Commonly, the laws of war in Judaism are understood through the categories of milchemet mitzvah (commanded or holy war) and milchemet r'shut (optional war). These two categories-supplemented at times by the category of milchemet hovah (obligatory war), are helpful in outlining the acceptable and/or unacceptable practices of deploying violence on a massive scale. This is usually the first place that people turn to when trying to think about Jewish notions of just and unjust war.

I want to argue that this specific body of halachah or Jewish law is irrelevant to the contemporary discussion. To find moral insight about the justice of war in the Jewish tradition, one must turn to a less well trod part of the halachic field. A more technical and, in certain ways, legally more sophisticated halachic discussions reveals that these parts of halachah are embedded in a (by definition) particularistic and, at times, chauvinistic tradition. Yet, it is possible to extract a halachic claim from its particularist context by embracing rather than ignoring the specifics of that context.[2]

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In 1812, Napoleon Bonaparte of France, head of the largest army in the world, began the worst military campaign in history. His ill-fated and tragic invasion of Russia led to nearly two thirds of the French army getting killed. The effects of the doomed maneuver were so long-standing that France never again recovered its military potency. Senator Barack Obama recently stated that if he's elected president the US will engage in a military maneuver just as foolish.

Within Senator Obama's recent pronouncements on Iraq is an ominous and troubling prescription about the small land-locked country of Afghanistan. The proposal involves sending "at least" two additional combat brigades to support the 50,000 NATO troops already present in Afghanistan. He goes on to ask for more helicopters, more nonmilitary assistance, and more intelligence gathering.

All of this, in Senator Obama's eyes, is supposed to suggest his greater military aptitude; his attempt to show that he will finish the job -- capturing Bin Laden and defeating the Taliban -- that his Republican predecessor was unable to finish. It is also a lot of politics, because increasing troop presence in Afghanistan allows Obama to say that he supports troop withdrawal from Iraq without appearing like the "surrender monkey" that the Republican opposition will inevitably try to paint him as around election time.

Yet Senator Obama's proposal is one of the worst military ideas in recent history. Here is why:

Afghanistan is considered the "graveyard of empires." Shortly after 9/11, in his 2001 Foreign Affairs essay, Milton Bearden, the CIA station chief in Pakistan in the 1980's, stated that unless the US proceeded with caution it would end up "on the ash heap of Afghan history."

The list of emperors and nations that have tried to hold Afghanistan is long and there is not a single success story. The Soviet Union spent ten years there, with helicopter gunships and tactical nuclear weapons, and failed. The British Empire spent nearly a hundred years trying to alternatively invade and control Afghanistan and veritably failed at both. The Ottoman Empire, which considered itself the inheritor of Roman power, never bothered with Afghanistan. In fact, they were actually dealt crippling blows by invaders from Afghanistan. In the seventh century, even the heaving Arab armies that had been able to take over then world power Persia in a mere five years after the death of Muhammad were unable to take Afghanistan. For Afghanistan to become Muslim more than a hundred years later it took a local ruler from within, and even then power was not centralized in one man. In other words, Senator Obama is setting the US up for failure of world-historical proportions.

Unfortunately most American policy makers don't quite understand the difficulty associated with holding Afghanistan because they think that successful invasion is tantamount to a successful occupation. That, of course, is the same tragedy that befell everyone from the Soviets to the armies of Muhammad. Afghanistan allows itself to be invaded. It doesn't allow itself to be held. Testament of this lies in the fact that it has now been seven years since the US military entered Afghanistan and yet just the other day an American base was actually infiltrated and 9 marines were killed. It will only get worse.

The reasons that Afghanistan is impossible to hold have to do with geography. Because of its centralized and landlocked location insurgents can disappear into any number of neighboring countries and use them as a base to launch attacks on the occupier. These days the base of insurgent operation are the tribal areas of Pakistan. Even if, miraculously, the US is able to clean out the tribal areas - an operation to which no sane Pakistani politician or military dictator would agree - it would simply mean that the Taliban would move to another one of the neighboring countries. It could be Turkmenistan or Tajikistan or most likely, Uzbekistan, which is now, as the noted journalist Ahmed Rashid pointed out in his aptly titled book Descent Into Chaos, producing militants at an alarming rate.

It would perhaps behoove Senator Obama to look at some of the ways the current Afghan insurgency uses the Afghan geography to its advantage:

- Recently US and UK forces captured one stash of Taliban heroin worth nearly two billion dollars going out from an Iranian port.

- Before that, an investigation by the Independent UK discovered that the Taliban are going to the northern border to purchase weapons directly from the Russians.

- Simultaneously an investigation by the NYTimes revealed that the Taliban have taken control of the marble mines in Pakistan's tribal areas.

All this doesn't even include any mention of the vast number of foreign fighters that come to Afghanistan from across the world, using the countless entry points into the country.

Historically, issues of geography have perhaps been at forefront of any military planning with respect to Afghanistan, but with Senator Obama, they barely register.

