Hezbollah Isn't a Model for Afghanistan
Michael J. Totten
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/viewarticle.cfm/hezbollah-isn-t-a-model-for-afghanistan-15256

According to the Washington Post, some White House foreign-policy hands may be willing to call it a day in Afghanistan if the U.S. military can beat the Taliban down into something that resembles Hezbollah. I suppose I can see why this appeals to those who know just enough about the Taliban to think it's possible, and just enough about Hezbollah to think it's desirable.

Hezbollah is moderate and almost reasonable compared with the Taliban. It participates in democratic politics and even conceded the most recent election to Lebanon's "March 14" coalition. Not even its worst fanatics throw acid in the faces of unveiled women as the Taliban does. Its secretary-general, Hassan Nasrallah, doesn't require women to wear headscarves, let alone body-enveloping burkhas, in territory he controls. While the Taliban destroyed ancient Buddha statues in Bamyan with anti-aircraft guns in 2001, the Roman Empire's Temple of Bacchus, where Western imperialists used to hold pagan orgies, remains an unmolested tourist attraction bang in the middle of Hezbollah's Bekaa Valley stronghold. Oh, and Hezbollah hasn't killed any Americans in Lebanon lately.

So, yes, Afghanistan would be a better place if it suffered the likes of Hezbollah instead of the Taliban. But prosecuting a war for that outcome would be bonkers. Hezbollah is an Iranian proxy militia and a Lebanese guerrilla army that starts wars with the country next door and violently assaults its own capital. It's also a global terrorist network with cells on five continents.

Last year, authorities in Azerbaijan arrested Hezbollah operatives who planned to detonate car bombs alongside Baku's Hyatt Tower, where the Israeli, Japanese, and Thai embassies are located. Twenty-two members of an Egyptian Hezbollah cell are on trial right now for plotting terrorist attacks against tourists. A Hezbollah suicide car bomber killed 29 people at the Israeli embassy in Argentina in 1992, and another suicide bomber killed 85 more at a Jewish community center there two years later.

The Iraqi branch of Hezbollah is hardly an improvement over the Taliban. "Hezbollah kills civilians as well as Americans with total disregard for Iraqis," an American soldier told me in Baghdad recently. "I don't know why Hezbollah is so much more ruthless [than Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army militia], but they are."

A senior administration official said the Taliban is "a deeply rooted political movement in Afghanistan" and therefore must be treated differently from al-Qaeda. That's true of Hezbollah in Lebanon, but it's not true of the Taliban. The last thing a senior administration official should want is for it to become true of the Taliban.

Hezbollah isn't popular enough to win an election in Lebanon, not even as part of a diverse coalition of parties from more than one sect. Hezbollah is, however, supported to one extent or another by a majority in Lebanon's Shia community.

The Taliban's popularity, meanwhile, is around 6 percent in Afghanistan. Most Afghans and Pakistanis who submit to its rule do so because they've been conquered. The Taliban doesn't even have popular legitimacy in the ethnic Pashtun community it hails from. It is no more "deeply rooted" than al-Qaeda was in Iraq's Al Anbar.

The fantasy that the Taliban might someday become more like Hezbollah and less like al-Qaeda is based on misunderstandings of all three. Hezbollah isn't half as moderate as some analysts think, and the Taliban is more bound up with al-Qaeda than many of these same people want to admit.

“It’s a fundamental misreading of the nature of these organizations to think they are anything other than partners," Bruce Riedel said of al-Qaeda and the Taliban. President Obama appointed him to lead the overhaul of its policy there between February and April this year. "Al-Qaeda is embedded in the Taliban insurgency, and it’s highly unlikely that you’re going to be able to separate them.”

Of course al-Qaeda is embedded in the Taliban. That's why NATO invaded Afghanistan in the first place. After September 11, 2001, the Taliban was given a choice to arrest and hand over the al-Qaeda leaders on its soil or suffer war, and it chose war.

Because it's bound up with al-Qaeda, it's still a threat to American and European national security. Matthew Levitt at Middle East Strategy at Harvard points out that the Taliban claimed responsibility for a plot to bomb Barcelona's subway system last year and that 11 men arrested in Virginia a few years ago were connected to both the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

Iraq's Sunni Arabs cooperated with Americans to destroy Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's branch of that franchise, not because they became pro-American all of a sudden, but because al-Qaeda violently suppressed their tribal political structure and tried to replace their traditional culture with something alien and totalitarian.

