Afghanistan, the Definition of Madness

By Alan Caruba

Why did George W. Bush invade Afghanistan? Answer: Occurring just after September 11, 2001 in which 2,977 Americans lost their lives, a CIA team was inserted into Afghanistan fifteen days later to begin a campaign against the Taliban who had allied with Al Qaeda and provided sanctuary for Osama bin Laden while the attack was planned. A U.S. bombing campaign in Tora Bora followed but bin Laden escaped into Pakistan.

When bin Laden was killed in 2011 by a U.S. Navy SEAL team, he was living in Abbotabad, Pakistan, a mile away from its equivalent of West Point.

The initial reason for the military action ceased to be of any critical importance and the Bush administration pivoted to concentrate on removing Iraq’s Saddam Hussein from power. Afghanistan became a backwater concern, but in 2002 Bush announced “a Marshall Plan” for Afghanistan, intended to be a development plan with security goals. In 2003, the U.S. invaded Iraq.

Insurgent activity in Afghanistan never ceased and military authority there switched to NATO, essentially to protect Kabul. It would be the organization’s first operational commitment outside of Europe. Hamid Karzai became the hand-picked leader of a nation that Transparency International deemed the second most corrupt in the world.

Afghanistan was and is a narco-economy. A result of U.S. involvement and due to a level of incompetance that defies comprehension, billions have been expended on the military and development efforts that found their way into the hands of the Taliban and the corrupt Karzai government.

The previous effort by the then-Soviet Union to exercise influence began in the 1960s. In 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan to support its puppet government from an orthodox Muslim insurgent group known as the Taliban. The insurgency drew support from Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and the U.S. Osama bin Laden would create al Qaeda as part of the effort to drive the Russians out of Afghanistan.

From 1979 to 1989, the war proved so costly to the Soviet Union that it finally withdrew its troops. The war would contribute to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Having learned nothing from history, ancient and recent, the U.S. has just initiated an agreement with Afghanistan to provide support for the next decade. The definition of madness is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

According to an April 23 news report, “The partnership agreement ensures that the U.S. will continue to support Afghanistan even after the U.S. ends major combat operations and scales back its development projects over the next two years” and “The strategic-partnership will commit the U.S. to more than a decade of economic and financial support for the Afghan state, which is still battling a resilient Taliban-led insurgency.”

No external entity, from Alexander the Great in 329 BC, to Genghis Khan’s Mongol army in 1221 BC, to the British Empire in 1839-1842, has ever encountered anything but defeat in Afghanistan. Add the U.S. and NATO to the list.

There is, one assumes, some military strategic value to trying to control events in Afghanistan in some fashion. Pakistan, since its founding in 1947, and India have engaged in efforts to exercise influence there with varying degrees of success. The deal that the U.S. has signed with Afghanistan is no more likely to ensure any influence than all previous efforts since 2001. At times, Pakistan has even denied U.S. military transports to provision our troops there.

For those who want to learn the truth of the failure of U.S. efforts, I recommend reading Douglas A. Wissing’s new book, “Funding the Enemy: How U.S. Taxpayers Bankroll the Taliban”, just published by Prometheus Books.

Wissing writes, “Within scant months of Tora Bora, the seeds of American failure in Afghanistan were sown: the U.S. consort with deceitful Afghan warlords and leaders; the American complicity in the revived Afghan opium trade; and the flawed U.S. logistics-and-development schemes that fueled corruption and helped finance the Taliban.”

Wissing concludes his intensively documented book saying, “Decades of American arrogance and cupidity have brought us to this point…but doing more isn’t going to change things. The hundreds of billions of U.S. dollars and millions of ruined lives haven’t made Afghanistan safer or less desperate. As America has upped its bets in Afghanistan, the insurgency has continued to grow in power and in influence.”

When he campaigned for the presidency, Barack Obama characterized the conflict in Afghanistan as a just war in contrast to American efforts in Iraq. By the time he took office, the Bush administration had already negotiated a withdrawal agreement with the Iraqi government.

The latest deal to continue American investment in Afghanistan defies any common sense, any justification. It comes at a time when America is deeply in debt. It reflects the Obama administration’s penchant for spending money it does not have without continued borrowing.

The next administration, assuming Obama’s defeat, must abandon the deal and abandon Afghanistan. Alexander the Great did. Genghis Khan did. The British Empire did. And the Soviet Union collapsed shortly after it did.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Afghanistan is Hell, Time to Leave

Afghans protesting the burning of korans

By Alan Caruba

Civil War General William Tecumseh Sherman gained everlasting fame when he said “War is Hell.”

The definition holds true, but one might also add that Afghanistan is Hell. Even after Alexander the Great defeated the Persian forces in six month’s time it took three years, from 330 BC to 327 BC, to get some measure of control over Afghanistan. For the Soviet Union, the war in Afghanistan dragged on for ten years (1979 to 1989) and led to its collapse.

The news is full of the story of a U.S. soldier in Afghanistan who went on a killing spree, leaving at least sixteen civilians dead, among whom were women and children, while wounding another five.

The death not noted in the news reports is the death of the American/NATO mission in Afghanistan, one that began with an October 2001 attack ordered by President Bush. Its purpose was to drive out the Taliban and elements of al Qaeda that had reportedly planned the 9/11 attack in outposts established there.

The Taliban are still in Afghanistan and across the border in Pakistan.

The figures on American and NATO casualties went from twelve in 2001 to 68 just thus far this year. During the “surges” to gain control over various provinces, 2009 resulted in 521 dead, 2010’s toll was 7ll. In all, there have been 2,915 coalition soldiers who have lost their lives there; 1,910 from the U.S., 404 from the United Kingdom, and 150 from our neighbor, Canada.

The effort has included soldiers from nations that include Denmark (47), Poland (35), Spain (34), the Netherlands (25), and France (82) a total of some twenty-eight nations.

It has been a failure.

That failure is seen now in the slaughter of innocents by a lone, American soldier, believed to be a staff sergeant, as yet unnamed. There are many unknowns at this point, but what is known is that trying to fight a war where Afghan soldiers are as likely to kill you as the designated enemy can drive a man to madness.

Trying to fight a war where two soldiers in an Afghan ministry were assassinated because some Korans were burned and others suffer a similar fate is itself madness. Such a place is the very definition of Hell.

America and its NATO allies, just like the Russians, have to leave. Plots against America can be planned anywhere. Afghanistan is the worst place in the world to fight a war. Alexander the Great found that out, the Soviets, and now it is our turn.

