Professor Walter A. McDougall's Burkean Conservatism

Professor Walter A. McDougall
Alloy-Ansin Professor of International Relations
University of Pennsylvania
Senior Fellow of the Foreign Policy Research Institute

I've not blogged on my old history professor Walter McDougall in a long while, partly because he's been so publicly quiet, so silent working on his next book that he only recently broke his silence to present a paper titled "Nightmares of an I.R. Professor" in which he relates the following anecdote:

[E]arly in 2012 a young specialist on the Middle East posted a blog about NATO air strikes in defense of the popular revolt in Libya against Muammar Qaddafi. The White House, eager to reassure Americans that the operation was not the prelude to another costly war and nation-building project in the Muslim world, called the President's posture "leading from behind." The blogger wondered whether this modest, multilateral, and limited-liability intervention might signal a full-fledged Obama Doctrine that repealed the proud, unilateral, and rhetorically limitless (George W.) Bush Doctrine. He then recalled a "fabulous book" titled Promised Land, Crusader State, which seemed newly relevant in the wake of the Iraqi and Afghan wars, and wondered "what would Walter McDougall think?"

That query was disconcerting since the "would" made it sound like McDougall was already dead.

That young blogger might not have known, but I knew McDougall wasn't dead, else I'd already have heard about his demise. I did wonder, however, what he thinks about the recent events in Libya, given that he's a Burkean conservative skeptical about intervening in the political affairs of foreign countries, which didn't make him popular with Neoconservatives even before 9/11:

My own new status as a pariah became painfully obvious in Spring 1999 when I addressed The Philadelphia Society on the subject "The Crusader State in the 21st Century." Joking that they asked me to speak about something I hoped would not exist in an era that had not yet begun, I used the occasion to draw spooky parallels between contemporary American interventionists and Medieval popes! Both could make geopolitical arguments on their behalf: the Crusades, after all, were a long-delayed counteroffensive against Arab jihads. But both promoted forms of "assertive multilateralism" on behalf of "regime change" in hopes of solidifying and sanctifying their home fronts while forcibly exporting their civilization. But pious intentions did not prevent the crusading knights from wreaking death, destruction, and havoc at ruinous cost, including collateral massacres of non-combatant Muslims, Jews, and Greek Orthodox Christians. Worse still, the Crusades became a self-perpetuating, transnational, political-economic system justified by "the revolutionary idea that Christendom had an intrinsic right to extend its sovereignty over all who did not recognize the rule of the Roman Church." With high irony I suggested the audience substitute America for Church and Democracy for Christianity to imagine how our modern crusaders could spawn perpetual war for perpetual peace -- like Oceania in George Orwell's 1984 -- and exhaust their own countries in the process. Much of the audience gave my talk a standing ovation, but an angry minority did not. Some were devout Catholics who took offense that I would liken Urban II to the sleazy Clinton! The rest appeared to be earnest young Straussians in whose neoconservative Weltanschauung my Burkean conservatism was heresy.

From these words, one might expect that McDougall will have opposed even leading from behind, and perhaps he did oppose it, though I do not know this for a fact. Also, since he says nothing of the recent events in Libya, including the murder of Ambassador Stevens, then I suspect that his recent talk took place before all of these unsettling developments. Perhaps he would say what he said after his reference to the "butcher's bill" the US has had to pay for its invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq:

By now you can guess "what McDougall would think."

McDougall is thinking, "I told you so!"

I imagine that's more or less what he's also thinking about Libya, even if we have been "leading from behind."

'Thrown-Away' General Picked Up by Yale

Stanley A. McChrystal

Photo by Andrew Sullivan
The New York Times

I was wondering what had become of General McChrystal after his resignation due to repercussions from his interview with Rolling Stone while directing the counterinsurgency operations in Afghanistan. Now, thanks to Elisabeth Bumiller's article of May 6, 2012 for the New York Times, "After War Room, Heading Ivy League Classroom," I know what has become of him: He's teaching a course at Yale! Talk about going out with style.

During his wartime duties in Afghanistan, McChrystal was known for his advocacy of forging relationships to fight insurgencies, so he teaches a course in leadership that helps students investigate this theme:

The theme in his case studies in leadership is that personal relationships matter . . .

He also seeks to establish good relations with his students:

His teaching style is loose: he wears khakis and open-necked shirts, insists that the students call him Stan, prods quiet students into talking and invites them all for runs with him and on overnight field trips to Gettysburg.

He's also known for "heading out to a New Haven bar for beers with his students," so I suppose he's preparing for the day he has to assign grades. With the good relations he's established, he can hope to preclude any potential student insurgency in his classroom due to any low marks he may have to assign.

He's also managed to avoid any general student insurgency at Yale, though this seems more to do with the fact that students differ these days from the countercultural students of my undergraduate years . . .

Larry Goodson and Thomas H. Johnson on US Tactics and Strategy in Afghanistan

ISAF

(Image from Wikipedia)

As I've occasionally mentioned, I'm on the mailing list of the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI), so I receive something of interest once every couple of weeks or so. Yesterday, an article by Larry Goodson and Thomas H. Johnson popped into my email box, "Parallels with the Past -- How the Soviets Lost in Afghanistan, How the Americans are Losing" (April 2011). Goodson is a professor of Middle East Studies at the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and Johnson is a research professor in the Department of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, so they should know what they're talking about. Their article is interesting and informative, but I wasn't quite persuaded about the Soviet-American comparison.

Why not?

Their claim is that there are "startling and unsettling similarities between Soviet strategies and tactics in Afghanistan during their Afghan war of 1979-1989 and American coalition strategies and tactics in Afghanistan since October 2001." They focus on "three similarities . . . central to current U.S. and NATO Afghan strategies: the focus on key population centers, reconciliation, and the development of 'Afghan' solutions to a variety of security concerns."

None of these three worked for the Soviets, they point out, so the three are unlikely to work for the US, either. That sounds plausible, except that I recall the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan well. The Soviets employed extremely brutal, scorched-earth tactics of warfare and alienated most Afghans. On this point, the Americans have endeavored to use very different tactics based on a counterinsurgency and counterterrorism strategy aimed at protecting the civilian population from the Taliban and other insurgents, nothing at all like the Soviets' scorched-earth approach.