For someone who previously disparaged the Iraq war as a "dumb war" and a "rash war" his suggestions about increasing troop presence in Afghanistan is a mistake. It is the sort of thing that led Napolean Bonaparte to destroy France.

But perhaps the only thing worse than Senator Obama's ideas are those of Senator McCain. No doubt dueling with his opponent, he recently announced that under his plan the US will commit even more troops to Afghanistan than it would under Senator Obama's plan. Such breathless scheming taking place by the leading presidential contenders will lead to disaster.

Getting bogged down in Afghanistan would be infinitely worse for the national interest than any Iraq.

More than a year before 9/11, veteran journalist and author Ahmed Rashid, wrote a book called Taliban. It described the rampant extremism in Afghanistan and asked the US to consider an immediate nation-building intervention. That warning went ignored --- with disastrous results.

His recent book, Descent Into Chaos: The United States and the Failure of Nation Federally Administered Tribal Areas Of Pakistan: Not really administered by PakistanBuilding in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia, is informed by nearly a decade observing and evaluating US policy in south and central Asia, and finding it baffling. Bin Laden is still free; the Taliban are expanding into Pakistan and Afghanistan; despite the increasing number of terrorists with verifiable links to the Federally Administrated Tribal Areas in Pakistan, nothing is being done to address the underlying issues there; and no one is paying any attention to Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Tukmenistan and Uzbekistan, despite the fact that these countries exhibit many of the same (and some unique) characteristics that led to problems in Pakistan and Afghanistan. None of these developments, in Rashid's reckoning, was inevitable. Mishandling and misjudgment by the Bush administration has abetted and enabled various ills that make the world unsafe. American failure to comprehensively defeat terrorism is America's own fault.

According to Rashid, the Bush administration's decision to project its power in Mesopotamia, at the cost of not attending to far more urgent issues in south and central Asia, is among the greatest strategic blunders any American president has made. Shifting the theater so quickly and suddenly after the invasion of Afghanistan --- for example, US troops that liberated Qandahar from the Taliban were moved to Iraq within three months --- led the US to outsource its job of eliminating terrorism to a disingenuous dictator in Pakistan and a still inchoate Afghan democracy. Both led to disastrous results. Pakistan's General Musharraf and ISI either turned a blind eye to terrorists or tried to co-opt them to advance their own agendas, while a better than token investment in nation-building in Afghanistan --- which would have cost a pittance compared to the war in Iraq --- could have stemmed many of the wounds that festered into security crises today. Instead, the US abandoned Afghanistan, thereby allowing the Taliban to mount a powerful insurgency that will cost huge quantities of money and human life to roll back.

Such errors of grand strategy were compounded by smaller-scale but non-trivial errors. As a Pakistani citizen who traveled widely throughout central Asia, Rashid can testify first-hand to the practical consequences of America's rubbishing and violations of the Geneva Convention, the imperial language of its officials; unnecessary maligning of the religion of Islam, and the usurpation of the State Department's customary prerogatives by Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon --- which played a direct causal role in the collapse of any serious commitment to nation-building well before any US soldiers touched down in Afghanistan.

Yet Rashid did not write this book to admonish. He is genuinely disturbed by the perpetuation of terrorist power, not to mention the continuing paucity of liberty, economic opportunity, and human rights that citizens of South and Central Asia face daily. His positive proposals for American policy are extensive in range, thoroughly grounded empirically, and ought to be required reading by members of the American foreign policy community.

I'll focus on just one of his positive suggestions. Rashid traveled through FATA --- Pakistan's Federally Administrated Tribal Areas --- with a Pashtun guide. He describes the region as "terrorism central," and not only the near certain secret redoubt of not only Osama Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, but also the base of operations of numerous terrorists and terror suspects spread throughout the world, whose identities Rashid lists. He argues that there are two possible ways of dealing with the threats based in FATA. The first is dispatching a military force to defeat the militants in an outright confrontation. This option has slim odds of success; the Pakistani military already tried it and failed, and external invaders are even less likely than Musharraf's army to have the requisite tactical and political support to succeed.

The second option --- the viable one --- highlights the indispensability of Rashid's book. FATA is one of those hinterlands of the globe that suffered through the transition from ethnic tribalism and economic feudalism to a nation-state paradigm. The literacy rate there is only 17% (3% for women!), there are no economic, opportunities, no legal system apart from an arbitrary mish-mash of tribal decision-making nominally supplemented by a statutory scheme inherited from the British Raj, and no educational system apart from whatever the mullahs could provide. There have never been political parties, much less a political culture, in the region. FATA exists outside of the sphere of international law and outside of the reach of the governments Kabul and Islamabad, its only political order the spiritual thrall of extremist religious leaders and the brute force of warlords. who use intimidation to impose themselves. In other words, it is the absolutely ideal sanctuary for al Qaeda and other stateless criminals gangs --- even better, arguably, than al Qaeda's other sometime homes in Somalia, Sudan, Afghanistan, and since the American invasion, Iraq).

