DANIEL GREENFIELD: THE BLOOD PRICE OF AFGHANISTAN *****
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The alleged attack on Afghans by an American soldier in Kandahar, where 91 soldiers have been murdered last year alone, is already receiving the full outrage treatment. Any outrage over the deaths of those 91 soldiers in the province will be completely absent.
There will be no mention of how many of them died because the Obama Administration decided that the lives of Afghan civilians counted for more than the lives of soldiers. No talk of what it is like to walk past houses with gunmen dressed in civilian clothing inside and if you are fired at from those houses, your orders are to retreat.
Air strikes are for days gone by. The American soldier in the ISAF is expected to patrol and retreat, to smile and reach out to Afghans while they shoot him in the back. After risking his life to hold back the Taliban, he is expected to take it calmly when his government announces that it is trying to cut a deal with the Taliban. As he waits out the final months until withdrawal, seeing his friends lose their limbs and their lives, knowing that the enemy has won, that he has been betrayed and is being kept senselessly on the front line for no objective except the diplomatic position of a government that hates him, that is taking away his health care, his equipment and his job; how does he feel?
The Panjwai district, where the shootings happened, are the cradle of the Taliban. Smiling civilians plant IED’s and children serve as lookouts. Obama’s Surge pushed hard into Panjwai and the Taliban pushed back. American soldiers were caught in the middle, dying for a handful of dusty towns where the inhabitants took their presents and shook hands with them, and then shot at them from cover.
The Montreal Gazette tells us that Belanday, one of the villages where the shootings took place, was a model village. What it omits is that Belanday was a key Taliban base, the houses were used for IED factories and it served as a transit route on the way to Kandahar City. The model village concept was supposed to change all that, but it didn’t change the sympathies of the local population.
All of that doesn’t matter though. The feelings of the men and women sent into the heart of the beast don’t matter. Only the eternally tender sensibilities of Muslims do. When Muslims kill us because we disposed of Korans that they marked up, we are at fault. When we kill them we are also at fault. This is the modern Catch 22 of the military which requires officers who have only one skill, sensitivity to Muslim feelings, and soldiers who die to keep the peace among their killers.
The life of an American soldier is worth less than a Muslim’s feelings. Under Islamic Sharia law, the blood price for a non-Muslim was only a third that of a Muslim. At Islam’s homicidal Wal-Mart, you could kill three Christians for the price of a Muslim. And we have cut prices even further by placing the feelings of a Muslim above the life of a non-Muslim.
When American soldiers die to protect Muslim feelings, denied air support and the right to defend themselves so as not to outrage the IED planting populace, there is no outrage from the mass media organs of outrage who take the liberal bumper sticker about always being outraged by their attention deficit disorder to heart. But when Muslims die, then the outrage machine grinds to life and begins making blood sausage out of any members of the military unfortunately enough to caught in the crossfire between CNN, CBS and FOX.
This is yet another opportunity for the Apologizer-in-Chief to apologize. By the time American soldiers leave hellholes like Kandahar behind, he may have racked up nearly as many apologies as the bodies of American sons and daughters, not to their parents naturally, but to the parents of their killers.
These days Obama hates the military more than ever for inconveniencing him by urinating on Taliban corpses, burning Korans and carrying out night raids. His only consolation is that if enough of them from key states die at the hands of the “moderate” Taliban, that the Muslim Brotherhood is negotiating with on his behalf, it might be enough to swing a key state in a close election. And if the soldiers get their revenge by urinating on dead Taliban, he gets his revenge urinating on live soldiers.
The soldiers, those who survive, can expect no parades, they can expect to have their health care benefits cut at the urging of the Soros run Center for American Progress and they can expect to be hounded by the media and Hollywood, which is already doing its best to turn the veteran of Kandahar or Fallujah into the new Vietnam veteran. They can watch on television as the Taliban sweep back into Kabul, firing assault rifles into the air, taking back every inch of the ground that they fought to defend for the ungrateful Afghans and D.C. drones. And they can watch some of the Afghans who have received visas, bring over large families and set up shop smuggling cigarettes and engaging in wire fraud, while receiving hefty government benefits, while they look for work.
All this will go unmentioned until much later when it will show up in occasional novels and fictionalized histories of the conflict. And those will be buried beneath the latest bit of ethnic literature from the Muslim world consumed by Oprah book club members and New York Times reviewers alike that teaches what a deep reserve of spirituality can be found in lovely places like Kandahar.
For now the outrage machine grinds on. The Taliban have sworn to take revenge, as if they weren’t already launching attacks as often as possible. As if there is any outrage at all involved in a region where it is a worse thing to burn a book than murder a little girl. For the faithful students of Allah, shooting a bunch of people is hardly worth a yawn. It shows a lack of imagination.
Bullets aren’t enough to satisfy the cruelty and sadism of a Taliban fighter for the Islamic Emirate which gloried in scenes such as these. “We would beat them with staves soaked in water – like a knife cutting through meat – until the room ran with their blood or their spines snapped. Then we would leave them with no food or water in rooms filled with insects until they died.”
That probably won’t make it into the next Oprah book club bestseller, but we can rest easy knowing that even when all the troops are back home, some of the perpetrators of these acts, will be here in America as we bring a sizable bit of Afghanistan home with us, just as we brought a sizable bit of Iraq with us. And all those little Kandahars and little Mogadishus and little Gazas will insure that the next time we need to fight the Taliban, we will only have to go as far as Minneapolis or Paterson.
On the way out, Obama will show up quickly, shake a few hands, sign some autographs and tell the troops they did good. No one will be allowed to ask him what they did, besides bleed and patrol a barren murderous land for a decade, just long enough to give a few girls in Kabul some hope, and then hand the country back over to the Taliban and return home with our dead?
What did we really do in Afghanistan? We killed some tribesmen, dug some wells and handed out a lot of money to other tribesmen in the hopes that they wouldn’t kill us. We learned some new languages, took a lot of dramatic photos and buried some loved ones. For a brief period of time we put the fear of God into the Taliban and Al-Qaeda when we roared like lions, before we learned to drink cups of tea, to dig wells and play hide and seek with unarmed civilians slash Taliban fighters.
We didn’t leave behind so many bodies because the Taliban are excellent fighters or because our soldiers aren’t good at what they do. The numbers alone tell the tale, the bloody Afghan surge where our men and women were sent out with their hands tied behind their backs, in a final sacrifice, to win hearts and minds with their lives, is one long body count whose responsibility lies with Obama and his advisers. The more men he cut off from air support, choked with inflexible rules of engagement, the more they died.
They didn’t die this way to protect America– they died to protect Muslim feelings, Muslim honor and tamp that ever flowing red spring of Muslim outrage.
Saudi Arabia, which runs our foreign policy, places a blood price value of approximately 80,000 dollars on a Muslim man, 40,000 for a Muslim woman or Christian man, which goes to show how much contempt Muslim men have for Muslim women by equating them in value to a Dhimmi man. If you’re in the mood to kill a non-Muslim woman, that will run you less than 900 dollars which helps explain the high fatality rate among maids in Saudi Arabia.
But the question is what value do we place on our lives? What value do we place on theirs? We have paid the blood price of Afghanistan a thousand times over and gotten nothing but blood in return. It is time that we consider striking a better bargain with our wars so that our killers pay the blood price, not us.
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