I therefore wondered what someone involved in planning the tactics and strategy used in Afghanistan by the US Military would think of the article, so I forwarded Goodson and Johnson's paper to one of my contacts who had been closely involved in working out those tactics and strategy (and to whom I've promised anonymity), and I inquired about this person's opinion. Here is the reply concerning the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan:

Interesting piece with some good points. I'm probably a little biased, but the article didn't adequately "connect the dots" between the history and the current situation for me. The comparison to the USSR's approach was superficial with cherry-picked, dated examples to draw connections or similarities that don't exist. A more thorough review of the ISAF population-centric approach shows a fundamental difference compared to that of the Soviets'. I suppose advancing such a provocative proposition is the authors' way of getting people to read and discuss their article, and I'm also not sure the authors know what's really been happening there the past year and a half. In the end, the authors actually advocate the approach that General McChrystal and Petraeus have pursued. The authors are correct that the central government is one of the biggest problems, and it undercuts the connection to the population distributed throughout the country with its incompetence and corruption. The outcome in Afghanistan is still to be determined. I think by the end of summer 2012 we should see if the McChrystal/Petraeus approach is successful. Let's hope that all our blood and treasure yield some significant level of success.

I wish that my contact had said more about "population-centric approach," as well as about "the approach that General McChrystal and Petraeus have pursued" -- and these two approaches are complementary, I gather, being two different aspects of the ISAF endeavor. Anyway, concerning the former point, about the "population-centric approach," my memory is that the Soviets really did abandon the countryside and simply hold the cities; the ISAF, however, has not abandoned the countryside -- at least not in my reading of reports from Afghanistan. As for the latter point, about "the approach that General McChrystal and Petraeus have pursued," I assume this approach is a variant on the counterterrorism strategy advocated by Goodson and Johnson:

Counterterrorism is Enough -- A counterterrorism approach does not accept the necessity of nation-building -- or at least holds that such a commitment of means is not justified by the ends. Instead, adherents of this [counterterrorism] approach, increasingly in the ascendance in Washington, believe that the United States and its allies can achieve minimal national security goals through the relatively secretive activities of counterterrorism specialists.

I presume that this is what my contact was referring to in stating that "the authors actually advocate the approach that General McChrystal and Petraeus have pursued." The US approach does seem to have given up on any belief that reforming Karzai's government is possible, so rather than get any deeper into nation-building, if that means setting up a government in Afghanistan that isn't corrupt, the Americans will be content with the lowered expectations of counterterrorism to ensure that Al-Qaeda doesn't ever again obtain a foothold there. This alone may take some doing, however, for Goodson and Johnson note that jihadists are not the most flexible individuals:

History would suggest that secular insurgents negotiate, jihadists do not. Rather, the Taliban that matter most within the movement are jihadists with perceived intense religious obligations (for instance, Mullah Omar, the Amir ul-Momineen, or Leader of the Faithful). "Peeling" such individuals away from the Taliban is virtually impossible because they believe they are following the mandates of a higher calling. Indeed, history suggests that no jihad has ever ended with a negotiated settlement or via reconciliation.

What holds for the Taliban jihadists would hold for Al Qaeda jihadists, too, as well as any other jihadists. A fully successful long-term counterterrorism strategy would have to determine why some Muslims turn to jihad and terrorism and would need to utilize policies that dissuade potential jihadists and potential terrorists from becoming actual jihadists and actual terrorists.

Good luck on that, though, for I'm not too hopeful . . .

Stanley McChrystal: The Thrown-Away General

Stanley McChrystal

(Image from Rolling Stone)

By now, everyone has surely heard of the Rolling Stone article by Michael Hastings, "The Runaway General," that served to deep-six General Stanley McChrystal's leadership role in Afghanistan and probably his military career.

Although I've had a link to the article for several days, I've not had time to read it until now, after the repercussions have all been felt, the ramifications have all been mapped, and the consequences have already worked themselves out, but to be frank, I think that the criticisms of McChrystal over this have exaggerated his statements, and many of the remarks most criticized were made by others, not directly by McChrystal himself.

Nevertheless, he's the leader, and he stepped over a line in even allowing a Rolling Stone reporter such unfettered access, demonstrating a degree of poor judgment in doing so. The question for me is thus why a clearly brilliant man well-versed in military intelligence -- especially one who's working in counterinsurgency and following a doctrine that emphatically teaches that soldiers should not unnecessarily make enemies out of civilians -- would so radically underestimate the impact of such an article in Rolling Stone, of all magazines to choose!

I'm just guessing, but I think that one thing to consider is the practice of embedding reporters within the military in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Many of these individuals have bonded with the military and written deeply engaging, sometimes rough and biting, but generally favorable depictions of the men whose fighting they've covered. And Hastings does have some good words for McChrystal:

He speaks his mind with a candor rare for a high-ranking official. He asks for opinions, and seems genuinely interested in the response.

But Hastings never bonded so closely as many embedded reporters have, perhaps because he didn't come under enemy fire and experience the feeling of having his very life protected by the men about whom he was writing.

But I'm only speculating on that point, and be that as it may, I suspect another factor at play here. McChrystal is described by Hastings as a rebel who likes to push against limits, a characterization that McChrystal would have to acknowledge since he likes to quote Bruce Lee's words on going beyond limits:

"There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them."

Words are cheap; actions, however, can cost you. Let's reflect on the possible significance of McChrystal's rebellious character by looking at some of his actions:

The son of a general, McChrystal was also a ringleader of the campus dissidents -- a dual role that taught him how to thrive in a rigid, top-down environment while thumbing his nose at authority every chance he got. He accumulated more than 100 hours of demerits for drinking, partying and insubordination -- a record that his classmates boasted made him a "century man." One classmate, who asked not to be named, recalls finding McChrystal passed out in the shower after downing a case of beer he had hidden under the sink. The troublemaking almost got him kicked out, and he spent hours subjected to forced marches in the Area, a paved courtyard where unruly cadets were disciplined.

Despite his troublemaking, he made himself a career . . . by continuing to press against boundaries:

[A]s he moved up through the ranks, McChrystal relied on the skills he had learned as a troublemaking kid at West Point: knowing precisely how far he could go in a rigid military hierarchy without getting tossed out. Being a highly intelligent badass, he discovered, could take you far -- especially in the political chaos that followed September 11th.

Read the entire article for more details, particularly on his putative role in the cover-up of Pat Tillman's death by friendly fire, an experience that might have taught him that he had a charmed career since many a lesser man would have gone down in the controversy.

Whatever the truth about that incident, General McChrystal was brilliant enough, successful enough, and even irreplaceable enough to keep moving forward in his career despite having -- and using -- a sharp tongue, but his success appears to have blinded him to political risks outside the military, where he apparently didn't realize "precisely how far he could go . . . without getting tossed out," the irony being that not his actions, but rather his words ended up costing him, for when you speak or allow your subordinates to speak frankly and critically about powerful men like Special Envoy for Afghanistan Richard Holbrooke, Ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry, National Security Advisor James Jones, Vice-President Joseph Biden, and President Barack Obama, you won't have a career for very long.