I think I know why we are still there. Neither Bush, nor Obama, want to be the President who was defeated by an enemy that isn’t even an army or even a local militia. It is a group of Islamic fanatics for whom time stopped in the seventh century. That is still the calendar in Afghanistan today, so many centuries later.

Not to put too fine a point on it, despite the heroism and sacrifice of our armed forces, but America hasn’t actually won a war since World War II and hasn’t formally declared war since 1941.

There will surely be punishment for the soldier who committed this massacre, but some may look back and conclude this was the day Americans decided finally to leave. We left Vietnam. We have left Iraq—twice now. The Middle East may someday embrace the values of freedom and liberty, but not in our lifetimes, if ever.

Estimates of the total U.S. military expenses in Afghanistan are calculated to exceed $190 billion.

In 2010 alone, U.S. military assistance to Afghanistan was $5.6 billion. Some element of those billions was spent on humanitarian infrastructure, health, community development, education and other worthy, but utterly wasted efforts. Most was stolen by an utterly corrupt “government” led by Hamid Karzai.

Afghanistan has no income producing agriculture, industrial or economic structure. Its only export of any significance is opium with which to produce heroin.

The war in Afghanistan is now the longest American war we have ever fought, longer even than the war in Vietnam. Pay no attention to the “progress” reports by U.S. generals. There has been no progress in Afghanistan. There is only the dark hole of Islamic fanaticism.

It is time to leave Afghanistan. It is time to leave Hell.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

The Pakistan Conundrum

By Alan Caruba

The answer to whether Pakistan is our friend is “It depends.”

That’s an apt description of U.S.-Pakistani relations over the years, but one thing is sure, Pakistan believes it is surrounded by enemies in general and fears India in particular. With a mindset like that, friendship is not a priority, but survival—even if it just means muddling through another day—most surely is.

I have read several books about Pakistan in order to understand this odd nation that was peeled off from India in 1947 when the British left. Divided between eastern and western sections, even Bangladesh, formerly East Bengal, separated from its western cousin, declaring its independence in 1971. In the ensuing civil war, a million died and ten million fled to India.

In “The Unraveling: Pakistan in the Age of Jihad” by John R. Schmidt, a former State Department diplomat for three decades, reflects on his years in Islamabad in the years leading up to 9/11. He is a sharp observer of Pakistan and provides a lively history while unraveling the complexities of its various tribal groups, who the Taliban were and are, and how Al Qaeda established itself there.

To understand Pakistan is to understand how very different it is from America. It is a feudal society from top to bottom and it came about because its founding father, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, a Bombay lawyer, envisioned a nation separate from India because he feared that Muslims would become a political underclass in a unified India dominated by Hindus.

Fully one-third of India’s Muslim population numbering 35 million people remained behind in India. In Pakistan, it took until 1956 to come up with a constitution, a decade after independence.

A feudal society relies on patronage to function. Thus, whoever holds power at any level in Pakistan is focused on looking out for his own patronage network and not for the general welfare of the nation.

As Schmidt explains, “It requires little imagination to see where such policies lead. They lead to the poorhouse. Nations whose economics are uncompetitive in the global marketplace yet dependent on imported fuel and other vital commodities, and whose governments pay out more than they take in, are bound to be chronically broke.” As a result, a third of the Pakistani federal budget is consumed by servicing its international debt.

Typical of the Muslim outlook, if you are not a Muslim you are simply the enemy. It doesn’t matter if you are Hindu, Christian, Jewish, or any other faith. The problem is exacerbated because of the divisions within Islam, primarily Sunni and Shiite, have little love for one another.

Based on its fear and loathing for India, Pakistan’s various leaders concluded they needed to be a nuclear power as a deterrent. That makes Pakistan a major concern for everyone around them, the world in general, and the U.S. in particular. “If jihadists succeed in seizing power in Islamabad,” notes Schmidt, “they will inherit an arsenal that today numbers approximately one hundred nuclear warheads.”

Pinioned between India on the south and Afghanistan to the north, Pakistan’s leaders, as often as not its army generals who seized control, have only their grievances and themselves to blame for troubles with India and the rise of the Taliban who threaten the government. This explains in part why its military has always been the most stable factor throughout its relatively brief history. Based on merit, it is also represents the best leaders the nation can produce.

Even so, the decision to use proxy jihadist fighters to influence who controlled Afghanistan turned out to be a very bad one. Schmidt believes that “Pakistan seems ill-equipped to deal with this rapidly metastasizing radical Islamic threat.” Can there be a more ironic fate for a nation founded to provide a home to Muslims? The threat the Islamic radicals represent is particularly painful in a nation, the majority of whose population, are more tolerant and moderate followers of Sufi Islam.

The U.S. was none too happy to discover that Pakistan had become a nuclear power. When 9/11 occurred, its leaders were told that their cooperation was required to facilitate the attack on the Taliban in Afghanistan. It was told to break off relations with the Taliban and close its borders to Al Qaeda.

This explains why Pakistan has cooperated with the U.S. in the capture of top Al Qaeda leaders such Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, but professed to be ignorant of the fact that Osama bin Laden was living in Abbotabad, a short drive from Islamabad. Indeed, for the Pakistanis, the news came as a shock and his assassination a cause for much chagrin.

In a similar fashion, the attack on Mumbai, India, by a radical Islamic group ended promising peace talks with India over Kashmir and left Pakistan’s international reputation in tatters.

As is the case in one Muslim nation after another, the central problem to their governance and international relations is radical Islam. Some nations like Indonesia have cracked down on it. Others like Yemen have been over-run by it.

Radical Islam, unless addressed by Muslims will remain a threat. It explains why U.S. troops will likely migrate in and out of Middle Eastern nations for years to come, shooting as many jihadists as possible, taking casualties, angering the local population, and confounding the public at home trying to understand why we’re there.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

The Pakistani Pit of Deception

By Alan Caruba

Even Pakistanis do not believe that their political and military leaders did not know bin Laden was living, as one columnist put it, “wrapped in the bosom of the Pakistani security establishment.”

Cyril Almeida, writing in the Pakistani newspaper, Dawn, a few days after the killing of bin Laden noted that, when the question is asked privately, “No one will say anything but, yes, they knew he was there.”

For 34 of its 64 years, Pakistan has been run by generals whose military intelligence presumably works in league with its Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI), though both have their own agendas. It is unlikely that much civilian control over either exists.

Almeida wrote, “If we didn’t know, we are a failed state; if we did know, we are a rogue state. But does anyone believe they didn’t know?”

