Why We're In Afghanistan
If anything indicates the need for a civilized presence in Afghanistan, it’s the recent slaughter of 10 aid workers by the Taliban.
If anything indicates the need for a civilized presence in Afghanistan, it’s the recent slaughter of 10 aid workers by the Taliban.
Of course, there will be those who will use the atrocity to bolster the theme that foreigners should leave the country immediately – if not sooner.
An out of sight, out of mind sort of thing.
In their way, the Taliban represent a human capacity for evil.
Their excuse – as if they need an excuse – for killing aid volunteers (six Americans, two Afghans, a German and a Brit), is that they were trying to convert Muslims to Christianity.
Nonsense, but apostasy – the rejection of the Islamic faith – is seen by some radical Muslim sects as justification for killing. Other interpretations decree that apostates should be given three days to repent and re-convert to Islam - or be killed.
Still other factions of Islam say that converting is no crime, unless the person attacks his former faith. And so the argument goes, with nothing in the Koran that explicitly demands death for apostasy.
Muhammad is supposed to have decreed that the choice for infidels should be converting to Islam, or paying a tribute, or being put to death. In any case, the Taliban claiming they butchered the aid workers because they were proselytizing for Christianity is a lie, and perhaps an attempt to mitigate their barbarism.
The aid workers were all adults who had made a conscious decision to help their fellow humans. Their leader was Tom Little, an optometrist who’d lived more than 30 years in Afghanistan with his family, even through the Soviet occupation, and the reign of war lords. His sole concern was treating eye diseases, which are rampant in that part of the world.
One of the victims was a dentist who gave up his practice in Colorado to help bring dental care to children. Another was a nutritionist, working to improve the diets of impoverished and malnourished people. One was a nurse. All were humanitarians in the most positive sense of the word – not religious zealots, not hungering to be martyrs, but individuals seeking only to better the lives of people who have very little.
Perhaps their example of goodness and generosity is what provoked the Taliban. Then again, maybe the Taliban tasted blood, in the sense that the Western world is ready to abandon Afghanistan to extremists.
Picking on aid workers specifically is a bit mindful of Algeria in the last days of French rule, when terrorists of the FLN targeted specific groups of Frenchmen in Algiers and Oran – assassinating druggists one day, postal workers another day, bus drivers after that, shop owners in their turn. Every day a different economic group for a bullet fired into the head from an alley.
The war came to Afghanistan because al-Qaeda was centered there before, during and after 9/11. At the time the world didn’t fully realize how cruel and demented the Taliban was. We know now, and for our soldiers to be withdrawn from that country, leaving the people at the mercy of the resurgent Taliban, would make us complicit in advancing evil.
One hopes the Afghan National Army and police can be trained up to a standard that will protect the people from the Taliban in the future.
Otherwise, future massacres of good people seem inevitable.