Rudyard Kipling"
“When you're left wounded on Afganistan's plains and
the women come out to cut up what remains, Just roll to your rifle
and blow out your brains,
And go to your God like a soldier”
General Douglas MacArthur"
“We are not retreating. We are advancing in another direction.”
“It is fatal to enter any war without the will to win it.” “Old soldiers never die; they just fade away.
“The soldier, above all other people, prays for peace, for he must suffer and be the deepest wounds and scars of war.”
“May God have mercy upon my enemies, because I won't .” “The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.
“Nobody ever defended, there is only attack and attack and attack some more.
“It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived.
The Soldier stood and faced God
Which must always come to pass
He hoped his shoes were shining
Just as bright as his brass
"Step forward you Soldier,
How shall I deal with you?
Have you always turned the other cheek?
To My Church have you been true?"
"No, Lord, I guess I ain't
Because those of us who carry guns
Can't always be a saint."
I've had to work on Sundays
And at times my talk was tough,
And sometimes I've been violent,
Because the world is awfully rough.
But, I never took a penny
That wasn't mine to keep.
Though I worked a lot of overtime
When the bills got just too steep,
The Soldier squared his shoulders and said
And I never passed a cry for help
Though at times I shook with fear,
And sometimes, God forgive me,
I've wept unmanly tears.
I know I don't deserve a place
Among the people here.
They never wanted me around
Except to calm their fears.
If you've a place for me here,
Lord, It needn't be so grand,
I never expected or had too much,
But if you don't, I'll understand."
There was silence all around the throne
Where the saints had often trod
As the Soldier waited quietly,
For the judgment of his God.
"Step forward now, you Soldier,
You've borne your burden well.
Walk peacefully on Heaven's streets,
You've done your time in Hell."
On Friday, the courageous Iranian dissident Masih Alinejad, whom the Islamic Republic recently tried to kidnap in New York and take back to imprisonment, torture, and death in Tehran, posted a video on Twitter of a young Afghan woman. As the tears fall down her face, the woman says: “We don’t count because we were born in Afghanistan. I cannot help crying. I have to wipe my tears to be able to film this video. No one cares about us. We’ll die slowly in history. Isn’t it funny?”
No, it’s as tragic as this woman feels it to
be, and the reason why it is happening gets right to the heart of why
the American mission in Afghanistan failed so completely, and left young
women such as the one in this video without anyone to defend them from
the Taliban.
The woman in the video is not wearing a hijab, which gives the
immediate impression that she is not an observant, Sharia-adherent
Muslim.
"We don't count because we're from Afghanistan. We'll die slowly in history"
Tears of a hopeless Afghan girl whose future is getting shattered as the Taliban advance in the country.
My heart breaks for women of Afghanistan. The world has failed them. History will write this. pic.twitter.com/i56trtmQtF
Political and military realities that are rapidly changing now
may have obscured the fact for her, but this woman is not being
abandoned now. She was abandoned years ago, in one of the foremost
mistakes of our two-decade-long series of mistakes in Afghanistan.
In our early years in Afghanistan, once the Taliban was toppled, we
set about nation-building, initially with an eye toward establishing a
Western-style constitutional republic in Afghanistan. But State
Department foreign policy experts drastically underestimated the Afghan
people’s attachment to Islamic law (Sharia), and disastrously discounted
Sharia’s political aspects in the naïve belief, fueled by Islamic
apologists in the U.S., that Islam was a religion of peace that was
perfectly compatible with Western secular models of governance.
The opposition to Sharia quickly gave way to their desire to be
culturally sensitive. The Melbourne Forum on Constitution Building noted in 2018 that
“most of the external actors, including the United States, American
church groups and the United Nations, initially attempted to marginalise
the role of Islam and Sharia in favor of liberal rights and freedoms.
However, understanding that Islam and Sharia are entrenched parts of
Afghan constitutional culture, foreign advisers such as Yash Ghai and
Barnett Rubin, who were directly involved in the drafting process
convinced external assistance providers to stand aside and leave Afghans
to make choices on these sensitive constitutional questions.”
And so the Afghan Constitution that
Afghanistan’s then-President Hamid Karzai formally ratified on January
26, 2004, begins “in the name of Allah, the Most Beneficient, the Most
Merciful” and is written in the name of “We the people of Afghanistan,
believing firmly in Almighty God, relying on His divine will and
adhering to the Holy religion of Islam.” The Constitution notes its
appreciation for the “jihad and just resistance of all the peoples of
Afghanistan.” It declares that “Afghanistan shall be an Islamic
Republic, independent, unitary and indivisible state,” and that “the
sacred religion of Islam is the religion of the Islamic Republic of
Afghanistan.” The significance of this is spelled out explicitly: “No
law shall contravene the tenets and provisions of the holy religion of
Islam in Afghanistan.”