If it were an individual, Pakistan would be diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, subject to raging fears that India intends to invade on a moment’s notice and antagonistic to Afghanistan as it harbors those who attack it.

In his recently published book, “Pakistan: A Hard Country”, Anatol Lieven provides insight to a nation that, until lately, was home to the most wanted man on the face of the Earth, Osama bin Laden. He was dispatched in a compound that was within a short distance of Pakistan’s equivalent of West Point or England’s Sandhurst. If we are to believe Pakistan’s civilian and military leadership, neither had any idea he was there.

“Trying to understand Pakistan’s internal structures and dynamics is complicated,” writes Lieven. “If there is one phrase which defines many aspects of Pakistan…it is ‘Janus-faced’: in other words, many of the same features of Pakistan’s state and government which are responsible for holding Islamist extremism in check are at one and the same time responsible for holding back Pakistan’s social, economic, and political development.”

“Pakistan,” writes Lieven, “is divided, disorganized, economically backward, corrupt, violent, unjust, often savagely oppressive towards the poor and women, and home to extremely dangerous forms of extremism and terrorism.”

Pakistan came into being in 1947 when leaders of India’s Muslim population like Mohammed Ali Jinnah, its founder, made it clear they did not want to be part of the newly independent India after Great Britain relinquished its colonial rule. Later, when East Pakistan broke loose to establish its independence in 1971, it became Bangladesh.

The thing Westerners find difficult to understand is the tribal nature of nations like Pakistan and Afghanistan, but it is not difficult to understand “Muslim nationalism and the bitter hostility to the U.S. role in the Muslim world in general and Pakistan’s region in particular.” However, in order to pursue the present combat role against the Taliban in Afghanistan, the U.S. and its European allies rely on neighboring Pakistan in order to provision supplies to their troops.

Since the Taliban are a creation of Pakistan’s ISI and because Pakistan has long been where al Qaeda has found refuge, those in charge have played a Janus or two-faced role for a very long time; at times providing intelligence of great value and at others aiding or at the very least, protecting the terrorist organizations. In return, the Taliban have proven an internal problem for the military and the government, occasionally requiring that they be driven out of areas they have seized.

In many ways, Pakistan is barely a nation. In its tribal northwest regions, such as the now fabled Waziristan, the state has little influence or control. As to its tribes, the two dominant ones are Punjab and Pathan. Both pursue their own interests.

As Lieven describes it, “A fundamental political fact about Pakistan is that the state, whoever claims to lead it, is weak, and (the) society in its various forms is immensely strong.” It is a nation of many separate fiefdoms who “plunder the state for patronage and favors” and this is graphically demonstrated by the fact that “barely one percent of the population pays income tax, and the wealthiest landowners in the country pay no direct taxes at all.”

Thus, the billions that the U.S. has pumped into its economy take on a very critical role, particularly for the military. This is a very different world from that of the West. The majority of Pakistan’s political parties are dynastic, led by a few powerful families. The entire society operates on kinship loyalty.

Pakistan is a perfect example of why the U.S. and the West are stymied by the illogic, the irrationality, and the duplicity of nations in which Islam is the predominant factor in their politics and society.

When you add in the geography of Pakistan, lodged between India and Afghanistan, bordered by China and Iran, you have a nation that can neither be ignored nor abandoned because of its strategic location.

Finally, there is the fact that Pakistan has a nuclear arsenal that must never be allowed to fall into the hands of the Taliban, al Qaeda, or anyone else crazed enough to use it for the greater glory of Allah.

Pakistan is a pit of deception and it is notable that our current relations with it consist of the special operations raid that killed bin Laden and the drones that continue to kill al Qaeda and Taliban who make themselves available targets.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Short Attention Spans

By Alan Caruba

The American Revolution, from the day in 1773 when tea got dumped in Boston Bay to the day in 1781 when the British were defeated at Yorktown took eight years. If it had been on television, the ratings would have fallen off in about two weeks.

My point is that, by the end of the second week of the turmoil in Egypt, it mattered less and less to those in the West that a million Egyptians were showing up in Cairo and Alexandria to demand Mubarak’s resignation or that demands for real freedom, real liberty in the Middle East are a very big deal!

Mubarak says he intends to stay in office until the election in September. He appointed a vice president, gave a pay raise to government workers, and has patiently waited for the crowds to grow tired of singing, chanting, listening to speeches, and to get on with their lives.

These events are cultural in nature.

Despite common ties with England, the colonists had been quite distinctly “American” for a very long time and didn’t like being treated poorly by the British crown and parliament. “No taxation without representation” became their rallying call.

Egyptians have been around a lot longer than Americans; several millennia in fact.

They have been Muslims since the religion was “introduced” by its early zealots in the seventh century A.D. Designed to appeal to Arabs in particular, but proclaimed as a universal faith to which everyone would have to submit, Islam put its stamp on Egyptians, just as it would on Persians and others throughout the Middle East, northern Africa, and into India..

It wasn’t that long ago that Egyptians were ruled by a monarch, King Farouk, crowned at age 16 and ruling until 1952 when a coup led by Gamal Abdel Nasser forced him into exile in Monaco. The defeat Egypt had suffered in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war would lead to the end of the king’s reign. Until then, from around the 1800s, the British had been deeply involved in Egypt, eventually wresting control of the Suez Canal from the French while the monarchy increasingly became a figurehead.

The British literally modernized Egypt, but by the end of World War Two, depleted in wealth to maintain their empire, they watched it drift away into new, independent nations. Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal in 1956 and continued to engage in wars with Israel. When Nasser died his successor, Anwar Sadat, made a cold peace with Israel and, shortly after, was assassinated by the Muslim Brotherhood.

Seated beside him that day was Hosni Mubarak, an air force general and, when he came to power shortly thereafter, he clamped down on the Muslim Brotherhood who wanted to turn Egypt into the same kind of hellish regime that was later imposed on Iran in 1979. As in Turkey earlier, Egypt installed a secular government whose military ensured that it stayed that way.

Most of this is unknown history to Americans who have already tired of seeing Egyptians in Cairo’s main square and, if they have paid any attention to the White House, know that President Obama, Vice President Biden, and Secretary of State Clinton have managed to say conflicting things about the uprising, looking and sounding clueless and foolish in the process.

Freedom, however, is not a joke and, thanks to the Internet, a lot of Egyptians, a lot of Iranians, a lot of Tunisians, a lot of Yemenis, and, in general, people through northern Africa, the Maghreb, and elsewhere in the Middle East would like to vote in legitimate elections where there are real choices among candidates and parties. They would like to live without secret police and other forms of oppression.

We tend to forget that George W. Bush’s aim when invading Iraq was to depose a dictator, to bring about democracy there, and to spread the message throughout the Middle East.

Mostly, the Egyptians would like to be rid of the endemic corruption that authoritarian regimes establish among a small, ruling elite that, in turn, discourages everything from owning a deed to one’s own home to being able to start a business without paying off several levels of bureaucracy and waiting a very long time.

The Egyptians want real opportunity, an energetic economy, and some form of actual democracy. Concessions are being made, but progress is likely to take a while.

The Muslim Brotherhood, al Qaeda, the Taliban, and all the other Islamists are in a race to gain control over the nations of the Middle East before freedom breaks out everywhere.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Why talking to the Taliban won't work

Killing Missionaries, Fellow Muslims, and Civilization

By Alan Caruba

The latest news out of Afghanistan is the brutal murder of missionaries who were part of a Christian medical team. Among the many excuses for Islamic barbarism is that the West is at war with Islam. No, Islam is at war with civilization.

In early August, after having hiked for more than ten hours to bring medical aid to isolated Afghan villagers, a team composed of six Americans, two Afghans, one German and a Briton, doctors, nurses, and logistical personnel, were gunned down by Taliban in the remote Parun valley of Nuristan province about 160 miles north of Kabul.

Their crime, according to Zabiullah Mujahid, a Taliban spokesman, was that they were “spying for the Americans” and “preaching Christianity.” They were members of International Assistance Mission (IAM), one of the longest serving non-governmental organizations operating in Afghanistan.

The team leader was Tom Little, an optometrist from Delmar, New York. He and his family had been in Afghanistan for thirty years with a break during the Afghan-Soviet conflict. He and his wife had raised their three daughters there. AIM receives private donations.

None of this made any difference to the Taliban that killed him and the others. Elsewhere in Afghanistan that day, a child was murdered by Sunni bombers and a bomb hidden in a wheelbarrow left five others dead. In Pattani, Thailand, a Buddhist husband and wife were murdered by Muslim gunmen in their bicycle shop and their 4-year-old nephew was wounded. In Kirkuk, Iraq Muslims shot a woman to death and in Baghdad two civilians were blown to bits by bombers.

Islam is an equal opportunity “religion of peace.” It kills Muslims, Christians, Buddhists and anyone else in the name of Allah. All this killing is rooted in the Koran, justified by the view that unbelievers have no right to life unless they convert. Even then, the schism between Sunni and Shiite Muslims is sufficient reason to kill each other.

There are well over a billion Muslims in a world of some six billion people and, while most undoubtedly want peace, their religion requires that the world be divided between Dar al Islam and Dar al Harb, the world of Islam and the world of war.

It can be argued that Christianity has blood on its hands and, historically, that is true, but what is most true about Islam in the last century and this one is that it represents a war on civilization itself.

In a Europe that has seen an influx of Muslims, nations there are struggling with them wherever they have gained large enough numbers to demand submission to Sharia law and other imported customs inconsistent with modernity.

Americans paid little attention to Islam until 9/11 destroyed the Twin Towers and a portion of the Pentagon. Up to then, Islam seemed far away despite a series of embassy bombings and other events.

Now Americans struggle with an Islam that wants to build a mosque within steps of Ground Zero in New York City. This has come as a shock to many, but Islam has a long tradition of building mosques over the sacred ground of others.

The Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem was built over the site of the Jewish Temple on the Temple Mount, sacred to Jews. In Constantinople, now Istanbul, the Hagia Sophia Cathedral was converted to a mosque. Throughout India, an estimated 2,000 mosques were built on the sites of Hindu temples.

Wherever Islam gained a foothold and became the state religion—in Islam there is no separation between church and state—the backwardness, the oppression of women, the refusal to accept another religion unless its practitioners accept a second-class position in society, are all endemic to Islam.

Islam is mired in the seventh century mentality of its founder and charged with a hostility, not just to other faiths, but to modernity itself, to the advances of civilization that seeks to reduce tensions between nations and peoples.

We are not dealing with people devoid of contact with modern civilization. Al Qaeda recruits via the Internet. They show how they behead “infidels” and urge more attacks everywhere against them.

For those who leave Islam, the punishment prescribed in the Koran is death. For those who “insult” Islam, the punishment prescribed is death. And for those who bring free medical care to villagers is death.

The proposed New York mosque should be built only when a synagogue or church can be built anywhere in Saudi Arabia where Islam began and where the harshest form of Islam, Wahhabi, is practiced.

If Islam calls the world of unbelievers Dar al Harb, the world of war, why can’t the world understand that Islam is at war with it?

© Alan Caruba, 2010

The Afghanistan Quagmire

By Alan Caruba

The war in Afghanistan has been going on for more than eight years as of this writing. Over that period of time I have been against it, for it, against it, for it, and now I return to what my instincts and experience told me all along. It’s over.

That war is lost. Once the Taliban acquired surface-to-air missiles, the primarily advantage our military had was removed. In the past month, the Taliban have shot down two of our helicopters. Any low-flying aircraft will be vulnerable along with all our front-line forces.

This is a repeat of how the Soviets lost their war in Afghanistan. The Stinger missles the CIA began to provide the Afghan insurgents and the many Arabs that joined the battle---including Osama bin Laden---the war was over. Not many years later, the Soviet Union collapsed.

You cannot win a counterinsurgency with local forces if (1) you don’t have a significant portion of the population on your side and (2) those forces do not want to fight.

Afghans don’t like anyone who is not an Afghan and, in many cases, they do not like other Afghans from other tribes. They didn’t even like the Arabs that joined them in the fight against the Soviets. They want to be left alone to raise poppies and make money the only way they can, via the drug trade.

The other factor that is a key to the situation is our “ally”, Pakistan. The U.S. has poured billions into Pakistan and they have been supporting the Taliban the whole time; more specifically, the Pakistan Inter-Services Intelligence Agency.

Let it be said that George W. Bush was right to chase al Qaeda out of Afghanistan after 9/11. Failure to take military action would have been seen as weakness and made the U.S. vulnerable to more attacks on the homeland. For eight years while he was in the White House, there were no further attacks.

Then Barack Hussein Obama got elected. He did so in part by claiming that Afghanistan was the “real” war to be won and that our war in Iraq was a mistake. Then, when he had to decide what to do there, he spent three months making up his mind, agreed to send 40,000 more troops, and announced the date when we would leave. You don’t win wars by telling the enemy when you’re going to leave.

While he’s been in office there have been two unsuccessful attacks, the Christmas underwear bomber and the Times Square bomber. The Fort Hood murders were swept under the rug after Obama took three days to think of something to say about them. He said we should not “jump to conclusions” about Major Hassan who shouted “Allahu akbar” while murdering his fellow soldiers.

Debka File, an Israeli news agency is saying what the U.S. press is disinclined to say. “America’s longest war is about to end.” Drawing on its military and intelligence sources, it said the US-led NATO forces will have no victory and must settle “at best in a draw or at worst in a win for the Taliban, al Qaeda’s extremist partner.”

An article in the UK’s Times was picked up by the Washington Post on June 14. The Times article was headlined “Pakistan puppet masters guide the Taliban killers.” It reported that “Pakistan’s own intelligence agency, the ISI, is said to be represented on the Taliban’s war council, the Quetta shura. Up to seven of the 15-man shura are believed to be ISA agents.”

The former head of Afghanistan’s intelligence agency, Amrullah Salah, recently resigned. He concluded that Afghan forces of the government under Hamid Karzai, the US hand-picked president of Afghanistan, would not and could not prevail. Afghanistan has never been a nation by any standard definition. It has always been a nation of tribes.

The Afghanistan conflict has cost the West billions and hundreds of lives. NATO, an institution put together during the long Cold War with the then-Soviet Union, has never had much support among its European members, none of whom have had much heart for a fight following World War Two.

The United Kingdom has been our most steadfast partner in NATO and in our two invasions of Iraq, after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, and in wake of the widespread belief he had weapons of mass destruction. Almost from the day he first stepped into the Oval Office, President Obama has engaged in every way possible to offend the British and his latest fulminations about the BP oil spill have only worsened relations.

When word leaked about Obama’s “rules of engagement” in Afghanistan that essentially put every one of our soldiers and marines at risk, the die was cast.

The combined US-UK force failed to loosen the Taliban’s grip on Marjah, the most recent military engagement. The Afghan forces refused to fight much of the time. The Taliban continue to control the whole of southern Afghanistan.

The Kandahar offensive has been postponed. It was to be waged by American, British, Canadian, and Afghan forces. If that doesn’t tell you that the war in Afghanistan is over, nothing will.

If there is no will to wage war vigorously to bring about victory, nothing can be done for now. This is not to say we will not have to return at some time, but as long as President Obama is in office, that is not an option.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

The Open-Ended War

By Alan Caruba

As I listened to the President address the nation from West Point, I was reminded of how well he can deliver a speech. It’s like watching a slight-of-hand magician. You marvel at his dexterity, but you know he’s still skillfully fooling you.

The speech, given in the Eisenhower auditorium at West Point, reminded me of President Eisenhower, the former general who led allied forces to victory in Europe in World War Two, the man called back to serve his nation, and a man who was hard on the ears when it came to delivering a speech. It made him more human. We forgave him his blunt manner. After all, he had spent his whole adult life in the U.S. Army, taking and giving orders.

Similarly President Bush never seemed all that comfortable giving a set speech, but you knew he meant what he said. You knew he hated the evil of al Qaeda and the Taliban. You knew he despised Saddam Hussein and other enemies of America, of freedom, and human dignity. He was not smooth, not articulate, but he was genuine.

Barack Hussein Obama never spent a day in uniform and something in the area of two years out of six of his first term in the Senate before being launched on the nation as its savior, its messiah. I always found the references to spiritual powers jarring though, like most, amusing in their over-reach. Obama did nothing to discourage the image.

His West Point speech was primarily political. The military elements revealed a get-in and get-out strategy in what has already been a long engagement of the U.S. military in the Middle East. It was filled with talk of NATO partners, Afghani partners, and Pakistani partners, but it also told the enemy that, if they were just patient enough, the U.S. would leave.

Wars, the generals tell us, have to be fought in terms of what the enemy does, not by any timetable we devise. Obama handed us, al Qaeda, and the Taliban a timetable.

When we leave, the Afghan government will still be as corrupt as ever. When we leave the Pakistan government will be as shaky as ever, though perhaps a bit bolder in its desire to resist the Taliban.

Obama made a powerful argument for the need to stamp out the Taliban and kill al Qaeda. He also said that both had “defiled” Islam “one of the world’s great religions.”

Islam is also the world’s single most violent and destabilizing ideology, causing death and spreading terror recently in the Philippines, destroying Somalia, and with a list of atrocities from Mumbai, India, to Madrid, Spain, to London, England. And, of course, on 9/11.

Islam struck again at Fort Hood, Texas.

The one undeniable fact of our times is that the U.S. and the civilized world are in an open-ended war with Islam.

Ironically, one of the expressed aims of al Qaeda is the overthrow of the monarchs, despots or elected leaders of Middle Eastern Islamic nations.

Neither al Qaeda’s soldiers, nor the Taliban, wear uniforms. They are classic guerrilla fighters, fading away like fog into the indigenous population. Not since the day of the Kamikaze, has the world witnessed suicide as an act of war.

While listening to our young President, I was reminded, too, of John F. Kennedy’s inaugural speech, possibly one of the greatest ever delivered in America since Lincoln’s Gettysburg address.

On that cold January day in1961, Kennedy said, “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”

While Obama’s speech was delivered well and met with polite applause from the cadets and others at West Point, its real message was that America will not shoulder the burdens of an open-ended war by itself or with the desultory support of NATO allies.

I thought, too, of the long Cold War America fought with the former Soviet Union.

For a little while, Afghanistan will be Obama’s war. And then we will leave.

We have some big problems here at home, a recession and joblessness, but we have always been able to work our way out of these cyclical financial difficulties.

This time it’s different. We have a White House and Congress hell-bent on initiatives such as Obamacare and Cap-and-Trade that will utterly destroy the economy and the nation. And they know it. And they don’t care.

One wonders, at this time and place, which is the worse enemy?

Obama: Saluting for the Cameras

By Alan Caruba

Presidents engage in all kinds of ceremonial events. Every Thanksgiving, they “pardon” a turkey so it doesn’t end up on the White House menu. They make sure they are photographed with the winning teams of various sporting series. Every Easter they can be found at the White House Egg Roll accompanied, I have always suspected, by a Secret Service agent in a large bunny costume.

The other evening, shortly after midnight, President Obama made sure to be photographed standing in line with military personnel and some civilians in attendance as the dead, including three drug enforcement agents, from Afghanistan were returned home at Dover Air Force base. Our military casualties are received in a solemn ceremony few except those in attendance ever witness.

Presidents have never participated in this ceremony. The caskets are a too vivid reminder that part of their job is to send troops in harm’s way. President Bush preferred to meet with the families of fallen heroes.

When 241 U.S. military were murdered by a suicide bomber in Beirut on October 23, 1983, President Ronald Reagan attended a ceremony at Camp Lejeune to speak of his grief and anger. Three months after the bombing, he pulled out U.S. troops.

The bombing, authorized by Iran and carried out by Hezbollah, foretold of the way our troops would be attacked by an enemy that would not meet them on the field of battle, would not wear a uniform, and preferred fanatical Islamic self-sacrifice as an instrument of war. The ultimate attack was al Qaeda’s 9/11 against civilians.

President Obama wasn’t there to honor those fallen soldiers or marines. He was there to be seen saluting.

Obama was there because, during the campaign he had used the war in Afghanistan as a way to criticize former President Bush’s decision to depose Iraq’s dictator only to find himself in unforeseen and ill-considered circumstances that required years and a change of strategy to redeem.

Afghanistan, said candidate Obama, was “a war of necessity” whereas Iraq was “a war of choice.” Only now, nine months into his first term, Obama is finding it very difficult to make a choice, to determine the “necessity” of conducting the war in Afghanistan or whether to withdraw from it.

What bothered me, as someone who served in the U.S. Army, was the way Obama was using those returning dead to “send a message” that he was very serious about the decision he was about to make.

The strategy concerning Afghanistan was handed to him by the existing Bush administration in a report prepared for his assumption of the office. His hand-picked general in the field says we will lose without increasing present troop strength.

Obama’s presence that evening was about perceptions and imagery. It was his way of trying to influence public opinion about his failure to act.

Increasingly, questions are being raised about his campaign statements and presumably his commitment to pursue the Taliban and al Qaeda in a vigorous fashion. The enemy knows it and it too is doing what it can to influence public opinion; they have stepped up the killing of American troops.

Frankly, knowing that he had never worn the uniform of his nation, it bothered me that he would stand there in the dark giving a salute. The closest he ever got to wearing a uniform and saluting in his past was when he was in the Boy Scouts—the Indonesian Boy Scouts.

There is something coldly calculating about using the returning battle dead to try to bolster an image of patriotism and commitment to military action, but that is what this President is all about, the image of things, statements about things in which he does not believe and intends to “transform.”

The Afghanistan Quagmire

By Alan Caruba

In November 2008, I wrote of Afghanistan, “Having lived through the long years of the war in Vietnam, I can tell you that Afghanistan looks and smells like Vietnam. It is the classic wrong war in the wrong place.”

I still think the U.S. should leave. I don’t like having to pack up and abandon Afghanistan to its fate, but Afghanistan’s fate has been fought over for centuries and, in the modern era, it has defied any invasion or intrusion into its affairs.

It is in a very bad neighborhood that includes Russia, Iran, and the worst basket case of all, Pakistan. The Afghans and Pakistanis mutually despise each other.

When someone like Adm. Mike Mullen, the current Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, says that the situation in Afghanistan has been “deteriorating” over the past few years and that the “Taliban insurgency has gotten more sophisticated”, as he did on August 23, you better pay attention.

More importantly, the White House had better pay attention. The Admiral is trying to send it a message. He said, for example, he was “extremely concerned” about the recent bombings in Iraq. Speaking on CNN’s ‘State of the Nation’, it was no secret that the man overseeing the greatest military on Earth was warning that it is ill-equipped to deal with insurgencies short of the massive infusion of manpower.

We tried that in Vietnam. It didn’t work. The former Soviets tried that in Afghanistan. It didn’t work. The invasions were successful in turning both places into slaughterhouses. History cries out against foreign engagement in this feeble excuse for a nation.

The U.S. justification for the waging of war is because 9/11 was planned there. It is a fallacy. The next attack on America can be planned anywhere. Al Qaeda does not need Afghanistan to do that.

Specifically, the last general charged with succeeding in Afghanistan asked for and was denied 10,000 more troops. Then he was replaced.

All during the long years of the war in Vietnam, Americans were told that another increase of troops would turn the tide, but we know now what the White House knew then; there was no indigenous enthusiasm for the South Vietnamese generals and even less for the Americans. Both Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon knew we could not win a war there and some 57,000 American dead is their ugly legacy.

We have been in Afghanistan since 9/11 when we enjoyed an initial success chasing out the Taliban and al Qaeda. That was accomplished, not by a massive U.S. troop infusion, but by hiring its northern tribes who were opposed to the Taliban, intruders from across the border in Pakistan, in combination with our extraordinary air power. Earlier, during the years of the Soviet invasion, the U.S. provided massive amounts of money and weapons to Afghan tribes, some which were led by notorious drug lords.

The Taliban are back. The Afghans are tired of American troops in their midst and you can largely dismiss the smaller numbers of troops from “coalition” nations because they are window-dressing. This does not diminish the casualties they have sustained, but it does acknowledge their very reluctant participation.

Long ago, the British learned that Afghanistan is a place where empires go to die.

Virtually every military expert agrees that Afghanistan is the last place on Earth for a modern army to wage war and that includes every NATO general. It no doubt includes the Russians whose invasion ultimately brought down the former Soviet Union. That whole game was part of the larger Cold War.

Afghanistan never was much of a “nation” though it was relatively calm when Afghan dynasties ruled from around the 1700s into the last century. In terms of foreign policy, the U.S. had largely ignored Afghanistan for decades.

The notion that democracy as practiced in the West can be transplanted there is farcical though some previous Afghan regimes had made progress to free women from Islamic subjugation. Efforts toward modernization have always been painfully slow there.

Since the 1700s the primary export from Afghanistan has been heroin and it remains so today. Other than growing poppies, there’s not much that passes for an economy there. It doesn’t matter who’s elected because the business of Afghanistan is opium. American troops will not alter that.

The U.S. war in Afghanistan has been going on since 2001, but Americans dislike long wars. We fought a long one and a wrong one in Vietnam. They serve no purpose. Our military exists to kill people and smash things. Nation building is not one of its skill sets, nor should it be.

Right now Americans are distracted by the battles over the hideous healthcare reform bill and Cap-and-Trade. Americans rightfully fear that those in control of our government are deliberately bankrupting the nation. In increasing numbers they have concluded that electing Obama president was a very bad idea.

It is unfortunate that we measure wars by the number of casualties, but they will continue in Afghanistan and, when Americans at last turn their collective attention to them, the pressure to withdraw from Afghanistan will mount.

I confess that the strategic reasons for being there defy my understanding, other than its proximity to Pakistan. It sounds to me like the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs wants to leave and for very good reasons that date back at least three centuries and longer.

The war on terror will go on until we kill as many of the leadership of al Qaeda as possible. When it becomes too lethal to join al Qaeda, its members will go back to herding goats. It is a war that can and should be fought covertly and as viciously as possible.

War! War! War!

By Alan Caruba

“In defense of our nation, a president must be a clear-eyed realist. There are limits to the smiles and scowls of diplomacy. Armies and missiles are not stopped by stiff notes of condemnation. They are held in check by strength and purpose and the promise of swift punishment.” I will tell you who said that at the end of this commentary.

D-Day, 65 years ago, was one of many days throughout history that determined the final outcome of a war. I suspect one can attach a great battle to just about every day in the calendar because the history of humanity is one of constant warfare somewhere, anywhere in the world where two men, two families, two tribes, two empires, or two or more states clashed.

The courage that Americans, joined by Canadians, British, Free French, Polish, and other troops showed on June 6, 1944 preserved freedom for a bit longer among the victors, though all of Eastern Europe had to be written off as the bribe to keep Soviet Russia involved. It would ultimately loose 20 million of its people.

The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed about 199,000. People forget that the Japanese emperor and the military, though clearly defeated, refused to concede.

War is the natural element of mankind. Peace is merely the interlude between wars.

Man is the most dangerous creature on Earth and young men, in particular, are either conscripted into armies or will just as likely form gangs to fulfill the desire “to seek the bubble reputation even in the cannon’s mouth.”

Every time I hear Barack Obama talk of diplomacy, I can hear guns being cocked or missiles being positioned. He is surely the most naïve President since the days of Woodrow Wilson who get elected promising keep the U.S. out of World War I and then, after committing U.S. troops, he went to Europe to participate in the writing of the Versailles Treaty where the British and the French ate his lunch. They divided up the spoils, punished Germany, and set in motion World War II before the ink was dry.

Wilson returned home with his dream of a League of Nations and the U.S. Senate shot it down, preferring to maintain our sovereignty than to get in bed with the knaves that started WWI.

That fool’s dream of an organization to ensure world peace was revived by Franklin Delano Roosevelt and signed into being by his successor, Harry S. Truman, who probably had little choice in the matter. Its first Secretary General was a Soviet spy named Alger Hiss, a communist who had risen high in the FDR government.

The world has always been a dangerous place because it has always been full of egotists and psychopaths who have seized or gained power in one fashion or another. Alexander tried his hand at a Macedonian empire. Rome laid down some fine roads and used them to ensure their hold on a widespread Mediterranean empire. Attila knocked on the doors of Europe. The Visigoths and other barbarian tribes sacked Rome.

The Church sent forth crusades in response to the military aspirations of Muslims to seize and hold Jerusalem, holy to Christian and Jew. The Muslims or Moors had already spread far into India and northern Africa, up into Spain. Their northern drive into Europe was stopped at Poitiers, France in 732 AD and on September 11, 1683 they were decisively defeated at the gates of Vienna.

In the last century, the Empire of Japan murdered thousands, if not millions in China while waging war to control Asia. In Europe the Nazis redefined barbarism and depravity.

War! War! War! Diplomacy is merely the process by which war may be delayed a bit and the terms of surrender are determined by the winner. Diplomacy has never stopped a despot from pursuing war. It has merely rescheduled it.

In 1986, Osama bin Laden formally declared war on the United States. He is still at war with the United States whether anyone is paying attention or not. And we are not. The Iranians, as crazed as bin Laden, have made their intentions clear by declaring “Death to America!” and “Death to Israel” every single day since seizing our diplomats in 1979 and holding them for 444 days.

After 9/11, George W. Bush did not hesitate to pursue war against bin Laden in Afghanistan and against a man, Saddam Hussein, and nation, Iraq, that were the object of dozens of useless United Nations resolutions as an instigator of wars. Obama’s response has been to denigrate our military achievement in Iraq and demand that Guantanamo be closed down.

Barack Obama is going to get a lot of Americans killed with his poetry about diplomacy.

The lessons of history are lost on this fool. Buchenwold concentration camp and the beach at Normandy are just background for “photo ops” to this greatest of narcissists. He is too busy waging his own war on America while seeking yet another stage on which to strut.

To become a nation in its own right America took on the greatest military power of its time, Great Britain, and won. It fought Barbary pirates. It waged a bloody civil war for its soul and won. It fought Mexico and added territory by winning. It fought Spain. It fought insurgents in the Philippines. It fought two world wars. It fought Communists in Korea. It fought them again in Vietnam. It forced the Russians to back off in Cuba. It fought Communists on the island of Granada and it fought a drug lord in Panama. It fought Iraq after it invaded Kuwait. It fought the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan and it again fought a despot in Iraq. We are still in both these places.

On September 10, 2001 Americans thought they were not at war with anyone. They were wrong. The only thing that has kept us from another attack was the policy enunciated in the quote with which I began this contemplation of war and peace. The man who said it is former President George W. Bush. The date was November 19, 1999.

Pakistan Implodes

By Alan Caruba

The wars going on in the Middle East will soon be the entire world’s next war as the fanatic Islamists throughout the region threaten to take over Pakistan and Afghanistan while continuing to wage war in Iraq. If they’re successful, India will be dragged into the full scale battle against the Taliban and al Qaeda. Where it spreads from there is anyone’s guess.

It is a battle between the seventh century of Islam and the twenty-first century of the rest of the world. It is a battle between men who believe that Allah demands it and they are prepared to spend as much time as necessary to achieve victory.

It is a battle in which the United States has been an unwilling participant for a very long time. The jihadists drew blood in Beirut, Lebanon during the Reagan years in the 80s and again when they blew up two U.S. embassies in Africa during the Clinton years. Tellingly, it included an abortive effort to destroy the Twin Towers in 1993.

After September 11, 2001, Americans applauded the vigorous response of the Bush administration in Afghanistan, but in point of fact al Qaeda’s Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri easily moved across the border into Pakistan and intelligence services believe they have been there ever since.

This enemy senses serious weakness in the new President. Obama has chosen Afghanistan, the worst place to fight a war, as his new “front” while at the same time announcing he is withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq. The increase of bombings in Iraq is no accident. It is an al Qaeda calling card. The worst of the news is the potential collapse of Pakistan as Taliban factions acquire more and more territory in what has always been a very poor excuse for a nation.

As Pakistan’s leading English-language newspaper, Dawn, recently said in an editorial, “…the Taliban are no longer a threat, but a grotesque reality,” noting that “The writ of the government weakens by the hour, while the terrorists are steadily emboldened. Yet the state and its institutions—including the military—have so far shown an appalling lack of commitment or wherewithal to force back the swarm.”

This is a newspaper in a Muslim nation, written by Muslims, who call the Taliban “grotesque.” And they should know! The editorial warned that, “The time in which to turn back the tide is fast running out.”

One of the most brilliant analysts of Middle Eastern affairs is Walid Phares, the Director of the Future Terrorism Project at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. “As the U.S. administration and its allies are devising a new strategy for the next steps in Afghanistan, the jihadists have already begun their next move—but this time it’s inside Pakistan.”

“If Washington and its allies fail to see the big picture in the fight against the Taliban and Al Qaeda,” wrote Phares, “which unfortunately may be the case now, the rapidly deteriorating situation will soon exceed the northwestern provinces of Pakistan to spill over to both Afghanistan and India.”

Simply put, you cannot negotiate with the Taliban or al Qaeda. Their promises mean nothing because they operate under taqiyya, an Arab/Muslim term that terrorism expert, Douglas Farah tells us is “embraced by radical Islamists. It blesses the concept of disguising one’s beliefs, intentions, convictions, ideas, feelings, opinions or strategies from the enemy and the infidel.”

“In practical terms,” says Farah, “it is manifested as dissimulation, lying, deceiving, vexing and confounding with the intention of deflecting attention, foiling or pre-emptive blocking.”

In an excellent Policy Analysis published by the Cato Institute on April 13, Malou Innocent shared her observations after having recently returned from a fact-finding trip to Pakistan.

Just how bad is the situation there? All of the seven tribal agencies administered by the Pakistan government are either under the de facto control or threatened by the Taliban movement. A recent truce between the government and the Taliban is of no real substance and should not be treated as such. As Ms. Innocent notes, “the military agreed not to launch operations without consulting tribal elders…(but) the army is more inclined to fight India, not a civil war within its borders.”

That is extremely bad news, but Pakistan has been a nation of extremes since it came into being after breaking away from the newly independent India in 1947 to become an Islamic state. The army—currently some 600,000 soldiers—has been the only stable element and has provided a number of presidents or rulers via coups.

Elements within the government such as its intelligence service have leaned favorably toward the Taliban and al Qaeda. Even so, “U.S. officials acknowledge, however, that the Pakistani government has captured more terrorists and committed more troops than almost any other nation in the ‘war on terror’.”

In its urban, modern cities and areas, there appears to be a genuine desire for real democracy, but the Taliban threatens to drag Pakistan back to the seventh century in its quest for a new caliphate. While the nation has remained focused on war with India since its founding, the real threat has always been the growth of fundamentalist Islam and it now poses the potential overthrow of the government.

Should that government fail, you will watch India go to full battle-ready status. Afghanistan’s government will likely fail despite the presence of U.S./NATO forces and the momentum to continue the jihad into all the nations of the region would pose a grave threat to the West. It could only be solved only by combat.

And the question everyone is wondering, if not asking, is whether Barack Obama will make the tough decisions necessary to keep Pakistan from falling to the Taliban or is willing, as George W. Bush was, to drive out a tyrannical regime?

Embracing Evil

By Alan Caruba

An interesting and disturbing pattern is emerging in the Obama White House. It evoked little comment in the mainstream press when he returned a bust of Winston Churchill to the British embassy and then gave short shrift to a recent visit by UK Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, albeit the UK’s support of this nation through thick and thin.

This was pre-dated by Obama’s calls for negotiations with Iran, an implacable enemy since it first took U.S. diplomats hostage in 1979. It includes more recent comments to the effect that we should be negotiating with members of the Taliban in Afghanistan. What’s next? An invitation to Osama bin Laden to share a glass of camel’s milk some weekend at his convenience?

The last century and now this one is testimony to the liberal embrace of every totalitarian regime and, in particular, those that engaged in mass murder, whether it be the Soviets, Mao’s Red China, the communist Vietnamese, or Fidel’s Cuba.

You could call it a fatal attraction and it is exposed in Jamie Glazov’s excellent new book, “United in Hate: The Left’s Romance with Tyranny and Terror” ($29.95, WND Books). I recommend it because, as you read it, you will begin to understand why so many “intellectuals” of the Left and many of the Hollywood community were and continue to be eager to embrace the enemies of freedom throughout the world.

The most famous of the latter is Jane Fonda who visited North Vietnam at a time America was engaged in war with that nation. More recently, Sean Penn disgraced himself as an apologist for the tyranny of the late, unlamented Saddam Hussein, as well as becoming the new-found friend of Venezuela’s Huge Chavez. Jimmy Carter has never met a dictator or Islamist terror organization he could not embrace.

In the tradition of Eric Hoffer’s breakthrough book, “The True Believer”, Glazov points to the way those that blame America for its capitalism, its economic success, and its celebration of consumerism, as the reason why some hate us. They always profess to be advocates for “peace”, “social justice” and “equality.”

They are people who profess to love “humanity” and who empathize with the alleged “victims of capitalism.” Glazov says “The megalomania and narcissism from which most believers suffer reinforce this dynamic.”

“To keep this toxic mindset in place, the believer must convince himself that he knows something that ordinary human beings do not.”

One of the most distinguishing factors of totalitarian regimes, aside from the fact that they murder or imprison countless people deemed “enemies of the state” is the way they make mush of words that describe reality.

We saw this practice emerge in the Obama administration when the new Director of Homeland Security could not bring herself to actually say the word “terror” when testifying before Congress. Memorandums are flying around DC agencies to avoid words like Islamist and terrorist, substituting “extremist” instead.

Glazov points out it should come as no surprise that “fascism and communism were centrally involved in the birth and development of Islamism. The Nazis, for instance, helped create Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, a pioneering Islamic extremist group founded in 1928.”

Why, for example, would the Obama administration offer nearly a billion dollars to Hamas to “rebuild Gaza” when they spent the last four years rocketing Israel?

Conservatives know there is evil in the world and they have their antenna on alert for signs of it here at home and abroad. Too many celebrated and party line Liberals, however, are drawn to today’s ideological butchers like moths to a flame.

Read Glazov’s new book. Watch who Obama calls his friends, appoints to position of power, and how he steers America’s foreign policy to reflect the Left’s love affair with murderous regimes while dissing our real friends.