Clearly, therefore, an effective means of shutting down terrorism in south and central Asia is to integrate regions like FATA into the international economic community. And indeed, Rashid notes that there were proposals in recent years for a referendum in FATA which would have allowed it to either become an independent province associated with Pakistan or choose to become part of the NWFP province. Naturally, those entreaties were shunted aside by Musharraf, the man the Bush administration foolishly treated as their number one counter-terrorist.

The US could begin to address to the challenge of FATA today by reviving discussion about FATA's provincial status with the democratic parties now in power in Pakistan, who are completely befuddled by the problem of what to do with the region, and are passively allowing the tribal leaders there to extend Sharia law over secular legal opposition.

That proposal for FATA is only one of many constructive ideas in Descent Into Chaos. Rashid's long-standing relationships with the leading political figures of south and central Asia, his fluency with US policy, and his decades-long experience with the region, make the a necessary resource for anyone interested in the post 9/11 world. It should be slipped onto the essential reading lists of the foreign policy experts advising John McCain and Barack Obama.

Looking back on this era of history, the gravest threat of the hour will probably not be understood to be Islamic extremism or Western neoliberalism, or whatever one's preferred party-fashionable bogeyman might be. It will likely be certain strains of Western philosophy.

Ian Buruma and Paul Berman have been among the most prominent figures who have tried to show the connection between Islamic radicalism and it's having absorbed ideas from European thinkers, although Stephen Schwartz has out-muscled both of them in his explication of the historical and ideological debt that modern Islamic radicalism owes to that infamous people of the Najd. Islamism doesn't stand a chance in the long run because depraved nihilistic movements always burn themselves out. The question is only how much ground they'll gain and how much damage they'll do before then (no small matter in view of the power of 21st century weapons technology). The ears their claims fall upon and the responses of the societies they attack and wish to destroy play a large part in determining the course of events. As one can quickly gather from reading Anja Havedal's review of Afghan Women by Elaheh Rostami-Povey in this month's issue of Democratiya, the particular Western incarnations of philosophy that inform certain current understandings of multiculturalism are poisoning "Western" minds just as much as the screeds of kaffir beheaders are infecting the minds of Muslims.

According to Havedal, Rostami-Povey thinks that just about every effort to help women in Afghanistan is a failure and/or a ploy disguising colonialist arrogance and avarice in the cloak of rights and freedom. But what's nonsense in all the talk about us and them, Western and non, is that while Elaheh Rostami-Povey claims that "an alien imperialist culture and prefabricated identity wrapped in the rhetoric of 'security, development, women's liberation and democracy' has [sic] been imposed on Afghan women and men alike" she herself speaks as one educated in the halls of British academe. Her CV is impressive: a BSc in Applied Economics (University of East London), an MA in Agrarian Studies (University of Sussex), and a PhD from the Open University. According to Rostami-Povey's view of things, she is herself imposing the philosophical insights of Western thinkers on Afghan women.

Culture is a notion that only has meaning through alienation or distance from one's way of life--the kind of alienation experienced in modern multicultural societies. Much widespread understanding of the moral evils of imperialism derive from the European-American experience of having been imperialists. The critique of imperialism most preferred by academics to this day was hatched by a German Jew steeped in the work of the monumental German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel. So when Rostami-Povey mounts her high horse of anti-imperialism and cultural preservation, shall we accuse her of making Afghan women Hegelians or Marxians? Individualistic self-determination, one could argue, is decidedly a product of European political philosophy, and the modern understanding of authenticity from Trilling to Taylor is American and Canadian, respectively. Isn't Rostami-Povey's argument just an imposition of a tapestry of "Western" ideas?

One doubts that she would welcome this critique. Certainly Rostami-Povey believes that Afghan women deserve a certain quality of life that is universally appreciated by our species. Freedom from war, loss, starvation, coercion, and suffering. This was precisely the political project from Hobbes onward, to see that humans improve their lot beyond the short, brutish one it has potential to be. But was Hobbes unique? Muhammad was himself a sort of political philosopher and conflict resolver proposing a way of organizing life both personal and political so that suffering might be decreased and goodwill promoted. More likely, these figures spoke in different places to the same need.

But Afghanistan is one of the most recently converted majority Muslim countries in what can only rightly be described as an Islamic empire. Prior to the arrival of Islam, and in many ways even after, Afghans adhered to centuries-old patriarchal tribal traditions. So when Rostami-Povey insists that Afghan women should be allowed to " struggle against local male domination in their own way and according to their culture," to which 'culture' can she possibly be referring if she hopes to maintain an ethic of anti-imperialism and women's rights?