As McChrystal found out . . . having gotten thrown away.

Democracy is Coming: Whom to Believe?

Leonard Cohen

"Democracy is Coming"

(Image from Wikipedia)

We've heard with some frequency that the US wants to provide security in Afghanistan and stabilize the place to allow some sort of 'democracy' to take root there as it perhaps has in Iraq -- that's part of the rather complex, shifting narrative, anyway -- but how exportable is democracy? Can it take root everywhere? Some say yes, some no. Let's hear from three men who've spoken on the issue of democracy's future in the non-Western world.

First, there's the well-known Francis Fukuyama, in "Is the age of democracy over?," writing for The Spectator (February 10, 2010) and taking a broad view, as one might expect of the intellectual who penned the famous "End of History" thesis back in the heady days of the latter 1980s:

[T]he future of democracy is not so bleak. In the first place, democracy remains, in Amartya Sen's words, the 'default' political condition: 'While democracy is not yet universally practised, nor indeed universally accepted, in the general climate of world opinion democratic governance has achieved the status of being taken to be generally right.' Very few people around the world openly profess to admire Putin's petro-nationalism, or Chavez's '21st-century socialism,' or Ahmedinejad's Islamic Republic.

No important international institution endorses anything but democracy as the basis for just governance. China’s rapid growth incites envy and greed, but its exact model of authoritarian capitalism is not one that is easily described, much less emulated, by other developing countries. Such is the prestige of modern liberal democracy that today's would-be authoritarians all have to stage elections and manipulate the media from behind the scenes to legitimate themselves.

Fukuyama has a point about the 'legitimacy' that democracy grants, for the democratic system means that the people, more or less, grant 'legitimacy' to themselves. But how does one get to democracy from whatever political system a nation finds itself under?

Suggesting one route is Iran expert Reuel Marc Gerecht, in "Iran, Beacon of Liberty?," written for The New York Times (February 10, 2010):

To an extent seen in no other country, Iran’s intellectuals have battled and evolved over these questions [of how to ground democracy in local conditions (i.e., Shiite Islam)]. For a century, the country has been trying to develop constitutional government. For 30 years, dissident clerics and lay intellectuals have struggled to reassert the democratic promise in the revolution.

Especially for religious dissidents, democracy is now seen as a keystone of a more moral order, where the faith can no longer be used to countenance dictatorship. An operating assumption of President Obama's speech to the Islamic world in Cairo last year is that Washington can work with authoritarian regimes against extremism -- that Muslims don't need to be politically free to tame religious militancy. But the evolution of Christianity, which never had Islam's deep fusion of church and state, tells us something different: that it has been the West's political evolution -- from autocracy to democracy -- which has, more than anything, depoliticized Christianity.

The same process is happening to Islam in Iran, but at a much faster pace than anything seen in the West. As a result, millions of Iranians -- the sons and daughters of once faithful revolutionaries -- have secularized. Whereas secularizing Westernized autocracies like the shah's prompted upwellings of religious radicalism, Iran's religious dictatorship has produced a softening secularization that is likely to last, since both nonreligious and faithful Iranians increasingly see representative government as indispensable to their values.

Gerecht would thus seem to side with Fukuyama, namely, that democracy is the default position in our modern world because other systems don't work very well, so nations turn to democracy when all else fails. Democracy allows individuals to work through their differences without violence . . . once that it is established, at any rate.

But is that true? Is democracy the default position? Does it allow for resolution of differences without violence? Consider the words of journalist Lee Smith, writing in The Strong Horse: Power, Politics, and the Clash of Arab Civilizations (2010) about Arab distrust of democracy (quoted in Michael J. Totten):

The assumption that democracy was all a plan to set the Arabs at each other's throats also made sense to many Arabs because it fit the way they see their own societies. For the Americans, democracy meant investing the Arab man, woman, and child with the rights due every human being. From the Arab nationalist perspective, empowering the Arab individual would necessarily come at the expense of the Arab nation. And weakening the unity of the nation would animate the sectarian monster that has stalked the region for a millennium.

Nowhere were these fears stronger than in Damascus. For the Syrian regime, democracy would mean an end to the domestic peace cultivated through coercion and repression since the founding of the modern Syrian state, and the unleashing of violence at unprecedentedly lethal levels. Majority rule, meanwhile, would obviously not only spell the demise of the Alawi regime but also threaten the very existence of the Alawi community. As they watched what was happening in Lebanon and Iraq, it was easy for the Arabs to conclude that if representative government meant brother slaughtering brother, then the Americans could keep their precious democracy to themselves. (p. 199)

One might argue that the Arabs misconstrued America's 'gift of democracy,' but that's precisely Smith's point -- democracy requires a culture of democratic assumptions in order to work. If you fear democracy because it means that some larger group will dominate your group within a culture that sees power as a zero-sum relationship, then you might prefer the possibility of victory offered by armed struggle to the certainty of defeat looming through democracy. If Smith is right, the US has likely been spinning its wheels in its wars of the past decade because for democracy to work, "the heart has got to open in a fundamental way," and that hasn't obviously been happening.

"Democracy is Coming"? Maybe . . . maybe not.

Pashtunwali: Rule of Law?

Purple Pashtun

Map of Iranian Languages

(Image from Wikipedia)

This post is merely an inquiry. Yesterday, I blogged on Philip Bobbitt's "New Rules of Engagement" and openly wondered if about his central statement. As I expressed this:

He says that our war aim is "is the protection of civilians within the rule of law," and he adds that "this is what General Petraeus realized was necessary in Iraq, and it is what General McChrystal has testified will be his goal in Afghanistan."

I then asked:

Is rule by Pashtunwali, for example, rule of law?

I would think not since Pashtunwali is customary law, but I don't really know very much about it. I looked briefly into this issue today and found reference to an article by Mark A. Drumbl titled "Rights, Culture, and Crime: The Role of Rule of Law for the Women of Afghanistan" (Columbia Journal of Transnational Law, Vol. 42, No. 2, January 2004). I haven't read this article, but I did find a summary, which includes the following:

There is . . . a role for rule of law in redressing the longstanding abuses suffered by the women of Afghanistan. However, as I have argued elsewhere, the justice emanating from foreign or international legal interventions often becomes externalized from the societies that this justice is intended to assist. One way to mitigate this externalization is to embed international norms within local contexts, perhaps through the use of ordinary local justice mechanisms. In the case of Afghanistan, however, the invocation of ordinary local law -- whether substantive or procedural -- to punish perpetrators of gender crimes may prompt troubling outcomes. In Afghanistan, local justice involves a fusion of Islamic and customary law that responds to and reflects endemic cultures of war. In the majority Pashtun community of Afghanistan, this customary law is called the Pashtunwali. The Pashtunwali resonates among certain local constituencies as legitimate local law. However, the punishments and reparations it imposes on systematic human rights abusers themselves amount to human rights abuses, particularly against women. For example, conveying women as chattel among clans constitutes a preferred form of reparation under the Pashtunwali for a broad array of human rights violations. For those women who are so conveyed, the Pashtunwali creates a situation of sexual terror in the name of pursuing accountability for prior wrongs.

