I usually find myself on the opposing side of a Feinstein (one of my senators) position but this time I'm in total agreement with her.
I hope this happens.
This next is a little interesting something I came across this am, for your more complete understanding of what we are up against.
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bergen.com
Hasan Jafri and Lewis Dolinsky: Knowledge of Pashtun culture could be key to war's success
Thursday, October 18, 2001
By HASAN JAFRI and LEWIS DOLINSKY
PRESIDENT BUSH has told the Taliban that the bombing of Afghanistan will end if they give up Osama bin Laden and comply with other U.S. demands. This proposition may play well in Peoria or even London, but not in Kabul or Kandahar.
For all of Slobodan Milosevic's bluster and disdain for America during the Kosovo war, the Yugoslav leader caved in because he got the message. The Taliban don't. And President Bush's ultimatums inflame Afghan passions against the United States. Even worse, they help Osama bin Laden.
The Pashtuns, Afghanistan's dominant ethnic group to which much of the Taliban belong, are a tribal society whose ancient culture and customs have evidently not been closely examined by the Bush administration. Roughly half of Afghanistan's population of 25.5 million is Pashtun. As many as 23 million Pashtuns live in Pakistan's Northwest frontier and Baluchistan provinces, which border Afghanistan.
The Pashtuns live by an austere code of conduct known as the pashtunwali. If America's engagement in Afghanistan -- whether war or peace or nation building -- is to be productive, the Bush administration must consider this code and speak to the Afghans in a symbolic and cultural language they understand.
Pashtunwali evolved from Afghanistan's pre-Islamic past, from which elaborate codes and protocols of the tribal elders, now known as maleks, survived. Because the Pashtuns are the dominant ethnic and linguistic group in Afghanistan, its non-Pashtuns -- including Tajiks, Uzbeks, Hazaras, Baluchis, and Nuristanis -- also know the concepts.
Central to Pashtunwali is nang, or honor. The tribesman is taught that death is preferable to a life without honor. Anthropologists often mention nang in relation to "sexual property," a euphemism for wives and women whom the Pashtun is taught to defend with his life. But there are many ways of despoiling a Pashtun's honor. Wartime ultimatums served between bombs are one way.
The Bush administration may think it is giving the Taliban a way out, but the ultimatums heighten the Afghans' sense that honor is being challenged. Literally, Bush's offers add insult to injury. Their public nature, tone, and uncompromising language cause the Pashtun to invoke the other major tenet of the code: badal, or revenge. The only way to redeem one's honor is to avenge it. The Taliban are vowing to do that.
In the ultimatums and counter-ultimatums that we are seeing on television, a choreography is emerging. President Bush's television ultimatum last Friday was followed on Saturday with a taped threat of more terrorist attacks from Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda that was broadcast on Qatar's Al Jazeera satellite television. Unlike the Bush administration, Bin Laden knows the Afghans well and he acted within pashtunwali to exploit its third tenet, melmastiya, or hospitality. As we know and have heard repeatedly, he is a "guest" in Afghanistan. Bin Laden's hosts, the Taliban, are bombed and beleaguered and had no way of responding. Cleverly, their guest timed his Al Jazeera ultimatum so that in addition to being a terrorist threat it was also a token of gratitude.
Of all aspects of pashtunwali, melmastiya is the one to which U.S. policymakers need to pay the closest attention. A complex etiquette surrounds the treatment and status of guests such as Bin Laden. In a tribal Pashtun house, the male members of a family, the host, and his sons, serve food to their guests but remain standing all evening in a show of respect.
Melmastiya's other and perhaps most relevant dimension is the requirement (nanawati) of providing refuge to anyone within the confines of one's home or country. It is a code related to nang. It is also the reason why Osama bin Laden has found a home in Afghanistan when nobody else will have him.
Bin Laden's stay in Afghanistan is not made possible by Islamic brotherhood or by the hard-line Islam he preaches. It is made possible by melmastiya. In Pashtun culture, a host gains honor by serving and protecting his guest.
The Taliban's extraordinarily polite requests to Bin Laden to leave Afghanistan earlier this month were interpreted as weakness, skulduggery, and time-buying ploys by Washington. In fact, the Taliban were acting the only way they know how. If necessary, in Pashtun custom, a host must sacrifice his life in the course of extending protection or refuge to a guest. That is precisely what the Taliban are now continuing to do, and what Osama bin Laden wants.
But under the Pashtun code, the guest has obligations, too: to obey the national law and not to do something than endangers his host. Whatever Bin Laden's motivations for being in Afghanistan, his presence has turned into a catastrophe for the Afghan people. The extremist Wahabi strain of Islamic fundamentalism that he preaches is popular in Saudi Arabia and Yemen but foreign to most Afghans, even to some members of the Taliban.
Bin Laden knows his true audience is in the Middle East. That is why his statements of hatred against the United States are taped in Arabic, not in Pashto or Dari, the languages of Afghanistan. They are broadcast for the Arab world on Arab television. Most Afghans get their news from the Pashto radio broadcasts of the Voice of America and the BBC.
The United States and Britain must tailor those broadcasts so that they are understandable within the Pashtun's code of honor and hospitality. What America's leaders and the leaders of the coalition say to the Afghans must be made understandable within the Afghans' cultural context.
