A Critical Juncture

So it's come to this. As it has countless times before. Conventional war cannot match the timeless corrective assaults of unconventional warfare. Since time immemorial great armies have been brought down by the resolute determination of a peoples' guerrilla militia. The best-designed, most advanced weaponry, the most regulated professional army simply proves inadequate to stilling the intent of a peoples' militant group capable of melting into the general populace.

It seems pointless to claim honour and sincere concern and compassion - for a people downtrodden and subservient to a rigid fundamentalist authoritarian religion that stifles the human rights of those it insists on the right to control - guides us. We are strangers in a strange land. Afghanistan has been a strange and hostile land to those who sought to invade it for far less humane reason than UN- and NATO-led coalition troops.

Added to the voice of the British ambassador to the country, is that of the chief of the British military, along with the U.S. military commander, still believing that additional troops and equipment will lead the Western coalition out of the bog that has mired it in fruitless attempts to wrest the Taliban from its refuge in the Hindi Kush mountains. Aptly named, translated to 'Hindu Killer', as the traditional perils of traversing the range caused the deaths of many.

In desperately forging ahead to wrest Afghanistan from control of the Taliban, it has given encouragement to the rise of greater numbers of Taliban in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, with brutally relentless suicide and truck-bomb attacks taking place now in both countries. Taliban forces now control roughly one-third of Afghanistan's surface area. Moreover, their rear-guard action and successes have spurred other Islamists to flock to their side.

Foreign fighters from Chechnya, Uzbekistan, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, as well as jihadists from Europe are construing their duty to their fellow Muslims by joining their fight, flooding in over the border from Pakistan into Afghanistan to confront the Infidel armies unjustly doing battle far from their own geographies. Western intelligence point to the fact that foreign fighters in Afghanistan now outnumber those in Iraq.

"Instances stemming from cross-border activities from Pakistan have increased significantly in terms of numbers and sophistication", is the word from UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. He also gave warning of a humanitarian crisis impending through a "perilous food security situation, which is affecting as much as one-sixth of the population and is caused by the current drought, exacerbated by high global food prices and the impact of the conflict on humanitarian access."

Who, among the general population in Afghanistan struggling to make a life for themselves will not blame the presence of foreign troops as bearing responsibility for their diminishing prospects for economic and social advancement? Despite that Taliban fighters attack foreign aid workers, just as they target Afghan schoolteachers, burn down schools, and assassinate female Afghan policewomen; preying on children appears a speciality.

Trouble is, it's the culture, the society, that militant Islam somehow does not seem to discourage them from preying on the vulnerable. Observant Muslims they may be, but they lack basic humanity all too often. The Afghan military and its police appear to take special pleasure in victimizing children. Not only female children, but young boys as well. Rape of boys is common; sexual assaults that can often disfigure children for life, let alone traumatize them beyond repair.

Canadian soldiers have complained of the ongoing sexual abuse of boys by Afghan officers, and have, as a result, been informed they must not intervene. The United Nations special representative for children and armed conflict insists that the Afghan government must enact effective laws to stop the horrible abuse of young boys by government officials, warlords and military personnel. The practise is termed "bacha bazi", translated as "boy play".

It's mind-boggling that a religion practised and held in high honour by over a billion people world-wide, which is said to be a religion of peace and respect for others, rigidly practised so that every facet of the life of a Muslim is informed by tradition and minute observances, yet seems to offer observant Muslims license to practise the most inhumane of abuses against one another.

Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff addressed the U.S. House Armed Services Committee by asserting that Afghanistan is not in need of more boots on the ground. "It needs more trucks on those roads, more teachers in those schools, and more trained judges and lawyers in those courts."

In sum, a complete upheaval of tradition and social values to more adequately reflect the 21st Century. But is this even remotely possible in a war-torn society, an impoverished economy like Afghanistan's?

One that has the government wringing its hands in despair over the certain knowledge that the Taliban represents huge numbers of ordinary Afghans whose fundamentalist Muslim ideals are not reflected in the actions and value structures of the current and unfortunately corrupt government administration. President Hamid Karzai is more than ready to confer with Taliban leaders, but they scorn him as a Western puppet.

The soldiers from the armed forces of 40 countries can do so much, and no more. They cannot forever battle an elusive enemy, supported increasingly by Muslim jihadist warriors from the neighbourhood and geographies beyond. The diplomatic efforts and humanitarian work of foreign countries are capable of performing patchwork remedies that the Taliban will most certainly dismantle at their earliest opportunity.

The country's destiny, unfortunate and miserable as it is, as it has always been, will, in the end, be in the hands of its own people. And the misery of it all is that their own theocratic beliefs will lead them inevitably back into the hands of the Taliban mullahs who utterly reject values not their own, who see nothing amiss in destroying the ancient heritage of other religions, so why would they respect what Westerners claim is the human rights of their own populations?

Women will once again be sequestered, unable to travel unattended by male members of their families and even then will have to be covered by dark burkas, only their eyes visible through the niqab. Women will no longer be able to work out of the home. Girls will no longer attend school.

Boys' education will consist of religious teachings, not secular subjects like science, mathematics and history. Men will be forbidden to go clean-shaven. Music and dance will be forbidden.

Poverty and lack of opportunity will once again clasp the country in the deadly embrace of complementary religious purity. For, as is now reluctantly acknowledged, "we can't kill our way to victory".