This passage does not explicitly address the issue of whether or not Pashtunwali is in some way a "rule of law," which I doubt, but it does focus upon a dilemma posed by current ideas on dealing with insurrection by providing protection for the population. For the Nato forces in Pashtun regions of Afghanistan to be accepted as offering legitimate protection, local Pashtun custom must be respected. Yet, in protecting the a local population against insurgent terror, the Nato forces must accede to what Drumbl calls customary "sexual terror" against women. As he states the dilemma:

At the present point in time, the incorporation of the local in the adjudication of mass violence in Afghanistan is itself a form of mass violence.

Drumbl was writing in 2004, but the dilemma remains. However, he expresses guarded optimism:

By way of conclusion, this Article suggests ways to reframe the dialog to circumvent this impasse. A helpful starting point is to recognize that religion and culture in Afghanistan are neither static nor immutable but, in fact, are politically contingent, and, as such, are informed by power structures. Present power structures are patriarchal, exclusionary, and totalitarian. One way to reframe the dialog is to generate change within local communities toward representative procedural access, including what Madhavi Sunder calls a right to culturally dissent. Norms cascading from this generated change, in turn, could facilitate the input of all members of local communities in the construction of local law. International interventions that encourage such procedural openness could permit interested local constituencies to claim international norms within the framework of customary and religious communities.

The idea of "procedural openness" is one concept among many in the modern understanding of "rule of law," so Drumbl would appear to be counseling patience in handling the dilemma.

That might involve a lot of patience.

Afghanistan Dynamic Planning: Official Site!

Afghanistan Dynamic Planning

Just a little plan . . .

(Even Higher PDF Resolution)

I know that I'm behind the curve on this flow chart, but I've been busy these past few weeks with grading, editing, publishing, and . . . um, being a good family man (i.e., no golfing around).

Anyway, a military officer of my acquaintance sent me the above diagram to 'clarify' NATO's plan for countering the Afghan insugency. Remember "Shock and Awe"? Well, this is similar: "Wonk and Gah!"

Sorry, bad pun . . . truly bad. But, honestly, this strategy is so gah-dang wonkily complex that its main aim must be to confuse the insurgents. Will it work? I can imagine them conferring:

"Well, Brother Osama, what is the proper shariah-based response to this latest infidel atrocity?"

"Amir Omar, I say we cut off the heathen hand of whoever drew this!"

Little do they yet realize that computers have no hands. That dawning realization will break their hearts and cause them to give up altogether -- like what happened with Jim Smiley's proverbial dog, Andrew Jackson, when it fought that nameless dog with no hind legs, a sad tale that Mark Twain somewhere relates.

Anyway, if you want to better understand the above diagram, then this officially released video explains all.

Scott Atran on Defeating Al-Qaeda

Afghanistan?

Jonathon Rosen

(Image from New York Times)

The anthropologist Scott Atran has an op-ed piece, "To Beat Al Qaeda, Look to the East," in New York Times (December 12, 2009) that's worth reading. I've read elsewhere that the US Military has contracted professional anthropologists as paid advisors to obtain insights into local culture so as to help defeat insurgencies and engage in state-building. I suppose that such advice is enlightening . . . though from my experience at academic conferences, I wonder if two different scholars can agree on anything.

Scott Atran, however, doesn't have a position with the US Military, though he has apparently received research funding through the US Defense Department. His professional positions are as an anthropologist at the National Center for Scientific Research in Paris, at John Jay College, and at the University of Michigan. He has recently authored Listen to the Devil . . . whatever the hell that title might signify. Listen to the devil we don't know? It's forthcoming, and I've not seen a synopsis, but he has other books already published.

Anyway, the crux of Atran's argument on how to defeat Al-Qaeda reduces to his focus on three critical factors that bind terrorist networks together and that can therefore be utilized for rooting them out and tearing them apart. He gives the example of success in Southeast Asia, specifically Indonesia, whose security forces killed Noordin Muhammad Top, head of Al Qaeda for the Malaysian Archipelago (a splinter group of the Islamist organization Jemaah Islamiyah), and he lists these three factors in that context:

First is friendship forged through fighting: the Indonesian volunteers who fought the Soviet Union in Afghanistan styled themselves the Afghan Alumni, and many kept in contact when they returned home after the war. The second is school ties and discipleship: many leading operatives in Southeast Asia come from a handful of religious schools affiliated with Jemaah Islamiyah. Out of some 30,000 religious schools in Indonesia, only about 50 have a deadly legacy of producing violent extremists. Third is family ties; as anyone who has watched the opening scene from "The Godfather" knows, weddings can be terrific opportunities for networking and plotting.

He then describes how the three factors were applied, but you can read the article for that. What I find interesting is that in the entirety of his long and insightful op-ed piece, Atran never uses the term "Islam" or even "Islamism," as though Islamist ideology played no role. Perhaps he ignores it because it plays little role in the practical job of rooting out terrorist networks? One need only follow up the links of friends, school, and family? That might work once a terrorist has already been identified, but where would one go about looking for terrorism in the first place? The friendships were formed during jihad (the fighting in Afghanistan), the schools taught Islamist ideology, and the families undoubtedly raised up a child in the radicalized Islamic way he 'should' go. Moreover, the defeat of Al-Qaeda is only one battle in the defeat of various Islamist groups and, more importantly, in the defeat of Islamist ideology.

But I don't fault Professor Atran for avoiding these larger issues. He's focusing on a practical problem, rooting out Al-Qaeda, and pointing toward a way to do so. Moreover, the three factors that he notes might offer some predictive power as to where Islamist ideology might lead to terrorist acts. Islamism doesn't inspire every Muslim to terrorism -- and not even every Islamist. Where, then, can we expect terrorists to emerge? Follow up the links of friendship, schools, and families.

Fort Hood Shootings: Motivated by Islamism?

