughkeepsie Comes Home

Well, a few of its members, who were evicted in the cold, rainy early morning hours when everyone was trying to sleep: 3:30 to be precise. The City had issued eviction notices last week, but when 200+ people showed up to support the Occupiers, the police stood down. They waited and planned patiently. Wednesday morning early, when only about seven Occupiers were onsite, sleeping, at the occupied park, the police came, announced that all of them had to leave and tore down their encampment. They also confiscated all their equipment: blankets, sleeping bags, tarps, anything the seven didn’t immediately grab and carry with them.

The Occupiers were in shock.

We got a call in the morning: could we pick up some of them, since we'd offered a place for them to rest and recuperate. When we went down to the library, where several were waiting, only one man decided to come with us.

It was interesting to get to know him a little. He's in his early 40's, has traveled all over the world, lived in intentional communities, graduated in Sociology, done academic work in Germany and had just been thrown out by his mother; he's also divorced. He doesn't have a job, and finds it difficult to look for one without a phone or a computer. He's obviously bright, thoughtful and very lost.

One of the other Occupiers was younger, hoarse from shouting, and apparently a bit off in the head. He stayed behind to hold signs at the site of the eviction, but had just been downloading something on a library computer about which his colleague remarked: "He claims he can make a billion dollars from it."

While Abe was older and needed a rest, the younger man was bursting with energy, and couldn't leave.

The Occupiers were anything but the stereotyped "dirty hippies," and their occupation had turned the park into a community meeting place, instead of a drug market, its previous incarnation. Crime rates in the area reportedly went down. Yet the police had to evict them, or rather, the City Manager decided that they had to go.

This isn't a meaningful sample of Occupiers. But still, it illustrates something that the Occupy movement exemplifies: the terrible waste of human talent and energy created by our economic and political system. I've seen this before, when I worked in prison. The men I got to know both in nonviolence workshops and in my college classes were bright, engaged, high energy, but barely literate. If they had gotten adequate schooling, what a resource they would have been! Instead, they were costing the State over $40,000 a year.

Maybe empires--Roman, British, Soviet, American--are lost because such people are squandered and thrown away. The OWS is in search of a different solution, where everyone is valued. I hope they/we can find it.