It should be conveyed explicitly to the Afghans that Bin Laden is a foreigner who is abusing melmastiya, and that Afghanistan is being taken advantage of. The United States has talked about helping to convene a loya jirga, or council of elders, as a way out of the crisis. The jirga is an expression of pashtunwali, but efforts to convene such a meeting must evolve from within Afghanistan, not from outside. The deposed king, Mohammad Zahir Shah, whom the United States proposes to bring back from exile at age 86 to head the meeting, has been out of Afghanistan since 1973. He is a stranger to most Afghans. A serious jirga would be inclusive, allowing even the Taliban to participate. Otherwise, the U.S. effort will again abuse the pashtunwali. A jirga without credibility would be a jirga without honor.
In the meantime, Washington cannot engage the Afghans in any meaningful dialogue by serving ultimatums and dropping bombs.
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Hasan Jafri has covered Afghanistan, Iran, and Pakistan for the The San Francisco Chronicle Foreign Service. Lewis Dolinsky has written frequently on foreign affairs for The Chronicle.
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And this today:
washingtonpost.com
Leave to Reinforce Taliban; Bombing Night 'One of the Worst'
Wire Reports
Saturday, October 27, 2001; 11:56 AM
TEMERGARAH, Pakistan ––As more than 5,000 Pakistani men headed for Afghanistan Saturday morning to fight in the holy war against the United States, American warplanes launched their most sustained attack on Taliban front lines north of Kabul.
Thousands of Pakistani men, young and old, had massed in Temergarah on Friday night with assault rifles, machine guns, even rocket launchers. A few even carried axes and swords.
Their mission, they said: to enter Afghanistan's Kunar province and help the country's ruling Taliban defend against any ground incursions by American troops.
"I am an old man. I consider myself lucky to go — and to face the death of a martyr," said Shah Wazir, 70, a retired Pakistani army officer. In his hands Saturday morning, he carried a French rifle from about 1920.
Organizers said similar-sized groups were massing in other towns across North West Frontier Province, an enclave of ethnic Pashtuns with ties to — and deep feelings for — neighboring Afghanistan.
Volunteers gathered in scores of groups of 20, sitting on the ground to be briefed on the ways of jihad — Islamic holy war — by military commanders wearing black turbans and full beards similar to the Taliban militia. One key rule: obedience to leaders.
"It is a difficult time for Islam and Muslims. We are in a test. Everybody should be ready to pass the test — and to sacrifice our lives," said Mohammad Khaled, one brigade leader. Would-be warriors embraced and chanted anti-American slogans.
Hussain Khan, 19, a carpenter from the area, carried a Kalashnikov and stood with his friend. He said he was leaving behind a fiancee and joining a just cause.
"Whether I come back alive or I am dead, I'll be fortunate because I am fighting in the service of Islam," Khan said.
The call for holy war came this week from Sufi Mohammad, an outspoken Muslim cleric who runs a madrassa, or religious school, in nearby Madyan. He exhorted "true Muslims" to mass and prepare to go to Afghanistan — to repel any U.S. ground incursions.
How they will get there, and what they will do upon arrival, is uncertain. Their way station before entering Afghanistan is Bajur, a borderland tribal village where volunteers from different area will come together this weekend.
In this region of Pakistan, Mohammad's organization, Tehrik Nifaz Shariat Mohammadi Malakand, or Movement for the Enforcement of Islamic Laws, has been embraced.
And the cleric's message — that, despite its insistence to the contrary, the United States is waging war on Islam itself — hits home.
"This is a strange occasion of world history," Mohammad said Friday. "For the first time, all the anti-Islamic forces are united against Islam."
It was impossible to verify how many supporters were actually en route to join him. In recent weeks, many militants have claimed far more backing than rallies eventually produce.
However, the numbers in Temergarah on Saturday morning — and the people jammed into trucks and on bus rooftops — suggested support was heavy. Mohammad's backers say the number to enter Afghanistan will reach 100,000.
"We are not worried about death," said Khaled, the brigade leader. "If we die in jihad, it is something much more greater than to be alive. And we will be taken into paradise."
The night before, men had massed by the thousands in Temergarah and other wind-whipped mountain villages in northeastern Pakistan's mountains.
Out-of-towners, their conversation crackling with anticipation, roamed Temergarah's streets. Pickup trucks patrolled town with loudspeakers attached, calling people to assemble with a chant: "Afghanistan will be a graveyard for Americans." Men huddled around radios, listening for news about the conflict; most tuned in to the BBC.
People camped on porches, beneficiaries of local hospitality. Others slept on floors of public buildings. Mosques lodged as many as they could, and supplied food and blankets.
"I cannot tolerate the bombing and the cruelty of Americans. I must go," said Mamoor Shah, a medicine salesman who, at 18, already has a wife and child. "Muslims cannot keep silent."
For many young men, this is no mere rite of passage. It is religion — and it is blood, heritage and family.
'ONE OF THE WORST NIGHTS'
In Afghanistan, U.S. bombers hammered Kabul on Saturday, lighting up the night sky with fireballs, and unleashed their heaviest raids yet on Taliban front lines north of the city.
"It was one of the worst nights," said one resident, speaking on the 21st day of the U.S. assault on Afghanistan.
Smoke billowed from a compound of the International Committee of the Red Cross, whose warehouses were hit by U.S. jets a day earlier. The ICRC said on Saturday it was unable to distribute food to Kabul residents because of the bombing.
North of the city U.S. warplanes circled high above Taliban air defenses and dived to release bombs and missiles on Taliban trenches and gun emplacements facing Northern Alliance forces. "This is the heaviest day of air attacks on this front so far," said opposition commander Mustafa.
U.S. plans were bolstered by news from Russia that it intended to give 40 tanks and more than 100 armored vehicles to the opposition Northern Alliance by year's end and by Britain's commitment of ground forces in the form of 200 elite Royal Marine commandos. |