Bernard V. Benjamin II (Left)

and

Duane Reasoner Jr. (Right)

Commenting

on

Major Nidal Malik Hasan

(Image from New York Times)

Michael Moss, writing for the New York Times in "Muslims at Fort Voice Outrage and Ask Questions" (November 6, 2009), notes the shocked outrage felt by many of the local Muslims near Fort Hood, where the recent mass shooting by Major Nidal Malik Hasan occurred . . . but also the questions asked by some. Or the questionable remarks:

"When a white guy shoots up a post office, they call that going postal," said Victor Benjamin II, 30, a former member of the Army. "But when a Muslim does it, they call it jihad. Ultimately it was Brother Nidal's doing, but the command should be held accountable," Mr. Benjamin said. "G.I.'s are like any equipment in the Army. When it breaks, those who were in charge of keeping it fit should be held responsible for it."

Mr. Benjamin has expressed himself oddly in assigning responsibility. I wouldn't refer to people as "like any equipment" that "breaks," but I would agree that the army seems to have ignored clear evidence that Hasan was a profoundly disturbed man. Unlike Mr. Benjamin, however, I doubt that Hasan's actions can be so easily distinguished from "jihad" since the words he is reported as crying out at the beginning of his rampage suggest religious motives on his part: "Allahu Akhbar!"

We will have to wait for the full report to determine what motivated Hasan, and since he's still alive, we may learn a great deal indeed. The early evidence, though, does point to religion as a significant factor, as we learn from Duane Reasoner Jr.:

It was Major Hasan, though, who increasingly felt let down by the military, and deeply conflicted by his religion, said those who knew him through the mosque. Duane Reasoner Jr., an 18-year-old substitute teacher whose parents worked at Fort Hood, said Major Hassan was told he would be sent to Afghanistan on Nov. 28, and he did not like it.

"He said he should quit the Army," Mr. Reasoner said. "In the Koran, you're not supposed to have alliances with Jews or Christian or others, and if you are killed in the military fighting against Muslims, you will go to hell."

The explanation given by Mr. Reasoner, that Muslims are not supposed to have alliances with non-Muslims, seems to be attributed to Hasan, but I suspect that Mr. Reasoner himself believes this as well, given his manner of citing the Qur'an on this point. I also suspect that this Duane Reasoner would be the same "young Muslim" named "Duane" interviewed by the BBC's Gavin Lee at the Islamic Community of Greater Killeen the day after the killings at Fort Hood, available in video on You Tube:

Duane: I'm not going to condemn him for what he did. I don't know why he did it. I will not, absolutely not, condemn him for what he had done though. If he had done it for selfish reasons I still will not condemn him. He's my brother in the end. I will never condemn him.

Gavin Lee: There might be a lot of people shocked to hear you say that.

Duane: Well, that's the way it is. I don't speak for the community here but me personally I will not condemn him.

Gavin Lee: What are your thoughts towards those that were victims in this?

Duane: They were, in the end, they were troops who were going to Afghanistan and Iraq to kill Muslims. I honestly have no pity for them. It's just like the majority of the people that will hear this, after five or six minutes they'll be shocked, after that they'll forget about them and go on their day. (Transcript from You Tube)

According to a report in the Stars and Stripes by Leo Shane III, "Fort Hood deals with aftermath of shooting as details of accused gunman emerge" (November 7, 2009), Duane Reasoner Jr. is "a recent Muslim convert who had been having dinner regularly with Hasan" because "Hasan had taken 18-year-old Reasoner under his wing, mentoring him in his new faith," so I think that we're hearing from the same guy in the BBC interview.

At any rate, the "Duane" in the BBC interview sounds to me to be a radical Islamist who would approve of the killing of any soldier headed for Iraq or Afghanistan, and if he was being mentored in his "new faith" by Hasan, then I infer that we can attribute the same Islamist views to Hasan.

And given that the Stars and Stripes article notes that Hasan gave a lecture "U.S. war in Iraq: A war against Islam," the inference is strengthened -- and will be strengthened even more if Hasan really did compare "Muslim suicide bombers to U.S. soldiers who've thrown themselves onto grenades to save their fellow soldiers," as he's alleged to have done on a website last May.

But let's see wait and see where the evidence leads . . .

Ganesh Sitaraman: "The land of 10,000 wars"

Ganesh Sitaraman

Harvard Law School

(Image from Harvard Law School)

In Monday's edition of The International Herald Tribune appeared a short but interesting article by Ganesh Sitaraman on the complexity of counterinsurgency operations in Afghanistan, but the article can also be read under the same title, "The land of 10,000 wars," on Harvard Law School's website.

Sitaraman, a lecturer at Harvard Law School, has recently returned from Kabul, Afghanistan, where he was working as a research fellow at the Counterinsurgency Training Center, presumably under its director, John Agoglia, and probably as part of General Stanley McChrystal's effort to formulate a strategy for counterinsurgency in Afghanistan. Sitaraman opens his article with a reference to McChrystal:

As General Stanley McChrystal's 60-day strategic assessment is wrapping up, he poised to recommend a new approach for Afghanistan, one grounded in counterinsurgency's strategy of protecting the population.

I'm no expert on counterinsurgency, but my understanding is that this strategy of "protecting the population" has been developed since World War Two, and especially since the Vietnam War in response to the US failure there. The strategy is somewhat counterintuitive at times because it entails putting troops at risk to protect a population that may in fact have some sympathies with the insurgents. But the rationale -- insofar as I understand it -- is that even a population with sympathy for insurgents will be ambivaent about the insurgency, so a counterinsurgency strategy that protects the population can perhaps "win the hearts and minds" of the population by offering more than the insurgents offer.

This worked rather well in Iraq against Islamists who alienated Iraqis by brutally applying strict Islamic law. To the extent that the Taliban Islamists threaten the same brutality, this counterinsurgency strategy might work. Afghanistan, however, is a more complex place than Iraq:

The defining feature of Afghanistan is its diversity. Consider, for example, the eastern province of Nangarhar, on the Pakistani border. Nangarhar is about 90 percent Pashtun, but it has a significant minority of Nuristanis, Tajiks, and Pashai, each of whom speak different languages. In addition to ethnicity, Afghans identify by qawm, a kinship or residence group akin to a tribe. There are almost 30 different qawm within the Nangarhar Pashtuns alone.

The sources of conflict in Nangarhar are as complex and overlapping as the identities of the people. The local insurgency has splintered into at least three major factions, each of which was once aligned with one of the others. Pakistani Taliban and Al Qaeda send fighters into the area, and vast criminal networks provide support to the local Taliban faction. In the midst of these interconnected insurgent relationships, tribal feuds and blood feuds between families put the Hatfields and McCoys' to shame. One story I heard featured a man who waited 40 years before taking vengeance on his neighbor. Insurgency was his cover for retribution.

