Baby Steps
KABUL, Afghanistan — The neighborhood boys shout at Mehboba Ahdyar when she leaves home. "Hero, hero! Look at the hero of our country," they yell at Ahdyar, one of Afghanistan's fastest female runners.
But the boys are not saluting a top athlete. Their sarcastic jabs are meant to poke fun at a teenage girl trying to realize Olympic-sized dreams.
Ahdyar, a 19-year-old middle-distance runner, is the only female on Afghanistan's four-member Olympic team
More ominously, Ahdyar's mother worries about the security situation in the country. Taliban militants often target organizations and individuals who champion women's issues, and the taunting by neighborhood boys — a mere nuisance in other societies — could draw the attention of militant suicide bombers.
There is hope...
Still, the country's athletes might even be inspiring Ahdyar's name-calling neighborhood boys to give sports a second look. After Ahdyar won US$1,000 by coming in first place at a track event held in Afghanistan, Ahdyar said she overheard some of her neighborhood detractors wonder aloud if they shouldn't lace up their running shoes.
"Look at that girl, she won (US$1,000) from running," Ahdyar recalled a boy saying. "Why are we sitting here doing nothing? Let's start running."
I know it isn't much, but this is how you win the war on terrorism. Not some girl running in the Olympics, but the changing of attitudes of the populace. It isn't something that happens overnight. It will take 20-30 years to affect the attitudes of the people. You don't win the parents, you change the children's attitude. They are either the future homicide bombers, or the future supporters of freedom and supporters of American ideals. Small steps.
posted by davis14633 at 06:30
5 Comments:
Or you can make the price of terrorism too high. When somebody commits a terrorist act, you kill everything they know: mother, father, brothers, sisters, wives, children, dogs, cats, cattle... You burn their house to the ground, and you sow salt on the land. If anyone speaks out against your actions, you kill them too, and everybody they know and love. You execute this policy instantly and without exception.
And terrorism stops. Guaranteed.
Sounds harsh, doesn't it? And it is. But that's how an empire works. In fact, it's the ONLY way an empire works. So either we start doing it the right way, or we stop dabbling in foreign adventures. You can't play at imperialism; that just gets good people killed for no good reason.
No matter how much progress appears to have been made, no matter how many little girls win marathons, when we pull out of Afghanistan and Iraq, they will revert to form like a rubber band. That's because the real problem, Islam, hasn't been addressed, let alone sovled. It will still be there, and it will instantaneously re-exert its influence on the population.
Do it right, or don't do it at all. Because I'm tired of watching brother Marines die for a bunch of stinking fucking barbarians who ultimately see us -- ALL OF US -- as nothing more than infidels, to be either converted, enslaved or killed. Because those are the only options their idiotic religion gives them; peaceful co-existence is not a long-term option in Islam, and it never has been. The sooner we wake up and smell the camel dung, the better off we'll be.
And the you become no better than them. Is it your wish to allow them to determine your level of civility, social values, and morality? If so, you need to change your affiliation and loyalty.
"War does not determine who is right - only who is left." Bertrand Russell
Once you annihilate them, you (the people that are left) make the social values, so there is no reason for Jar(egg)head to change his loyalty.
That's like saying defending yourself is a crime. The truth is, the Islamic extremists started this and finaly hitting back in the same manner does not make one as bad as those that start something.
So no, jar(egg)head is not making himself as bad as them with his take on what to do. I understand his stance and realize he may be correct. You need to realize the wisdom that sometimes you have to take a few lives in order to save many. No one likes the idea but sometimes you have to do something that you don't like.