People like Rostami-Povey must decide whether they believe it is a universal good that women be free and persons have a right to self-determination. If she does, then she must also accept that Western philosophers' ideas were not ethnically bounded, but considerations of human beings attempting to create what used top be called in less relativistic times "the good life." Those ideas are no more culturally specific than is the basic need to live free of the horror that Afghan women have been experiencing for centuries under male, Soviet or Islamist domination. Instead, she suffers from the cancer in Western philosophy--the popularization of two absurd notions in particular. One, that the preservation of culture is an end in itself, even if that culture espouses ideas that are inimical to the good life; and two, that quest for the good life is a conceit to be replaced by instating the regime relative values. That regime is, by Rostami-Povey's standards, a German (read: Nietzschian) one. I prefer to say it's just a bad idea.

Her system of designations is undesirable. That regime is, according to the standards of anyone interested in bettering of the lives of others, at best a hindrance and at worst a recipe for the kind of liberal nihilism, despair and self-hatred that will say when thousands of its countrymen die at the hands of illiberal murderers, 'We deserve it.' But in Afghanistan, it makes the best the enemy of the good, positing failure due to the 'self interest' part of enlightened self interest. It declares the messy business of aid a fiasco where there are instead some lives improving, even if not all at the rate and to the degree that Rostami-Povey--and any decent person, I might add--would like to see.

“This was supposed to be the good war,” goes the current liberal meme on Afghanistan. The implication being that Iraq was catastrophic from the get go, but now American hubris has turned the righteous battle in Afghanistan sour as well.

The thing is, if you check the old liberal memes you’ll have a doozy of a time figuring out when they considered Afghanistan the good war.

In October of 2001 I found myself in Greenwich Village having to maneuver through a thousand-strong herd of marchers with fake gashes and grim reaper outfits. The season, the costumes, and the neighborhood suggested New York’s annual Halloween parade. The placards about secret oil pipelines, Israel, and impeachment tipped me off that this was something genuinely spooky. I was in the middle of the first wave of liberal response to the good war.

Here’s a sort of "human interest" piece from The New York Times on the Afghan campaign 24 hours after it began:

Many people expressed a passionate worry that American soldiers were about to become bogged down in an endless pursuit, even though they supported that effort. And others grieved openly for the inevitable deaths of innocent men, women and children beneath the bombers, as if their losses would only compound the thousands of American deaths.

[ . . .]

Some even took to the streets to parade their concerns, joining previously scheduled peace marches in several cities. At a march in Philadelphia sponsored by the American Friends Service Committee, Bal Pinguel, the group's coordinator of peace building, said the bombing would only add to the number of innocent people killed in the entire event. But, Mr. Pinguel added, ''I believe that bin Laden should be brought to justice.'

Hundreds of protesters also joined a candlelight march in Chicago against the bombings, saying war was not the proper response to terrorism.

Well, okay. They’re just reporting what they see. But this is from a New York Times opinion piece the same day:

Never before has the United States launched a military campaign against such an elusive and hydra-headed foe, with so little clarity about precisely how it will prevail.

[. . .]

The word ''war'' has been widely used in the last three weeks, by ordinary folk as well as politicians. War, whether conventional or unconventional, is an enterprise in which one side kills members of the other, and the other side does likewise, until one cannot continue, but it is by no means clear that the country has thought this through in its first reaction to Sept. 11.

Osama bin Laden, the suspected terrorist leader, made it clear once again, on videotape, that he would not back off. The tape, date uncertain, was broadcast on Arabic satellite television. He challenged the allied efforts to picture him as a renegade who has corrupted the teaching of his faith, describing the American war against him as a war against Afghanistan and Islam. As long as it continues, he promised, Americans ''will never taste security.

And then, what I assume counts as support: “Still, the coalition is remarkable, and in certain ways it seems to have the makings of the New World Order about which George Bush the elder used to speak.”

Remarkable indeed.

We know where the coverage and commentary has gone since. Every spring we’re told the Taliban is “bigger than ever,” and then, when the rag-tag group of mountain fighters is taken out by the end of each summer we don’t hear a word about it. We were told that Hamid Karzai is merely the mayor of Kabul, but when Afghans elected they’re first female governor silence reigned.


You’d have no idea that there are many reasons to be encouraged about the continuing struggle for freedom in Afghanistan. There is much good news about the good war, and much of it has nothing to do with war itself. Here are some choice examples:

Criminal Justice
When an Afghan Christian convert faces death for apostasy it’s front page news. Here’s something that’s not. Since 2003, the New York based International Legal Foundation has established six offices throughout Afghanistan. The ILF has made slow if steady headway mentoring Afghan lawyers, and progressing toward the establishment of a viable judicial system in the country.

Technology
Hate your cellular service? Try Afghan Wireless. Just a few days ago the company announced ”the completion of a 2,500km STM1 microwave ring, which passes through 18 provinces. The new backbone connects cities including Mazar, Takhar, Badakshan, Kunduz, Kabul, Kandahar and Spinboldak.” This gets rid of the formidably high cost of satellite time. Widespread cheap cellular service is a massive step toward modernity.