This might make application of the counterinsurgency strategy of protecting the population rather complicated and therefore difficult. Some of this effort is military, but a lot of it is police work, which requires state-building efforts, and that entails that the state be perceived as legitimate. Unfortunately, Afghanistan's government is seen as grossly corrupt, detracting from its legitimacy.

And even if this state-building is successful in the short run, will it prove a long-term success? Iraq is seen as a success story, but it was easier because a semi-functioning state had been in place there for some time, and even with Iraq, questions remain as to whether the quasi-democratic system constructed with American assistance will survive. Afghanistan raises even bigger questions. I suppose that we'll just have to see what happens.

By the way, does anybody know where Sitaraman gets his expression "the land of 10,000 wars"? Is Afghanistan known as a land of 10,000 wars?

In William Whiston's 1737 translation of Jewish Antiquities, Flavius Josephus tells in Book 8 of a dream that King Solomon had in which God informed him that if the people of Israel turned away from the Torah, they would be destroyed "with ten-thousand wars and misfortunes" (page 337), and in The Flame of Attention, published in 1983, Krishnamurti states in Chapter 3 that human beings have suffered "ten-thousand wars" (page 39), but neither of these two instances of the expression has any specific link to Afghanistan.

If anybody knows where Sitaraman got the expression -- or if he coined it -- please let us know.

Joshua Foust on Robert Kaplan

Registan Banner

(Image from Registan)

Joshua Foust over at his Registan blog takes issue with Robert Kaplan's Foreign Policy article that I commented upon and linked to yesterday. In particular, Foust dismisses the notion that the Taliban in any way signify Pashtun nationalism:

The Taliban are not an expression of Pashtun nationalism. As but one example, Abdulkader Sinno argues in excruciating depth that the Taliban were successful only because of their organization (and the disorganization of the mujahideen), and not necessarily because of their ideology or sense of nationalism. In fact, neither Afghan nor Pakistan Taliban are nationalist -- they are explicitly pan-Islamist. They want an Islamic State, not a Pashtun one (their ethnicity is merely how they are organized, not motivated).

Now that I think about the point, I realize that I ought to have recognized this myself. I've been reading about the Taliban since the 1990s, when they were relatively unknown but successfully bringing order to Afghanistan's chaos while also imposing their strict, Wahabi-funded version of Islam upon the areas that they had 'pacified.' I knew nothing then of an ethnic base to the movement, and the point made at that time was that this Islamist movement was being funded by Saudi Wahabists and organized by Pakistan's intelligence service, the ISI. Or so I read in the papers that I was reading in those days, e.g., The Guardian, The International Herald Tribune, various German papers.

At the time, if I recall, one big question concerned their ideological motivation. Did they want Afghanistan alone, or did they have larger aims? The attacks of 9/11 focused attention on the fact that the Taliban was hosting Bin Laden, and even if they had not directly contributed to the attacks, the fact that they protected Bin Laden after 9/11 raised suspicions that they might have aims beyond Afghanistan.

Since 9/11, I've noticed that the Taliban are strongest in the Pashtun areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan, so Kaplan's view that the Taliban is an expression of Pashtun nationalism sounded plausible. But Foust is right about the Taliban: "their ethnicity is merely how they are organized, not [how they are] motivated." They are pan-Islamist, which helps explain why they would want all of Pakistan, why they have links to Al Qaeda, and why they have foreign jihadists among their fighters.

I need to read Joshua Foust at Registan more often (and thanks to John B. of Clever Turtles for the tip).

Various Remarks on Korean Christian Missionaries

Korean Missions in Muslim Lands

15,000 Korean Missionaries in the World

(Image from New York Times, 2004)

We often hear that merely 7 degrees of separation stand between any two individuals in the world, which means, for example, that I probably know somebody who knows someone who knows some person who knows some individual who knows some soul who knows some acquaintance who knows Bin Laden.

Sometimes, the degrees are more, sometimes less.

We're also told that we need not reach back too far in the geneological tables to find that everybody around the world is related.

Sometimes, the relationship is closer in time and space.

I thus read with some shock that Pastor Bae Hyeong-kyu, the first of the two Korean hostages murdered by the Taliban, is the younger brother to a brother-in-law of Peter Beck.

Who's Peter Beck? Well, I know him, having met him over dinner last January. At the time, I related an anecdote that he had told us over our meal in an Uzbek restaurant about his excursion to the very brink of North Korea, and he has since granted me the permission to identify him as the one who told the tale:

One of those present yesterday, an American (and I'm leaving him unidentified since I'm not sure if he'd want to be identified), told an anecdote about his near visit to North Korea. He was on a raft that was being poled on the Tuman River by two Chinese Koreans. The three of them waved to a North Korean border guard, who waved back. So ... they poled closer. The guard asked for money, so the American tossed some. The guard asked for more. The American said, "I'll give you more if you'll let me shake your hand." The guard considered this, but then shook his head no. So, the American asked, "Could I step on shore, then? I've always wanted to visit North Korea." Again, the guard considered but declined. The Chinese Koreans then poled away, back toward China, and they told him that the South Koreans who go rafting with them toss far more money and make no conditions.

The American telling the story then smiled and remarked to us that this neatly captures the difference between the respective policies of the United States and South Korea toward the North.

At the time that I met Peter, he was director of the International Crisis Group's Seoul Office, but he has very recently moved on to take on the position as executive director of the U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea and is now stationed in Washington, D.C.

As you might guess by the anecdote, Peter is hardly averse to taking some risks ... but he does draw some crucial lines, as he tells us in a recent column, "Understanding people of faith," written for the September 3rd edition of The Korea Herald:

When I learned that 23 Korean missionaries had been abducted in Afghanistan, I told my wife, "Looks like another group of crazy Korean Christians." It struck me as the height of recklessness and foolishness to take a group of inexperienced Christian relief workers into the heart of Taliban country.

Imagine his shock at the response of his Korean wife:

My wife responded by informing me that the leader of the group, Rev. Bae Hyeong-kyu, who would soon be the first executed, was a relative.

Coming to grips with this, emotionally, took some time for Peter:

As son-in-law No. 3, even though I am very close to son-in-law No. 4 (my family slept on his family's floor when we moved to Korea three years ago and we would move nearby), I had not met his younger brother, Rev. Bae. I did know that like my wife's family, he and his family are devout Christians. In fact, I am one of the only non-religious people in my wife's entire extended family. When word came that he had been killed and I was interviewed by America's most influential radio network, National Public Radio, I felt like I had been rather cold and detached. Indeed, a close friend who heard the interview would later inform me that my lack of religiousness came through the interview loud and clear. However, after spending that evening with my brother-in-law and learning about what amazing humanitarian work his brother had done in Africa and the risks taken and sacrifices made by Western missionaries to bring Christianity to Korea, the next interview I did for CNN was much more sympathetic. To my regret, I would receive dozens of messages about the NPR interview, but none about the CNN interview.