I still hold some small hope, and I think Davis does as well although that's for him to state, that the populace of these areas of the world will see Islam for what it is and leave it behind. For it is only when the populace abandons Islam that things will truely change for the better in the long term. After many years of conflict, it's hard to see this happening but I still feel it's possible. I have never been to the region and jar(egg)head has. For this reason and others I realize that I may be just fooling myself about the posibilities. I hope I'm correct but I've been around long enough to know that jar may have me on this one. And if you think he'll enjoy being correct then you obviously don't know him very well. He has been to war and seen it up close. I don't believe he likes the idea having to use brutality of the type he states. I think it's that he believes it's the only way to eliminate the problem once and for all. And as I stated, he may be correct.
I realize he could reply for himself, and he may, but I get tired of the moral equivalance that tries to say if you kill someone in a defensive action it makes you as bad as the guy who started it.
And the you become no better than them. Is it your wish to allow them to determine your level of civility, social values, and morality?
I am unsure how this mentality got started in the United States. I suspect it may have originated in the counter-cultural and anti-war movements of the 1960s. Where ever it came from, it is both a cause and symptom of how terribly wrong things have gone over the past thirty years. Compare the "no collateral damage" principle of the last 15 years, which is producing no tangible long-term results, with the policies of Curtis LeMay in the 1940s. The contrast is frightening -- even more so when one realizes that what you're really looking at is the decline of the United States as an effective world power.
Let's have ourselves a little theoretical exercise, Mr. Anonymous. Let's say that after the Luftwaffe bombed London, Churchill, Roosevelt, et al had taken the stance that "if we bomb German civilian population centers, we become no better than them." How do you think that would have turned out?
What if General LeMay had decided that firebombing the Tokyo residential zones in order to break the will of the Japanese junta would "allow them to determine our level of civility, social values, and morality."
What if Harry Truman had decided that he didn't have the moral courage to use nuclear weapons on Japanese civilian population centers in order to drive Tojo to the bargaining table? Do you think that would have ended well for the forces of freedom?
Or do you think that maybe -- JUST MAYBE -- all those people understood something that you do not: war is not nice. War isn't playing chase in the desert with a few ragtag ruffians and a CNN camera crew in tow. War has only one goal, and that is the complete and utter annihilation of the enemy's will to fight.
Why do you think Dresden was deliberately and systematically burned to the ground? Why do you think hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians burned to death in their own houses? Because that's how wars are won. Those civilians chose not to dissociate themselves from their aggressive leaders and flee. When they did so, they became tacitly cooperative in their leaders' actions and therefore became targets.
Bombing population centers obviously won't work in the current war, but the principle that drove those policies remains valid. You have to destroy the will of the terrorists to fight -- and perhaps even more importantly, you have to short-circuit the creation of more terrorists. The only way to do that is to make terrorism carry too high a price tag. These are people who don't care about their own lives. They wish to become martyrs. So you have to find some other way to reach them, some way to convince them that blowing up Americans is simply too expensive.
This is not an episode of a television show, nor is it a thorny problem in an ethics course, ready to surrender to the proper line of debate. This is reality. And reality is very ugly, very raw, and completely without mercy. When high-handed moral theory meets reality head-on, guess which one wins?
If you wish to lose everything that makes you free, everything that gives you the very right to postulate such ethical drool and ridiculous relativism, then keep applying it to our military and tying down our government in its ability to fight wars. But don't come crying to me when you're living under Sharia law and the very act of studying another religion will lead to your swift execution. In point of fact, it will not be possible for you to come crying to me, because I'll have already died in a futile attempt to protect your right to spew ethical chaff and peer down your nose at better men than yourself. But I'll happily pay that price, because the alternative would be living side-by-side, under whatever government ends up ruling this country, with people who think that wars are won and freedom preserved by high-minded ideals instead of hard men with hard ways.
Now go crawl back under your emotional blankets and pretend there's nothing wrong in the world except Those Evil Republicans, that everyone will "just get along" when they see the shining castle of your brilliant philosophy, and that destroying forces, societies and organizations which threaten you somehow makes you a bad person. You're free to believe whatever your want; that right has already been earned for you and given to you freely. Just try not to get in my line of fire.
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