Natural Resources
One enormous hurdle facing Afghanistan is that its main natural resource, poppy seeds, has been outlawed. Well, what if the country had another? It does. Nature News reports that a copper deposit, called Aynak has resources worth an estimated $30 billion dollars. “What happens at Aynak could eventually serve as a model for developing Afghanistan's other natural resources, ranging from mineral wealth to reserves of coal and petroleum.” The World Bank is now involved in the potential bidding process.

A sober, but hopeful, must-read by Ann Marlowe in The Wall Street Journal details several other signs of progress.

Jalalabad, the largest city of eastern Afghanistan, with 400,000 people, is now just a three-hour drive to Kabul on a good road recently built by the European Union. Another hour's drive brings you to Mehtar Lam, capital of Afghanistan's Laghman province, on another good road funded by USAID.

Free and easy passage between cities undercuts warlords’ abilities to control great swaths of secluded land. Many more blacktop roads are in the works.

For those who speak of Kabul as an illusory exception to larger Afghan barbarism, Marlowe has interesting news to report:

Further south is Khost, a province that received little help from the central government in recent decades. Now construction cranes hover over Khost City, with modern five- and six-story office buildings and shopping centers rising amid grimy two-story concrete bazaars. The United Arab Emirates (UAE) recently finished building a new university in the city. And this month the Afghanistan Investment Support Agency, an investment-facilitating agency, is inviting 300 overseas Khostis to come discuss building an industrial park.

Both Kabul Bank and Azizi Bank opened their Khost branches in the summer of 2006, and each have about 3,000 accounts. Both branch managers expect their numbers to double this year. The numbers are low because some local residents view even non-interest bearing accounts as un-Islamic. (Competing fatwas have been issued by various mullahs on the topic.) About 65,000 people have mobile phones in the province.

Technological advancement, investment, and construction are well underway in Afghanistan. Such enterprises have a momentum of their own and transform societies in exciting ways. But perhaps the biggest development in Afghanistan is the freeing-up and influx of human capital. Since 2002 nearly 5 million Afghans have returned from neighboring countries. This reverse exodus is not without its problems. Available resources, chief among them. But the bottom line is we’re talking about millions of people who’ve come home with some sense of things being better and a suspicion that the future consists of more than coffee breaks between occupiers and fanatics. Combined with continued international support, an organically enthusiastic population like that could deliver Afghanistan into unprecedented territory. I’ll put those 5 million up against the Greenwich Village thousand any day.

Musmeah Yeshua Synagogue, Rangoon

A few years back I received a group email that linked to a chart listing the number of Jews in every nation in the world. The two figures that most blew my mind were those representing the number of Jews in Iran: 20,000, and the number of Jews in Afghanistan: 1. The first number surprised me because I had no idea so many Jews remained in Iran after the Revolution. The second number gripped me on a purely existential level. I imagined, rather dramatically, this lone Jew living out his days against a monochrome landscape of bleached sand and rubble, without a single co-religionist in sight. Practically a sci-fi existence.

The chart linked to this guy’s story, and I was pretty fascinated. For a while there was one other Jew in the country, but the two fought over a bible and became hateful enemies. Then the second to last Jew in Afghanistan died. You can read more about the last Jew in Afghanistan here.

I just came across another interesting statistic, though. There are twenty Jews left in Burma. Their mini-community is in the capital, Rangoon, and they occasionally celebrate holidays with Buddhist monks. Here’s Ynet News on what it’s been like for them lately:

"These are the saddest Rosh Hashana and Sukkot we've had in a very long time… we had to adjust the prayer services to the military's curfew, the streets are crawling with soldiers and the situation here is very unstable. The Jews, like many others here, fear for their lives," said Samuels.

The tensions between the military junta and Buddhist monks have made the Jewish community take extra precautions and they have recently hired a private security company, to guard Yangon's only synagogue.

"The unrest here makes it hard for us to even find the quorum needed for prayers," said Samuels. "There are usually a lot of tourists here this time of year, but this year, because of the riots, there are very few of them. Everywhere you look all you see are people rushing home," he added.

"We all pray that the UN negotiations will help restore the peace and quiet to this country," the article quotes one of the twenty as saying. Pray, indeed. Today, China’s ambassador came out against sanctions, and Burma’s ambassador said he can’t understand why there would be need for international action of any kind. Once again, we witness U.N. paralysis at the hands of sinister opportunists treated as statesmen.

Here’s to justice for the Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, and all other good people of Burma.

Shaun McCanna of Salon.com tells how easy it is for soldiers to score cheap, pure heroin in Afghanistan, the country-of-origin for 90 percent of the world’s heroin supply:

Experts think it could be a decade before the true scope of heroin use in Iraq and Afghanistan is known. Dr. Jodie Trafton, a healthcare specialist with the VA's Center for Health Care Evaluation in Palo Alto, Calif., says it takes five or 10 years after a conflict for veterans to enter the system in significant numbers. The VA has recently seen a surge in cases from the first U.S. war in Iraq. "We're just starting to get a lot of Gulf War veterans," she explains.

