
In PJ Media this morning I discuss why we should get out of Afghanistan, and should have done so long ago:
American and Afghan officials in Afghanistan’s Farah province were holding an inauguration ceremony
last Friday for new recruits to a village police force. As part of the
ceremony, the new policemen were given weapons that they would use for
training. As soon as one of the recruits, Mohammad Ismail, received his,
he turned it on the American soldiers who were present, murdering two.
This was the seventh such attack in two weeks “” and each one is
emblematic of just how foolish and wrongheaded our national adventure in
Afghanistan has become.Farah’s provincial police chief, Agha Noor Kemtoz, explained: “As
soon as they gave the weapon to Ismail to begin training, suddenly he
took the gun and opened fire toward the U.S. soldiers.” Ismail had just
joined the Afghan Local Police force the Sunday before his attack.
Nonetheless, according to the Associated Press, “the NATO-led coalition has said such attacks are anomalies stemming from personal disputes.”They have gone even farther in other attempts at face-saving,
claiming that the attackers are not part of the Afghan jihad against
NATO forces. According to ABC News,
“officials have said most of the attacks are motivated not by support
for the Taliban, but for “˜private reasons” including grievances against
local Afghan commanders, ethnic feuds, and depression. Senior U.S.
officials have insisted the attacks don’t indicate a high level of
Taliban infiltration into the army.”On the other hand, says the AP,
“the supreme leader of the Taliban boasted on Thursday night that the
insurgents are infiltrating the quickly expanding Afghan forces.”Which explanation is more plausible: the Taliban’s or NATO”s? Is it
really likely that over the five long days that Mohammad Ismail was
involved with the Afghan Local Police he stored up such serious private
grievances against Americans that, once he got a weapon, he had to start
shooting? Or is it more likely that he was a member of the Taliban from
the start, and joined the police in order to get close enough to
Americans to kill as many as possible?These murders keep happening because there is no reliable way to
distinguish an Afghan Muslim who supports American troops from one who
wants to murder them, and political correctness prevents authorities
from making any attempt to do so anyway, because it would suggest that
Islam is not a Religion of Peace. And so ever more U.S. troops are
sacrificed to this madness.