If I had a nickel for all the times people in audiences where I've spoken, or emailers to this site, or learned analysts with whom I've debated, or any number of other people have told me confidently that Islam is not a monolith, that the umma is rent by deep divisions, and that the simple Sunni-Shi'ite divide about which every schoolchild knows would preclude any large-scale cooperative jihad action -- if I had a nickel for every one, I'd be able to buy that Jihad Watch learjet I had to return when Jamal Badawi reneged on his promise.
Islam is indeed not a monolith. The umma is indeed rent by deep divisions. Sunnis and Shi'ites do indeed hate each other. You'll note that the Taliban rep quoted here even says that the Iranians and the Taliban have different religions. But will Sunnis and Shi'ites cooperate in jihad activity? Sure, no problem. Iranian already funds Hamas. And now this.
"Iranians train Taliban to use roadside bombs," by Miles Amoore in The Sunday Times, March 21 (thanks to all who sent this in):
TALIBAN commanders have revealed that hundreds of insurgents have been trained in Iran to kill Nato forces in Afghanistan.The commanders said they had learnt to mount complex ambushes and lay improvised explosive devices (IEDs), which have been responsible for most of the deaths of British troops in Helmand province. [...]
According to the commanders, Iranian officials paid them to attend three-month courses during the winter. [...]
Karl Eikenberry, the American ambassador to Afghanistan, recently described signs of co-operation between Iran and the Taliban as disturbing.
"Iran or elements within Iran have provided training assistance and some weapons to the Taliban," he said.
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran has publicly backed his Afghan counterpart, Hamid Karzai. But American and British officials have accused Iran of playing a double game by giving covert backing to the Taliban.
Shi'ite Iran had long opposed the Sunni-dominated Taliban. The reason for the change was summarised by one Taliban commander who said of the Iranians: "Our religions and our histories are different but our target is the same. We both want to kill Americans."
As much as the Hatfields and the McCoys hated one another, infidels, with regard to Islam and all of their divisions, are like some third neighbor who both the Hatfields and the McCoys hate so much that they are willing to work together to get that third neighbor. What this should do for the more dense infidels is impress upon their thick head that Islam hates you more than they hate one another. What is so hard to understand about that?
If Iran is covertly backing the Taliban then we should start sending convert drones to bomb Iranian military bases. Kinda like an eye for an eye thing.Its very middle eastern.
Isn't there an Arab proverb that says - the enemy of my enemy is my friend?
Iranians training Taliban: "Our religions and our histories are different but our target is the same. We both want to kill Americans."
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Lookâcommon ground! sarc/off
Krazy kafir, I believe you are thinking of this proverb:
It is me against my brother, me and my brother against our cousins; my family against the tribe, and all of us against the infidel."
Thanks, gravenimage.
A relative of mine who served in Tikrit,and who came home thinking it was all a crazy effort that made no sense from the viewpoint of those who understand that the Camp of Islam would always be united against Infidels, but that within that camp there were divisions and fissures just waiting to be exploited -- to be exploited, in most cases, by the world's Infidels, with America in the lead, doing nothing to prevent them or patch them up -- put it to me thus:
If there are two men in a barroom, each of whom deeply resents or even hates the other, and they are just on the point of really going at it, but each of them resents you, and hates you, even more than they do each other, then for god's sake, don't go into that barroom. If they are close to blows, why enter in order to prevent them from doing the very thing that would help to weaken both of them.
Let me ask a question I have asked many dozens of times at this site: from the American point of view, from the point of view of the world's threatened non-Muslims, was the Iran-Iraq War, that lasted from 1980 to 1988, a good thing or a bad thing? Let's see behind such unexamined, and flimsy assertions as "we need to avoid instability in the Middle East a all costs" ("instability" in the Muslim states may use up their attention, their men, their money, their morale, not ours, and what's more, may give us the breathing space to figure out, especially in imperilled Western Europe, what Islam is all about and why its tyrannical hold on the minds of men must not be allowed to extend any further into the historic heart of the West, that is, Europe).
We were wrong to enter that bar room. The fighting will mount pari passu with our withdrawal, and that outcome will constitute not a "failure" of American policy, but the only "victory" that was ever possible in the first place, and it will be, though not in a way that either the Bush or the Obama Administration can take credit for, such a "victory." Only those who predicted it years ago, and who explained why it would constitute such a victory, have a right to claim it.
That is not exactly how my friend put it. He was in the military, and had a pithier way of putting it. But I'm sure he won't mind this re-write. He knows my heart and mind are in the right place.
iran has been doing this from the start, it has attacked other Western targets including Israeli targets by using hizboys in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza. we all know the ruling elites of the land of Sowdi, Egypt,jordan are fearful of iranian thugs.
According to Bill Warner of The Center for the Study of Political Islam, 61% of the verses in the Koran denounce Infidels, so it's no wonder that the various Islamic sects unite against a common enemy.
That's what makes General Patraeus's statement about the Arab-Israeli conflict complicating the fight so absurd, as though Israel, an Infidel state, would ever be accepted, and as though the Infidel American soldiers will ever be liked.
Look, General Petraeus would have great difficulty -- it would probably be impossible -- for him to accept the idea that what he tried so hard to accomplish, and is trying so hard to accomplish now, doesn't make sense, is more of what the Bush Administration insisted upon as part of, or related to, the messianic sentimentalism of bringing "freedom" to the "ordinary moms and dads" in the Middle East, an utter impossibility if by "freedom" we mean advanced Western democracies rather than merely an election or two, then followed by coups and counter-coups of various brands of despots or "royal famiiies" keeping power through the army and mukhabarat.