 

By killing two South Korean hostages and refusing to release the remaining twenty-one, including eighteen women, the Taliban is taking a new path that hints it is becoming an Afghan branch of Al Qaeda. [Christian Science Monitor]

Cheney says he was wrong about the status of the Iraqi insurgency. The Vice President admitted to Larry King that he was (gasp!) "incorrect" in saying two years ago that the insurgency was in its “last throes.” [Iraq Slogger] It took two years of vicious, bloody insurgency and thousand of military and civilian casualties for the VP to finally admit he was "incorrect." That's noble of him. Now, how about some remorse.

The House of Representatives passed a measure intended to improve diagnosis and treatment of PTSD in service members returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. [Iraq Slogger]

Pro-Taliban fighters have seized control of a mosque and shrine in the Mohmand area of Pakistan's North West Frontier province and renamed it the Red Mosque. The tribesmen have expressed support for Abdul Rashid Ghazi, the leader of Islamabad's Lal Masjid, or Red Mosque, killed in a government assault last month. [Al Jazeera]

Tori of Atlanta, a voluptuous Southern courtesan, will be in Iraq this month to entertain the men of the Private Security Contractors Association. [Iraq Slogger]

"One of the least covered aspects of the fallout from the Iraq war is the rising toll of suicides, both near the battlefield and back home." [Editor & Publisher]

Efraim Halevy, former chief of Israel's Mossad intelligence agency, says it is time for Israel to speak directly with the leaders of Hamas. [The Wall Street Journal]

The Bush administration offers 25 percent more aid to Israel as part of the massive arms deal for Saudi Arabia, but Democrats and Jewish groups say they still want many questions answered before signing off on the plan. [Jewish Telegraph Agency]

Syria’s political and military leaders have rescheduled the start of hostilities against Israel on the Golan for the second two weeks of November, 2007, postponing their original planning by more than two months. Also, Saudi Arabia will not promise to attend Bush's proposed Mideast peace conference, and they say Israel needs to show peace rather than just talk about it. [Debka]

Professor Martin Kramer, a senior fellow at Shalem Center's Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies, blogs on the geopolitical situation of the Jews. [The Jerusalem Post]

I have to admit one of my greatest joys in reading the news comes when I get the chance to find out what Afghanistan's last Jew is up to. One can't help but conjure images of The Odd Couple reading about the disputes between Zebulon Simentov and Yitzhak Levin before Levin died in 2005:

Among other antics, they held separate services, had vicious shouting matches neighbors say could be heard down the street, and denounced each other to the Taliban as spies for Israel's Mossad intelligence agency.

Talk about narcissism of small differences. Somebody really should make a film. Cast: Sasha Baron Cohen as Simentov and Chevy Chase as Levin. Don't ask why Chevy Chase comes to mind--something in my gut links Spies Like Us to Borat to squabbling Afghan Jewish men.

These days, the news from Kabul isn't especially exciting, but the old fella's in quite a mood:

"He drinks a lot and is very impatient," the boy laughed. "But if you had brought a bottle of whiskey he would have been in heaven."

While his wife and two children enjoy a far more hospitable existence in Israel, Simentov waits around and tends to the synagogue that sparked the feud with Levin. He huffs about a possible property dispute with Levin's son and something about not needing to go to Israel because he doesn't speak Hebrew. What does he think of Karzai? You guessed it: he preferred the commies and the Taliban.

I'm serious about that film. Somebody get Ari Sandel on the horn...

• American prisons and policies failing at immigration detention. [The New York Times]
  
• "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" ruling shows free-speech hipocrisy of Supreme Court. [The Los Angeles Times]
• In the Vice President's office--"with no real remit and no real limits, open to exploitation and abuse"--Cheney's ongoing disregard for the Constitution. [The Nation]
• The most dangerous Vice President since Aaron Burr. [The New Republic]
• Doctors in the UK vote to make early-stage abortions more accessible. [The Daily Telegraph]
• Harper's editor Wyatt Mason on his friendship with Leonard Michaels. [Harper's Magazine]
• Robust opium crop in southern Afghanistan. [Guardian Unlimited]

 

• U.S. airstrike kills 25 Afghan civilians. [Guardian Unlimited]
• Wealthy gays say queer pride is boring. [The New York Observer]
• War crimes verdict delivered in Sierra Leone. [The Economist]
• Crocs: suspect. Crocs and socks: forget it. (It's also W's new trend.) [The Washington Post]
• You can't handle the truth! White House to close Guantanamo. [The New York Post]
• Hasslehoff hammers tabloids while O.J. goes Mel Gibson style. [TMZ]
• Democrats worry they're not down with Michael Moore. [The Los Angeles Times]

 

An article in the Houston Press that drew heavily from a report issued by ACBAR remarks on the declining popularity of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan:

Goodwill toward foreign forces is eroding across Afghanistan because airstrikes and botched raids by U.S. and NATO troops have killed at least 230 civilians this year, an umbrella group for aid agencies [ACBAR] said Tuesday.

