RUTHFULLY YOURS

A video has surfaced of four United States Marines urinating on the dead bodies of Taliban fighters in Afghanistan. The act took place after a firefight which resulted in the Taliban deaths. The firefight was extremely harrowing and could easily have resulted in any or all of the Marines getting killed or wounded.

The act has been roundly condemned by everyone from U.S. Secretary of State Clinton to U.S. Secretary of Defence Panetta to American military officials and politicians of all stripes, to pundits all over the world, to President Karzai of Afghanistan, who denounced it as “completely inhumane”. Karzai also said “The government of Afghanistan is deeply disturbed by a video that shows American soldiers desecrating dead bodies of three Afghans.”

In a fit of hypocrisy and chutzpah even the Taliban denounced it.

In the meantime, no progress has been made towards bringing those responsible for killing Mohammad Najibullah in 1996 to justice. Najibullah was President of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. His government fell to the Taliban and he took refuge in the United Nations compound in Kabul. The Taliban forced him out of the compound, publicly beat, tortured and castrated him and dragged him to his death behind a pickup truck before hanging his dead body on a traffic barricade and leaving it there to rot.

There also hasn’t been any progress made towards bringing to justice those Taliban responsible for desecrating the dead bodies of thousands upon thousands of other victims of theirs. The Taliban delight in torturing, mutilating and killing their victims and desecrating their dead bodies and have a long, well-documented, indisputable history of doing exactly that. Talk about torturing, mutilating, killing and desecrating people…the Taliban are masters of all four and always have been. Unless they are stopped they will keep on doing what they’ve always done and thanks to U.S. President Obama’s feckless policies the chances of them being stopped are nonexistent.

No one is saying the Marines were right to urinate on the Taliban. No one is saying the desecration of their bodies was justifiable or acceptable, even if it did happen in the heat of the moment. Acts like this by American military personnel are few and far between however and absolutely pale in comparison to the torture, mutilation, killing and desecration which has always been the hallmark of the Taliban and remains so to the present day. The four Marines will be charged and convicted and pay a heavy price for what they did. The Taliban will not pay for what they do every day nor will they be stopped.

The Marines were wrong to literally piss on the Taliban. They were right metaphorically though. The Taliban are barbaric, inhuman monsters who bring nothing but misery, death and desecration with them wherever they go. Metaphorically they deserve to be pissed on.

Literally, they deserve a lot more than that.