If you have spent time, invested yourself in, a certain policy, and done so year after year, you would have to be very strong to stand back, think clearly, and come to understand that what really matters is weakening the Camp of Islam, and not in bringing "freedom" to "ordinary moms and dads" in the Middle East but in protecting freedom for "ordinary moms and dads" (and unordinary ones too, including those who are childless) in the placces where freedoms have been developed, over many centuries, in Europe, and now are threatened not by a superior system, not by a higher morality, but merely by sheer numbers, by the demographic conquest, aided by campaigns of Da'wa, and the Money Weapon, and vast propaganda effort, of Muslims who, though in many cases they come as "refugees" from the squalor and backwardness and despotisms of Muslim lands, fail to recognize that that squalor and backwardness and despotism is a result of Islam itself, the very thing that, with their presence and their demands and their aggressive acts, they work to have dominate in the very West that so generously and naively took them in.
I don't know if General Petraeus will ponder the matter, and perhaps come to regard the effort in Iraq, and Afghanistan, and Pakistan, as not worth it, one that included in the case ofIraq, will-o'-the-wisp goals that recede, and recede, and in Afghanistan and Pakistan, far more limited goals -- the regimes in both countries are not only corrupt and meretricious, but cannot possibly deliver anything like good government, and even if "Al Qaeda" is defeated, or the Taliban defeated, the same ideology, the same hostility and hatred toward Infidels, will remain in Afghanistan and Pakistan, even among the very people who, for their own reasons, had wanted the Americans to fight the Taliban and fight Al Qaeda.
Think of the two trillion dollars (see Joseph Stiglitz' calculations) spent or committed (as with lifetime care for tens of thousands of seriously wounded veterans) asa result of Iraq. What might have been done with that money, in Western Europe, to help the forces resisting Islam just as, after World War II, the American government poured money into Western Europe, into its political parties too, if they were cable to resist Communism. But now the American government criticizes the Swiss for the vote to ban the minaret, distances itself from those who, in France (Philippe de Villiers) in the Netherlands (Geert Wilders), in Great Britain (Lord Pearson), and elsewhere seem most keenly to see the Islamic threat. The American government, that during the Cold War supported the Congress for Cultural Freedom, and poured money into publishing the best magazine in the English-speaknig world, Encounter, and had its own publishing houses to reprint Russian emigre literature and political tracts, does nothing, now, for those whose works could have such an effect on Muslims. Not a cent has gone to translating and publishing ibn Warraq's "Why I Am Not A Muslim" or Anwar Shaikh's "Islam: The Arab National Religion" nor to finding the best translators, and putting into Arabic, Farsi, Urdu, Bahasa in its various forms, such books as Wafa Sultan's "The God That Hates" or the growing collections of testimonies by ex-Muslims, such as that edited by Ibn Warraq, "Leaving Islam." No, there is no propagande effort, none, because the American government is afraid to alien Muslims, and does not wish to do a thing that they might get wind of, because we have convinced ourselves we have to have their cooperation, and we have constantly to earn the right to protect their regimes and people from Al Qaeda, from the Taliban, from tutti quanti.
No, no, no.
It's all a crazy strategy, crazy because we are not looking beyond the next two or three years, not realizing this is not a long war but a war without end, and world-wide, and it is not to be solved by incredibly expensive expeditionary forces entering Muslim-ruled lands to "make things better" rather than to make war.
And so we tiptoe, and allow this, and allow that, because we don't want to "alienate" those whosee "hearts and minds" we have to win, not realizing that they cannot be won, but only, and at great expense, at the expense of all our ideals and sometiimes, only by sacrificing our most loyal allies and our principles, and our own sense of ourseelves, of the West, in order not to "alienate" these Muslims.
This has led to mad policies, madly executed.
Just think, by way of evidence, of the headline in today's New York Times that reads:
"Fearful of alienating Afghans, U.S. Turns Blind Eye to Opium."
Fearful of alienating, fearful of alienating, fearful of alienating.....
Perhaps on some level one can excuse a general who has spent so much effort on a wasted cause for refusing to give up on that cause, particularly since the armed forces are tasked with fulfilling goals set by others in the political class, but in the end that is what LEADERSHIP is all about, that is why men put their entire life on the line, their career, their monetary concerns. Leaders find a way to do a gut check and whatever the cost do what is right. That our political class, and our military leaders, are willing to continue to waste lives, limbs, time and a sickening amount of resources (money) on these absolutely absurd adventures in Muslim lands truly is a staggering condemnation of our current ruling class. If even one of them has read even a tenth of what is posted on this site for the past ten years they would have enough of a starting point from which to launch their attack on the failed polices. That none of them have done that, or if some have made meager attempts, done enough to force the necessary change, brings eternal condemnation on them all, something that history will record, eventually, unless of course it is Muslims who are writing the history of what was once Western Civilization.
You can bet your bottom dollar, or nickels, that when Iran does have the ability to produce "suitcase nukes" they will be handing them out, like candy, to the "Hiz-balls" and "Tally-banners" to blow up Jooz and Americans.
@Hugh
Look were not the Americans and the Israelis helping out the Al-Qaeda linked Jundullah in Iranian Sistan-Baluchistan province ?
Were you not talking about helping the anti-Iran , Marxist "People's Mujahidin" group in Iraq ?
Did the Israelis not help the anti-Lebanon Southern Lebanese Army (SLA) for years in southern Lebanon ?
Consider this as a tit for tat for exactly what the Israelis and the US did to Iran through their proxies.
Let's put this in the terms that the "kids" can understand -
Crips training Bloods: "Our bandannas and our graffiti are different but our beef is the same. We both want to kill cops."
China is also training and arming the Taliban too. First the few Taliban attack on China never threaten China exsitance as than state but have americaian military bases in Afghanistan are than major threat to China exsitance. Plus China have than huge muslim population alread may-be 30% to 40% of China population is secertly muslim.