Why is the American government funding Pakistan? Why are our true-blue allies, Saudi Arabia and those sheikdoms (the U.A.E., Kuwait, Qatar, et al.), who are dripping in gold, not paying everything they can to keep Pakistan free from “extremism” by relieving its “poverty”? Why is this apparently, always and everywhere, in Pakistan, in Egypt, in Jordan, and among the Gazan Arabs and the “West Bank” Arabs, a task not for Muslims but for Infidels? Should it not be taken care of by the fabulously rich beneficiaries of the most fantastic transfer of wealth in human history, the Arab and Muslim members of OPEC? After all, is there not supposed to be loyalty, and sharing, among the members of the Umma, the Community of Believers, worldwide?
Where’s that Muslim sharing? Where’s that Muslim caring? Why should the American taxpayers, whose government now has obligations (see Peter Peterson’s Committee) amounting to more than fifty trillion dollars, have to pay to keep Muslims in Pakistan or Iraq or Afghanistan sufficiently “prosperous” so that, in the view of the innocents who presume to protect and instruct us, they will not give rise to those “extremists” who, some devoutly believe, are the only ones we need worry about, in that colossally misleading “war on terror” we hear so much about?
Why does it have to be our money? Why does it have to be Infidel money? Why not some of the more than ten trillion dollars that the Saudis and other Muslim oil states, most of those tiny sheikdoms with populations of less than a million, have raked in without the slightest effort on their part since 1973 alone? Where’s that Umma fellow-feeling? Where’s that supranational Islamic solidarity? Or is it only a loyalty to members of the Umma when they are fighting against, or perceived to be fighting against, Infidels?
Why has the American government not moved heaven and earth to make the Saudis pay and pay and pay?
In Afghanistan, as in Pakistan, as in the world, there is no end to this. One can either grasp this, and act to exploit the weaknesses in the enemy camp — the Camp of Islam and Jihad — or one can continue to pretend that the problem is finite. Even those self-consciously somber predictions of a “long war” or a “war that will last thirty years” still are not long enough. There is no end to Jihad; there is only containment, reducing the threat to manageable, endurable, proportions. One may continue to pretend that it is not about Islam but about a presumed (never explained) “perversion” of Islam, and that somehow, if Infidels only apply enough force and distribute enough money, all manner of things shall be well.
Nonsense.
The only way to deal with this problem is never to allow a triumph of Islam, never to think that Muslim appetites can be sated (they can, however, if demands are met here or there, be whetted), and to work to make Islam less attractive. It should be made less attractive both to the pool of would-be converts in the West, and outside the West, as in sub-Saharan Africa, and to those already born into Islam, but who have other identities to cultivate and cling to. This is the case with the 80% of the world’s Muslims who are not Arab, and who therefore may in some cases be open to the argument — one which happens to be true — that Islam has always been, and always will be, a vehicle for Arab supremacism.
There is so much that could be done, and it could be done at such little cost. But it would require imagination, intelligence, knowledge — and how much easier it is, for those lacking in these, to repair to those bombs and “boots on the ground” and the handing out of tens of billions. All that is so much easier than studying a matter, and using one’s brains in a different way than they are employed in moving tens or hundreds of thousands of troops, or stacking neatly the piles of hundred-dollar bills that are to be handed out like confetti to {Iraqis, Pakistanis, Afghanis, your favorite Muslim country to be rescued here}.