The Taliban are waging the same kind of war against ethnic Pashtuns and their traditional culture in both Pakistan and Afghanistan. "The Taliban systematically destroyed Afghan and specifically Pashtun culture by banning music, the arts and any kind of artistic expression," Dr. S. Amjad Hussain wrote earlier this year after returning to the U.S. from his hometown in Pakistan's Northwest Frontier Province. "For me there is the escape of flying home to America. That can't be said about millions of people who are being terrorized by these self-appointed, self-anointed, uneducated, and uncouth custodians of my faith."

And listen to Farhat Taj, a Pashtun woman from the same area: "I am writing because I am so very fed up with 'experts' in both Pakistan and the West constantly distorting the realities of our people and area. . . . The people living in northwestern Pakistan under Taliban rule are being held hostage. The Taliban terrorists have unleashed a reign of terror on the people, who are not willing to give up their Pashtun culture. They are overpowered by the armed militants. Their lives, livelihood and culture are attacked by the Taliban in league with al Qaeda."

So I have a better idea than trying to transform the Taliban into Hezbollah, which is no more possible than it is desirable. Let's think of the Taliban as al-Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan — which it basically is — and vanquish it as we and the locals did to their brothers in arms in Iraq.


Why Bin Laden Really Turned to Terrorism
The Final Shame: American Female Soldiers
Phyllis Chesler
http://pajamasmedia.com/phyllischesler/2009/10/13/why-bin-laden-really-turned-to-terrorism/

According to the United States Treasury, al-Qaeda now has less money than the opium-enriched Taliban does. But saying so might be dangerous—it might “shame” al-Qaedian fanatics into having to prove us wrong. After all, there are still plenty of oil-enriched Arabs ready to fund both groups.

On the other hand, the women sure are growing restless in the Lands of the Burqa. For example, two female Kuwaiti Members of Parliament, Rola Dashti and Aseel Al-Awadhi, are defying the country’s powerful Islamist movement by refusing to wear hijab, or the headscarf, in Parliament

“You can’t force a woman going to the mall to wear a hijab and you can’t force a woman going to work to wear the hijab,” the MP, Rola Dashti, said. “This is not Iran or Saudi Arabia.”

MP Dashti insists that Kuwait’s constitution grants “freedom of choice and equality between the sexes and does not incorporate sharia.” Nevertheless, a private citizen has filed a lawsuit against the American-educated Dr. Dashti and Professor al-Awadhi for not wearing hijab. The matter will be heard later this month.

Osama bin Laden would not be pleased by naked-faced Muslim women—and in positions of public power. That fact alone might inspire him (and many other Islamic fundamentalists) to acts of terrorism. Here’s why I say so.

A few weeks ago, at this blogsite, I wrote: “Follow the burqa” and you’ll find a fundamentalist household, possibly even a terror cell or two. In my view, those men who demand that women wear shrouds are often the kind of men who might also be terrorists or supporters and funders of terrorism.

Osama bin Laden’s first wife and one of their sons, Omar, have written a Memoir, Growing Up Bin Laden. Although Carmen Bin Laden has also previously written a Memoir (she was married to one of Osama’s brothers, Yeslam), she was not “of the blood.” For a son to go public, exposing his father, and for him to stand by his mother, is unheard of, wondrous, heroic, and quite dangerous.

Growing Up Bin Laden shows us how cruel, weird, misogynist, and tyrannical Osama is both as a husband and a father.

By saying so, I do not mean to reduce evil solely to its psychiatric components or to excuse it. Rather, there is an Islamist culture out there in which such misogyny is normalized and valorized. That culture breeds terrorism. Domestic terrorism, national terrorism, international terrorism. I know: Counter-terrorism experts are not comfortable in talking about psycho-dynamics of family life. They want the specific information that will help them prevent the next act of terrorism.

Allow me to suggest that a psychological or psycho-analytic approach does not mean that a mass murderer and fanatic “gets to walk” away from justice. Understanding the psycho-dynamics of evil does not excuse it; on the contrary. It is one way to understand where it breeds, how it is shaped into human form. Taking a psychological approach does not rule out the equal importance of jihad, fundamentalist Islam, oil economics, geographical, technological and military realities, or the existence of evil. A psychological approach is invaluable in terms of understanding the family dynamics that lead certain men and women to become terrorists, and to support and fund terrorism.