Next paragraph:

The complaint followed reports of dozens of civilian deaths in recent days during fierce fighting sparked by a Taliban offensive in Uruzgan, a key southern province.

And the next:

Noncombatant casualties the past several days — whether caused by foreign troops or the Taliban — have fed public anger toward President Hamid Karzai's government and the foreign soldiers supporting it.

So in other words, everybody's mad at everybody except...you guessed it: the Taliban! At least according to this article. We're left to wonder whether the Afghan people really blame the violence on U.S. and NATO forces more so than on the Taliban, with whose tactics they're all-too-familiar.

But if the AP writer had ventured a further look into ACBAR's bulletin archive, they would have found a far less contentiously sinister report on U.S. mismanagement of affairs in Afghanistan that would have exposed an even greater threat to the future and prosperity of Afghan civilians. Bulletin No. 23, June 10, 2007, page 7.

It's on page 7 that we learn that the U.S. is still pressuring Karzai to spray Afghanistan's biggest cash crop with lethal chemicals. The Afghan leader rejected the previous proposal on the grounds that it would be harmful to the people, the water supply, and non-poppy crops of the already beggared country. So now the U.S. supposedly has a 'safe way' of carrying out the plan. What do they expect us to believe? That Burt's Bee's and The Body Shop teamed up to create a green poppycide?

In a country with a struggling economy, where according to the bulletin almost half the yearly income comes from illicit opium sales, the U.S. still thinks it's best to rain chemicals down on Kabul rather than legally invest in the country's most lucrative resource. Afghanistan's main legal resources are embroidered textiles and rubble. The rubble market value declines every day that continued fighting turns the rubble to dust.

If this situation keeps up, where fascists like the Taliban can initiate aggression and manage to watch the blame for the ensuing carnage fall everywhere except on their own heads, I'm going to need a dose of opium so big I'll have to buy the entire 2007 harvest myself.

This past weekend at a book expo, Naomi Klein plagiarized Gandhi a bit when she said of the war with Islamic fundamentalism :

I’m not against fighting for civilization and all that,” Klein said, “It’s just that I’m still not sure where ‘civilization’ is… I’m still looking.

Post-colonial and subaltern studies have rightfully made us suspicious of using the term 'civilization' without great care. From what privileged vantage point is anyone allowed to say what is and isn't 'civilization?' This is a familiar enough argument even to those unfamiliar with the hotshot philosophers that made this worldview popular. While it didn't originate with 20th century French thinkers, the most recent vintage of this thought was almost certainly fermented in the casks of existentialism.

In a nutshell, existentialists believed that the Ultimate and Divine, and the revealed capital 'T' Truth are falsehoods (or in some cases, the Divine did exist but was unknowable due to its Divinity and all). The Klein principle translates to 'civilization' insofar as it emphasizes that there isn't a perfect arbiter to flawlessly reveal what is 'civilized,' and so one is forced into an agnostic position. But existentialists made a big deal out of responsibility--i.e., 'if God isn't responsible for me and the truth, then I am.' Definitions are more grey, more difficult and less comforting because they are always up for debate and redefinition, however we must take the leap--do something and say something in spite of the fear that uncertainty brings, in spite of the near certainty that somebody will come along at some point with something better. The one who refuses (or who is incapable) of taking that leap is the tragic figure--not the principled hero--of the existentialist world.

It may be true that none of us can or should be so arrogant as to say we know about Civilization and everybody else had best get on board with it. But today, the most well-meaning people think this position excuses them from the hard work of trying to define what is civil, what civilization is, and then fighting to make sure it survives. They seem almost too disappointed in the lower-case 'c' to put any force of will behind the struggle.

Then again, Klein may not be mired in a philosophical conundrum. In her case it's probably just idealism gone haywire. Since the current state of things doesn't meet her standard, she won't be pinned down saying anything definitive about civilization. This is a cop-out and its dangerous--it makes the best the enemy of the good. Besides, existence is a clear-cut issue. Either one exists or one does not, which means that there can be no agnosticism-- no matter how idealistic--in an existential struggle.

As for Klein's confusion, somebody should tell her to take a glimpse at the Islamic civilization that is wrecked on a daily basis by Islamic fundamentalists. A picture of Kandahar 100 years ago compared with today maybe? Or how about Bamiyan? Might Ms. Klein agree that the gargantuan stone statues represented a great many hours when people were carving rock instead of killing or maiming one another? More importantly, the Afghan peoples' reverence for them as historic and cultural landmarks was testament to their pride in the accomplishments of humanity. It was a very pluralist respect for others--a respect for art, religious difference, and shared history that the Taliban blew apart. Irresponsible is too mild a way to characterize those who won't come right out and say that the fight against people who do this is a fight for civilization.