Peter does not tell us what humanitarian work Bae did in Africa, but he adds this remark about Bae's family:

As fate would have it, we spent our very last evening in Korea with Rev. Bae's parents and siblings. I was impressed with how their deep faith was guiding them through unfathomable grief. Rev. Bae's mother told me, "Our son is with God now. My concern is for the families who are waiting for their loved ones to return."

Many of us know from various news reports that Reverend Bae and the other missionaries have been accused of using poor judgement, and I agree with some of the criticisms. We don't know all of the details, of course, and I've been waiting to learn more before drawing a firm conclusion, but so far, I hold to what I said a few weeks ago.

First, I reminded critics that the Korean Christians, no matter how 'fanatical' they might be, were not the moral equivalent of the Taliban:

These Christians go to do volunteer work in health and charity services as well as to witness to their faith, which is by and large a peaceful one.

That seemed necessary to point out, given the harsh criticism that these Christians were receiving for doing missionary work in a Muslim country. Many people even seemed to think that the Christians deserved what they were getting at the hands of the Taliban, a reaction that I cannot understand.

My second point was directed toward the Korean government:

The Korean government should not negotiate with the Taliban over these hostages. The Taliban are murderous, violent, fundamentalist Islamist terrorists. Negotiating with them will lead to more hostage-taking -- especially hostage-taking of Koreans.

The Taliban themselves have since confirmed this point:

Taliban spokesman Qari Yousef Ahmadi vowed to abduct more foreigners, reinforcing fears [expressed by many individuals and governments] that South Korea's decision to negotiate directly with the militants would embolden them.

"We will do the same thing with the other allies in Afghanistan, because we found this way to be successful," he told The Associated Press via cell phone from an undisclosed location. (Amir Shah, "Taliban free last South Korean hostages," Yahoo News, August 31, 2007)

This won't stop the missionaries, of course, no matter what the Korean government has agreed to with the Taliban about preventing any more Koreans from going to Afghanistan for any reason but especially for reasons of mission work. Indeed, Korean missionaries are already protesting the government's agreement:

The Korea World Missions Association, has expressed “dissatisfaction” with the agreement between the Korean government and Taliban banning missionary work in Afghanistan. It has also released a document that proposes setting up a crisis management team for overseas missionaries and lays out ground rules for crisis management. In other words, if there is an another hostage crisis, then these guys will take the lead in negotiating with the hostage takers. ("Missionary Work to Continue in Afghanistan?" Marmot's Hole, September 1, 2007)

Many will continue to criticize Christian missionaries, but as Peter Beck notes:

Only two types of people are willing to risk their lives to help North Koreans trying to flee the North: brokers working for money and missionaries working for God. At some point, we must each decide how much risk we are willing to take to help others. Those of strong faith tend to be more risk-taking than those of us with little faith.

Peter is not without his criticisms of Korean Protestant Christianity, and I can agree with some of his points, but my larger agreement is that Christian missionaries are "more risk-taking" than most other individuals.

And this is precisely the problem for the Korean government, for there are approximately 15,000 Korean Christian missionaries scattered throughout the world. I astonished several professors at the annual Kyung Hee University retreat two weeks ago when I told them this fact, for they had no clue that Korean mission work was so extensive. We had been discussing the hostage situation, and I had given my opinion that the Korean government should not be negotiating. They had disagreed, maintaining that the government could not refuse to negotiate for the release of Korean hostages, but when I cited this statistic about the 15,000 Korean missionaries, they immediately grasped the potential problem and began to see things my way.

Evangelical Christians, who supply many if not most of the missionaries in the world, tend to see themselves as being at odds with the world, with worldly culture, and with worldly power. If they truly believe this, then they should not be relying on the world to rescue them if they are kidnapped or otherwise persecuted. Worldly organizations can do so if they feel a humanitarian obligation, of course, but the missionaries should not expect this and, indeed, should make clear that they take risks without expecting rescue, that they will instead rely upon their faith in God.

I think that they'll be far more effective if they do so.

Pastor Douglas Shin: "our faith has become very corrupt"

Saemmul Stained Glass Window

Stained glass, stained hearts?

(Image from Saemmul Presbyterian Church)

The online Christian news site Compass Direct News ran an interesting article about a week ago, "North Korea: Refugees Facing Crackdown" (July 31, 2007), an interview with Pastor Douglas Shin, "a Korean-American pastor living in Los Angeles who has built 'underground railroads' for North Korean refugees since 2000 as leader of the 'Exodus 21' movement."

For those not in the know, the expression "underground railroad" originally referred to the routes from safe house to safe house that escaped slaves used for secretly passing from America's southern slave states to the northern free states or on to Canada in the time prior to the Civil War. I presume that the expression "Exodus 21" alludes to the Exodus story in the Bible of the Hebrew slaves from Egypt but updating that story to the 21st century and applying it to the North Korean refugees.

The entire interview is fascinating (as was an earlier interview from May 2001 in the Chosun Journal), especially when the interviewer posed the following question:

In Afghanistan, the Taliban has taken Korean aid workers hostage and killed two of them -- how could South Korean media and others blame the victims for wanting to do good?

Pastor Shin had a revealing answer:

Korean Christians, while numbering less than 3 percent of the population early in their history during the Japanese colonial period (1910-1945), were the spiritual -- as well as physical -- leaders of Korean society. With the outward growth since 1970s concurrently with the economic growth of the country, our faith has become very corrupt, emulating the secular sector, not vice versa. We have shown many bad examples to the people, so they've come to hate us now.

In short, Korean churches have grown corrupt and disliked ... though Shin doesn't specify precisely how. But Shin doesn't harshly blame the missionaries taken captive by the Taliban:

These Sammul Church folks are the cream of the crop of Korean believers, and Koreans have very little for which to blame them -- except for that picture they took at the Seoul airport [in front of a sign warning of the dangers of traveling to Afghanistan], and the tourist bus they chartered in Kabul -- yet, they are vulnerable to the avalanche of criticism from the Netizens and the media because of the general social ethos here that is willing to shoot down any Christian at any time for anything whatsoever.