Remember how crazy Mohammed Ata was in terms of his view of women? He imagined that his mortal frame would actually survive the 9/11 incineration intact and he left instructions which demanded that no “unclean” pregnant woman be allowed near his body to prepare it for burial. As I’ve written: “Follow the burqa” and you may potentially find a terror cell and its supporters.

Well—now meet bin Laden, the family man.

According to Dr. Nancy H. Kobrin’s forthcoming book, The Banality of Suicide Terrorism. The Naked Truth About the Psychology of Islamic Suicide Bombings (for which I’ve written the Introduction), I know that when Osama was an infant, his father Mohammed banished his mother, Hamida. Thus, psychologically, Osama was “abandoned” by his mother and neglected by his father who had 56 other children and who died when Osama was 10 years old.

Osama married his first wife, Najwa, when she was 15 and he was 17. Like his mother Hamida, Najwa was also from Syria; both his mother and first wife, Najwa, were reportedly very beautiful, glamorous, active, westernized women.

Thus, the young Osama had to bear the shame of having no mother—and of having a mother who was a fourth “revolving position” wife, who was duly divorced, banished, and known as “the slave.” Osama himself was known as the “son of the slave.” Nevertheless, rather than identify the source of all his misery (his father, Islamic gender apartheid), Osama spent his life yearning for paternal affection and attention which he never really got.

Dr. Kobrin points out that the prophet Mohammed also had a series of similar losses (his mother Amina, his wetnurse, Thueiba, his next mother figure, “Halima,” then back to his mother Amina who died when he was five, his guardian-grandfather, etc.)—and that Mohammed’s genocidal persecution of the Jews began after the loss of his first wife and of the uncle who had reared him.

Back to al-Qaeda’s founder. Osama, the husband, never banished his first wife, Najwa, who, we are told, used to play tennis and paint—but Osama forced her to fully veil, Saudi style. Their wedding? No jokes, no music, no dancing was allowed. Thereafter, Osama never allowed Najwa out of the house except to visit relatives or to move to another house. She lived her life in purdah, in prison. She endured Osama’s marriage to three other women, one of whom she herself chose. She never complained.

Osama did not allow modern medicine for his children; refrigerators were forbidden, as were air conditioners, phones, toys, and televisions. Osama expected his sons to also become suicide killers and he subjected his young children to dangerous and frightening military maneouvers. According to Omar and Najwa, Osama also murdered his children’s pets in chilling ways—ways that characterize many other serial killers.

Once, Osama killed a pet monkey. He had one of his lackeys run it over with a car. Osama said “The monkey was not a monkey but was a Jewish person turned into a monkey by the hand of God.” He gassed a new litter of puppies, Nazi-style, trying to see how long it would take them to die.

But what was it that sent Osama totally over the edge? What compelled him to plan the mass murders of civilians on every continent? Omar tells us. When Osama saw American female troops on Middle Eastern Arab soil, he cried out. “ Women! Defending Saudi men!”

That was the ultimate shame, the only shame that mattered, greater than the shame of having no mother, no father, the shame of being known as the “son of the slave.” Instead of bonding with persecuted women and/or trying to protect them, Osama went the usual psychological route. He subjugated and imprisoned his wives and bonded with his absent father by becoming like him, only more so.

Psychologically, unconsciously, Osama has denied needing to be protected by a strong woman, namely a mother, when he was an infant, and his denial goes so far that he chose to becomes a serial killer, a mass murderer; he specializes in killing life. He is an anti-Mother. Osama takes his rage out on America, Jews, Christians, Israelis because, in his eyes, they have freed their women; indeed, to him, such countries are therefore like women and must be subordinated.

Amazingly, at least one son, Omar, not only fled Afghanistan and his father’s control, he took his mother Najwa out with him. He did so even before 9/11.

Thus, the experience of naked-faced women in positions of power (in the American military or in the Kuwaiti Parliament) as “shaming” men, is one major component of Islamic terrorism. There is no appeasing this misogynist madness. One must stand against it.

President Obama must do everything in his power to help free Middle Eastern women from illiteracy, poverty, forced veiling, forced, arranged marriages to first cousins, polygamy, purdah, etc. Alas, thus far, he has flattered their jailors and crowed about America’s support for the hijab. Perhaps our President should talk to the brave Kuwaiti parliamentarians.