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Peters on CIA massacre
(Note: this entry, concerning Peters’s January 4 New York Post column, was drafted before I read today’s New York Times article revealing that the suicide bomber was a Jordanian.) In a rare Ralph Peters column that is interesting and useful and not a spilling of bitter anger against the universe, he makes the point that the jihadists understand us, but we don’t understand them. (I would add that our liberal ideology absolutely prohibits our understanding them, because if we understood them, it would be the end of our liberal vision of humanity and thus of our very identity.) The Taliban, says Peters, know that we’re into trusting people, indeed that our whole policy of improving the Afghan security capability depends on “building up trust” between Afghans and ourselves and between Afghans and Afghans. And this provides the Taliban with the opening to kill us from within, as in the recent suicide massacre of CIA employees at a remote CIA base by an Afghan CIA agent. Peters says numerous similar attacks have been going on for the last year; I’m not aware of that, but here in the December 30 Los Angeles Times is the story of one such attack by an Afghan soldier on U.S. troops.
However, it’s even worse than what Peters says. The problem is not just that our naive American trust gives jihadists the opportunity to make friends with us and then mass murder us from within; it’s that even after they make friends with us and mass murder us from within, we still won’t get it. We’ll continue on as before. Why do I say this? For the reason just referred to. Evidently there have been several surprise murderous attacks on U.S. forces by supposed Afghan allies over the last year, and that hasn’t stopped the U.S. forces from continuing to work cheek by jowl with the Afghans. Meaning that our willingness to let our enemies (whom we persistently imagine to be our friends) continue to kill us has already gone beyond a Monty Python level of parody. Why should the mass murder of CIA officers at base Chapman teach us that we can’t trust Muslims, if we haven’t already learned that? Email entry |