Rolling Out African Jihad

The Canadian military is resting up and restoring its normal equilibrium in the wake of withdrawing itself from the fire of an unwinnable Islamist civil war in Afghanistan. The intention of NATO and UN-aligned forces to pull out all the stops to help save Afghanistan from itself may have been a noble one, sweeping up after the initial routing of al-Qaeda and the Taliban, but battling the forces of an ancient, entrenched heritage is not that readily achieved.

And certainly not when the country's neighbours are themselves entrenched in a very similar backwater of tribal and religious historical orthodoxy that places basic human needs a far distant concern to the far more immediate needs of war lords, drug kingpins, religious fanatics and murderous tribal antipathies.

Pakistan and Afghanistan, Iran and India, with its immense Muslim minority, need all the help they can muster to somehow, in the future, heave themselves out of the immense canyon of misery, degradation, oppression, war-mongering, sexism and institutional corruption they are mired within. But none of this rescue can be achieved without a concerted and deliberate inner conviction to spur internal action to change.

The presence of external actors, foreign NGOs, diplomats, volunteers and troops can never hope to turn these countries' fortunes around. They must be self-inspired and self-administered, determined to rout the forces of entrenched tribalism, corruption and religious coersion to achieve a liberation for themselves. And there are scant indications that this course is ready to be taken.

And while those countries stagnate in the morass of their faithfulness to the past restraining their enlightened future, North and North-west African nations are succumbing to the very same forces of mind-dulling evisceration of hope for the oppressed, by imposing on those prepared to welcome a new focus on human rights, a deeper extension of the misery they have long struggled against to survive.

The threat inherent in the growing legions of violent jihadists clamouring for a return to the origins of Islam as a conquering ideology of divine force is on the march and like a hydra's head that keeps growing new snarling heads to confound its enemies each time one jihadist militia is put down, two spring up in their place.

The French military went into Mali to rout the Islamists who claimed a sweeping Saharan territory for themselves. Yemen, Somalia, Algeria, Libya have all proven vulnerable, and have surrendered to the reality of becoming breeding grounds for Islamists passing through jihadic training camps. The United States is working in Niger to support troops there against the Islamists.

The brutalizing Boko Haram have established themselves in Nigeria, Cameroon and Mali; their spread is incorrigible, unstoppable. Canada has withdrawn itself from one frying pan into which it got tipped into the fire of Islamist passion of conquest, and has no real desire to embroil itself once again, even as a support for France in Mali. Despite which...

We witness the violent paroxysms of violence and despair from Egypt to Tunisia, Libya to Syria, Somalia to Mali. With the fears of the Gulf States, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia at the outcome of the alliance between Syria, Iran, Lebanon and Iraq as Islam devours its own, shedding its old skin like a moulting snake, to become a serpent of the past.