What do fascist Islamists hate more than the freedom of expression? Women who express themselves freely. And what could possibly be worse than a woman speaking her mind? A woman unafraid to condemn the whole lot of fanatical, backward bullies on the airwaves. That's most likely why Zakia Zaki, a hero of dissident Afghan radio journalism, was recently murdered in her home in front of her three year-old son.

Zakia Zaki started her radio career eight years ago. At the time Parvan province was one of the few areas in the country to be controlled by anti-Taleban forces.

The Independent Association of Afghan Journalists has condemned the murder, describing it as an example of how difficult the working environment has become for journalists and especially for women.

"She believed in freedom of expression, that's why she was killed," the association's head Rahimullah Samander told Reuters.

Stateside, the Afghan Freedom and Security Support Act of 2007 is proposing to send $135 million over a period of three years to the Afghan Ministry of Women's Affairs, the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, and Afghan-led non-profits as part of the bill's Afghan Women Empowerment Act. You can honor Zaki's legacy by showing your support.

Consciousness, popularity raised: Eve Ensler and Selma HayekIn comments, Izzy Grinspan responds to my post: "I've only seen the Vagina Monologues once, but what's stuck with me, in a way that I would describe as both horrifying and surprising, is the section about the woman who was repeatedly raped in Bosnia. . . . For me, at least, this was the most memorable, most upsetting part of the show—much more than a 'dutiful footnote.' . . . Where is the line between play-acting and really acting? What would you like the cast of the Vagina Monologues to do instead of putting on the show?"

I agree that this part of the production, which I do remember vividly, is both memorable and upsetting and a welcome depature from the fatuity and navel-gazing (well, vagina-gazing) of the production as a whole. But I still call it "dutiful," and woefully inadequate. The only other serious "monologue" in the script is spoken by a Lakota Sioux woman who has been abused by her husband. Powerful stuff, until we reach the ending: "They took our land; they took our ways; and they took our men—and we want them back!" It's characteristic of protest literature to be parasitic on the thing protested; it's in the interest of Eve Ensler and the Vagina Monologues to decry sexual violence while ignoring those of its perpetrators who can and should be held accountable.

The last time I saw the Monologues, the U.S. military had just driven the Taliban from Afghanistan: that is, real people had taken real risks to improve the lot of women in that country. This fact didn't receive a mention. I don't suggest that the young students acting in Ensler's production should take up arms and march on the failed state of their choice. But the fact that the production refused to acknowledge or honor real risks and real gains—rather than mere sentiment—has stuck with me. To say that something good can be done, has been done, is to accept responsibility. The cast of the Vagina Monologues is responsible only for sound and fury, signifying self-love.

The putative argument of the Monologues is that sexual violence is real and must be stopped. The argument of someone like Ayaan Hirsi Ali is that the abuse and repression of women around the world comes from specific conditions and ideologies that can be changed. The perennial sneer on campuses where "awareness" posters and panels are common is that no genuinely violent person ever changed his ways because of a poster or "discussion group." Hirsi Ali is petitioning our "awareness" in terms that may actually force us to do something.

Who reads only the Koran?

We do! We do!

Who drops walls on gays and Jews?

Who makes bombs out of their shoes?

We do! We do!

Mullah Sabir: Look at the news reports. Half of Afghanistan is again under our control. We have advanced to just outside of Kabul. President Hamid Karzai is a prisoner in his own palace. True, he constantly flies around the world and spends time with the powerful leaders of the West. But in his own country he does not even dare to travel around. You can well imagine that, at our meeting of 33 Taliban chiefs, the mood was anything but sombre.

 

On the one hand, I kind of hate posting about things going on in the Muslim world when they don't have any direct connection to Jews or Judaism. It always makes me feel like I'm suggesting that everything Muslim is inherently important to Jews because the two Abrahamic religions have some kind of built-in, unstoppable, and presumably antagonistic relationship, which I obviously think is a load of hooey.

BUT! While there is nothing remotely Jewish about the following video, it would be a crying shame not to share it with the world. The Burqa Band is Afghanistan's first all-girl pop group. Salon's Broadsheet blog describes the lyrics thusly:

Against a raw beat, the vocalist chants a sardonic ditty in choppy schoolgirl English:

"My mother wears a burqa,
my father wears it too.
I have to wear a burqa too,
the burqa it is blue.
When you wear a burqa
you don't know who is who,
if you want to meet your sister,
it can be your uncle too."

Happy subversion! In the song, the veil doesn't so much segregate the genders as render them indistinguishable. At the end of the song, the words even wreck the logic of courtship:

"You give me all your love,
you give me all your kisses and then
you touch my burqa and do not know who is it."

but honestly, reading the lyrics doesn't come close to witnessing the incredible weirdness of the video.  You kind of have to just watch it for yourself: