Ignatieff has seen the jihad up close, and he believes hearts-and-minds development projects will fix it -- once again showing that observation alone, when not properly grounded in study of the values and principles of the culture at hand, can sometimes lead one astray. How will development projects address the Taliban's insistence that what they are doing is carrying out the law of the one true God?
"When Iggy met the Taliban," by Colin Freeze in the Globe and Mail (thanks to all who sent this in):
It’s a pithy paragraph, capturing as it does the Taliban’s contempt for international conventions and their predilection for medieval punishments.The central image is very well crafted, too. One can almost imagine the blood-spattered rope circle, the vacant swinging space, which once held the neck of the fallen ruler who was lynched for being a superpower’s stooge.
“Three nights before I arrived, the Taliban had dragged him out of the [United Nations] guesthouse, castrated him and beaten him to death and hanged his pulpy body from the stanchion of a traffic warden’s observation tower. As I drove into the city, only the noose, flecked with blood, remained swinging from the tower.”
So wrote Michael Ignatieff in 1997 in an essay for The New Yorker. At the time, he was a celebrated writer -- one who happened to arrive in Kabul just as the Taliban was taking over and the world’s security situation was about to under go some seismic shifts. It was at this point that the writer became acquainted with what he called the “pitiless logic of jihad.”
The noose had been used to hang a Soviet-backed former Afghan president, Muhammed Najibullah. His final indignities were a major coup for the Taliban, who by then had captured three-quarters of the country, and were well en route to implementing what they regarded as God’s law.
Mr. Ignatieff actually met Taliban fighters face to face during his visit, experiences reflected in the 1997 essay that puts what he did and saw into the context of a big-picture rumination: How should the international community deal with the rise of remorseless irregular warriors, who care nothing about human rights nor the conventions of war?
Fast forward a decade later, and the question still hangs.
Mr. Ignatieff was back in Afghanistan this past weekend. This time, as a top Western politician, representing the Official Opposition of a country that has sent over 2,500 soldiers to help fight the Taliban.
Mr. Ignatieff, the Deputy Leader of the Liberal Party of Canada, was travelling with his former political rival, Leader Stephane Dion. Their shared message was that Canada is going to want the soldiers back, sooner rather than later.
While the U.S. military and NATO allies, including Canada, have beaten back the Taliban over the past six years, the jihadists stubbornly linger. Now, the Liberals are pushing an agenda to ratchet down dangerous Canadian combat missions in the Taliban’s heartland, and crank up the less dangerous work, like development projects. (The position is fully articulated in an eight-page document released last week -- www.liberal.ca/story_13465_e.aspx .)
Because Mr. Ignatieff has hit hawkish notes in the past, he was asked within minutes of landing at Kandahar about whether he supported his party’s calls to start beating swords into ploughshares. “I wouldn’t be on this airfield if I didn’t,” he told reporters who asked whether he supported his party’s position.
While working with Mr. Dion in Kabul, the Liberal second-in-command said they both made sure that President Karzai got the message from a potential Canadian government-in-waiting “The key thing that the president understands, and the ministers understand, is that sooner or later this country is going to stand on its feet,” Mr. Ignatieff said.
For his part, President Karzai was gracious, but seemed unconvinced of the wisdom of the Liberal position. In a statement following the meeting, Mr. Karzai expressed thanks for Canada’s sacrifices, but pointedly added that “the events of September 11 serves us well in reminding ourselves that not fighting terrorism head-on can have disastrous consequences for Afghanistan, the region and the world at large.”
Not long after President Karzai’s statement, the Taliban issued a statement of their own.
It was called “Martyrdom attack preformed in Capital Kabul city.”
On Monday. gunmen killed eight inside a Kabul hotel. The Islamists claimed the attack was a noteworthy blow against “Western-backed puppet government, as well as foreign embassies and businesses.”
Read it all.
...And against humanitarian aid workers and other representatives of civilization.
"The pitiless logic of Jihad."
Perhaps the most on the money observation I've read since I started to educate myself on Islam. The logic of Jihad is pitiless, devoid of any human compassion or empathy, a rigid canon of hatred which brokers no dissent or tolerance, only Islam applied in the most ruthless possible form. Death, destruction, suffering and hopelessness, for any Muslim or non-Muslim caught in it's evil clutches.
The pitiless logic of Jihad indeed.
There are a couple of important issues that are factually incorrect about this column...
1) Najibullah was hanged in 1992, not 1997...(perhaps Ignatieff was recounting events in '92 in an essay written 5 years later, but the article never specifies as much).
2) The people who hanged him were NOT the Taliban.
The Taliban didn't even exist as an organization until 1994, a fact that belies the urban myth that the USA created the Taliban through its support of the anti-Soviet resistance in the 1980s; the USA had washed its hands of the victorious Mujahadin in '92 when it became apparent they were more interested in fighting among themselves than in governing Afghanistan. The Taliban were created by the Pakistani ISI in '94 and recruited from among Afghan refugees in NW Pakistan. They conquered most of Afghanistan 4 years later.
Actually, the Taliban conquered most of Afghanistan TWO years later ('96).
Mr. Ignatieff is a fool. He has written 2 books that are completely inaccurate about the Balkan conflicts.
He and his Liberal stooges placed the Canadian forces into their combat role, and when they lost their election cried foul and blamed the Conservative government for the result.
Now Iggy and his pals are trumping beating swords into ploughshares, what a pipe dream.
These guys are clueless, they have two choices, stay and fight, or withdraw. The Taliban and company will never cease to come forward until they either kill everyone or are killed themselves.
I don't believe any country in the west has the ability to stay and achieve this unfortunately.
As long as Pakistan remains a power in the region, the Taliban will always be there and they will always have fresh conscripts.
Cornelius,
Most likely those who accuse the US of creating the Taliban look at Pakistan as a US puppet and just assume they were doing America's bidding.
In any case, it's more fun to blame the US. Politically correct as well. We can't allow a third world country to be accused of destroying itself. Obviously the big bad Uncle Sam did it. Funny, he would have done it at about the same time he was assiduously courting Yasser Arafat.
Don't forget "The pitiless logic of Liberals".
Yes the Pakistan's ISI have mastered the art of covert operations as Bernard Henri Levi discovered in his investigations into the murder of Daniel Pearl who was hot on the scent.
It is still a mystery to me WHY Clinton allowed the development of the Pakistani nuclear bomb to proceed unhindered.
"Observation alone, when not properly grounded in study of the values and principles of the culture at hand, can sometimes lead one astray."
That says it all. Observation without knowledge is just that, and Ignatieff is not simply led 'astray'- he remains pitifully clueless. The worst is that he and the likes of him infect others with their cluelessnes.
Bravo Cornelius, for once you got it right!
Sheik Yer Mama,
Bugger off!
I don't give a crap what Ignatieff says. He was parachuted into a riding, not having lived in Canada for decades - another Trudeau type poseur. He can screw off.
http://www.macleans.ca/article.jsp?content=20061218_138216_138216
That's not nice, Corni!
I commended you for 'getting it'-, and now you're losing all your PC skills over it....?
Michael Ignatieff, a ceaseless lecturer to the Israelis about what they "must" do in order to obtain "peace," is hopeless in his impervious-to-reality views. He knows next to nothing about Islam, its texts and tenets and attitudes. He knows nothing about the history of Islamic conquest of non-Muslim lands, or of what happened to the non-Muslims under Muslim rule in the lands conquered, over 1350 years, from Spain to the East Indies.
He attitudinizes. He emotes. He presents himself as a "liberal." But old-fashioned liberals would not recognize him as such. He is a new breed, a breed that is going to be far less fashionable, go out of favor very fast, as the full meaning and menace of Islam knocks cock-a-hoop all kinds of soft-minded people, even the Michael Ignatieffs of this world. It's hard to say whether or not he was more self-assuredly dangerous when he was at the Kennedy School, or now that he has returned to Canada, but there are many in Cambridge -- so I have been informed and do not doubt -- delighted to be relieved of his bien-pensant presence.