generalspeaking

Peaceful Reconciliation

Love and war, it has been said, are very close in emotional nature. Perhaps that was meant on the micro-scale of human one-on-one interactions. Say, for example, in close interpersonal relations when emotions that once expressed love for the other suddenly reversed to the sister-emotion of hatred. On the other hand, it's not that uncommon in human history for violently opposing ideological-political groups to come to a common understanding, eschew past violence and form a ruling alliance.

It's just a bit of an emotional stretch to envision a reasonable political entity such as that of Afghanistan's current government accepting a potential alliance with the strident, bloodstained jihadist ideals of their Islamist counterparts, inviting them to a bargaining table where they might iron out their 'differences'. As though that might be possible. Jihadists don't tend to compromise; they have a habit of insisting on complete surrender.

Surrender to the inevitable, that if they are brought back into the fold, they will envelope the fold into their version of sharia-led Islamism, taking the country back to its traditional medieval mode of societal, theist-led governance. Totalitarian in nature, brooking no interference with their rigidly unforgiving treatment of those whose values might wish to include other influences.

Yet here is President Hamid Karzai, who is continually on bended knee in the United Nations, visiting NATO countries, asking that his country not be abandoned to the ravages of the resurgent Taliban. Mr. Karzai has extended a hand of understanding, of peace, to the leader of the Taliban. Mr. Karzai knows his country and his countrymen, acknowledging that fundamentalism is burned deep into the psyche of his population.

President Karzai has revealed that "A few days ago, I called upon their leader, Mullah Omar, and said, 'My brother, my dear, come back to your homeland, come and work for the peace and good of your people and stop killing your brothers'." The Taliban has been extended a guarantee of goodwill from the Afghan government, and protection from the very international forces he beseeches stay there and protect.

"They should come back and not be afraid of the foreigners. I will stand in front of the foreigners", he said. How very noble. How very conflicted. Which is it to be, after all? The ongoing presence of the foreign troops, so essential to the present continuation of Afghanistan as a slowly emerging quasi-democracy, or a return to the former Taliban reign so ruinous to the emotional, the economic, the social fabric of the country?

Well, it has been revealed that the British ambassador to Afghanistan in confidential conversation with his French counterpart, discussing the possible future of the country, gave his opinion that the war was effectively done with, over, finished. Nothing more that the combined goodwill and sacrifices of the foreign governments and their military missions could accomplish.

Afghanistan should be left to itself, to straighten out its needs and priorities. The country should be encouraged to make representation between its goals and that of the Taliban, reach an agreement to power share. As though. Yet an intermediary has been appointed, none other than Saudi Arabia, in the hopes that the Taliban might be amenable to reason and re-orientation of their goals and past practices.

Saudi Arabia, apart from being the initiator of a virulently-fundamentalist, anti-Western brand of Wahhabist Islam that gave birth to al-Qaeda and by extension ideologies such as the Taliban, has itself had some experience and presumably some successes, in re-orienting jihadists intent on exterminating the royal Saud family. They believe in reconciliation and re-education.

Violent jihad is permissible when it occurs, evidently, in non-Muslim lands. When it rears its blood-soaked head in Islamic nations, it is a sinful enterprise, an assault against Islam and its traditional values. Peace, of a peculiar type, may ensue after all, between the current Afghan administration and the Taliban, who knows? The peace of utter capitulation, perhaps.

But there will be sacrifices. There are always scapegoats, those who bear the perennial brunt of anger. Islam, despite protestations to the contrary, in certain cultural, traditional milieus, is unmistakably, tragically, misogynistic.

Courageous women like Malalai Kakar, the recently murdered Afghan high-ranking police officer whose specialty was the legal protection of Afghan women in a violent society, will once again be relegated to silence, the hearth, childbearing and black burkas.

Their daughters will be denied education and opportunity. Their sons will be taught Islamic precepts interpreted by rude mullahs. History repeated.

Labels: Societal Failures, Troublespots

posted by Pieface @ Wednesday, October 01, 2008