For some harsh but intelligent, albeit speculative criticism of the Saemmul Church missionaries being held by the Taliban, see Michael Hurt's Metropolitician blog entry "Cunning Christian Stunts":

[W]hat I see ..., rather than brave Christian lambs, are rather the self-deluded and culturally insensitive Christians in Korea, whom I encounter all the time, who berate and preach to anyone within earshot about how they will go to Hell, about how Jews and Muslims are not "real" religions, and a million other things I need not mention here.... I think this is a case of a bunch of idealistic, mostly young folks who saw this whole thing as a cunning Christian stunt, and they never really felt the fear of death.... These are middle-class kids who've lived in sanitized apartment complexes, have been kept in a cocoon of constructed innocence, and probably saw this whole thing as a great adventure, while the church elders who put them up to were likely thinking about how this would enlarge the name of their church as well. "Look! We went to Afghanistan and taught prayer songs to kids! What'd your church do?" Bigger name means more members, means more money, means more power.

So, who's right on the Saemmul Church missionaries, Korean-American Douglas Shin or the American half-Korean Michael Hurt? I guess that we'll just have to wait for the details.

Of course, readers know that I've recently gone on record defending the missionaries in my blog post "Two opinions on the Korean hostage crisis in Afghanistan...," but I don't know the real motives of these particular missionaries any better than other bloggers do. However, in a blog entry over a year ago, "Christianity Today on Korean Christianity and its Missions" (February 26, 2006), I expressed some skepticism about 'voluntary' missionaries sent by Korean churches. The South Korean missionary group Durihana, for instance, sends North Korean converts living in China back into the North to proselytize secretly, and when criticized for this, Durihana's director insisted that they "don't force them to go back" but instead "send only volunteers." At that claim, I mused:

Volunteers. Hmmm ... well, anyone who's been around Korean churches understands what that means. Korean Christianity reflects Korean society -- hierarchical and Confucian. If the 'seniors' favor evangelism, the 'juniors' will volunteer.

That may be the sort of thing that happened with the Saemmul Church missionaries, too. Whether Shin, Hurt, or I turn out to be correct, we all three see problems in Korean churches for the way in which they reflect some of the less appealing aspects of Korean society.

Let us nevertheless hope that the remaining 21 captives are released by the Taliban unharmed and without any concessions on the part of the Korean, Afghan, or American governments and that Korean Christians draw some appropriate lessons from this experience.

Absolute National Sovereignty to the Taliban?

Taliban's Destruction of the Bamyan Buddhas

All power to the Taliban?

(Image from Wikipedia)

Over at Malcolm Pollack's WakaWakaWaka, an individual going by the name "Gak Seolli" has posted a comment about the Korean hostage crisis in Afghanistan that includes the following remark:

The Taliban, no matter how morally repugnant we may find them, doesn't [sic: don't] have to answer to anyone in regards to what they do on their own land. They've guaranteed no safety for foreigners, offered no invitation to missionaries. They've quite plainly done the opposite....

When questioned on this point, Gak Seolli elaborated that concerning the Taliban, he had merely:

...inquired into the rights anyone had to enter their territory and what rights outsiders would have to demand that the Taliban allow certain behaviors or visitors on their lands. Did the Taliban not make it pretty clear that outsiders and non co-religionists should stay out of their land? The US/Korean governments got the message, By what right do we declare that their declaration is invalid?

These two brief statements don't provide much for me to go on, but the basic position seems to be what one might call "absolute national sovereignty," for the Taliban need not "answer to anyone in regards to what they do on their own land."

There seem to me to be two problems with this position, one empiricial and the other theoretical:

Concerning the former, empirical problem: Are the Taliban actually the political authority in Afghanistan? If they are not -- and they don't seem to have political power at the moment -- then is Afghanistan "their own land" in the relevant political sense? If the Taliban are to speak in terms of absolute national sovereignty, then they ought at least to hold political power before doing so. Political power, however, is currently held by the government of President Hamid Karzai under a constitution ratified by the loya jirga in 2003. This official government has demanded that the Taliban free the Korean hostages. If absolute national sovereignty is accepted, then how can the Taliban oppose its own government?

Concerning the latter, theoretical problem: Is absolute national sovereignty a reasonable political position? Does a governing authority really not have to answer to anyone with regard to what it does on its own land? That seems counterintuitive to me, for it implicitly leaves one without the right to criticize the internal affairs of any foreign country for any policy whatsoever. Does one truly not have this right? If a country is committing genocide within its own borders, can one really not legitimately criticize this? My moral intuition suggest that we should not only criticize such an internal policy, we should also attempt to stop it. If this intuition is correct, then absolute national sovereignty is an unreasonable political position to hold.

My intent here is not to set up a straw man for attack, and I don't know that I've correctly understood Gak Seolli's position, but absolute national sovereignty would seem to be the logical implication of the view that the Taliban need not "answer to anyone in regards to what they do on their own land."

Variants of absolute national sovereignty have had eminent theoreticians, such as Thomas Hobbes or Carl Schmitt, but most political thinkers decline to adopt such a political philosophy.

Two opinions on the Korean hostage crisis in Afghanistan...

Quintus Septimius Florens Tertullianus

André Thévet, Les Vrais Pourtraits et Vies des Hommes Illustres

"semen est sanguis Christianorum" - Tertullian

(Image from Ökumenisches Heiligenlexikon)

I suppose that I should have an opinion on the hostage crisis in Afghanistan.

I mean the 23 (now 22) Christian medical missionaries from South Korea captured by the Taliban and threatened with execution if South Korea doesn't withdraw its troops 'immediately' or pay a ransom, or if the Afghan government doesn't exchange 23 (now 22?) Taliban prisoners for them, or if the United States doesn't do something (probably), or if the whole world doesn't convert to Islam (eventually). As you see, I'm not absolutely clear on what the Taliban want.

Even one local police chief in Afghanistan, Khwaja Mohammad Sidiqi, acknowledges that the Taliban demands are confusing: "One says, let's exchange them for my relative, the others say let's release the women, and yet another wants a deal for money."

While the Taliban may not know what they specifically want, they do want the world to know that they are very serious. They've already killed one prisoner, the 43-year-old pastor, Bae Hyung-kyu, who was leading the group, reportedly because he "was sick and couldn't walk and was therefore shot." I don't know if that early report was accurate, but it's hardly one to counter the negative image that many already have of the Taliban.

Anyway, I suppose -- as I said -- that I should have an opinion on the hostage crisis in Afghanistan.

Actually, I have two opinions, and I've already expressed both of them ... not here at Gypsy Scholar, but over at the Marmot's Hole. My first opinion was in reaction to the spate of initial criticism blasted at the missionaries themselves by a number of commentors, who considered the missionaries stupid -- first for being Christian, second for going to a Muslim country as missionaries, and third for going to a war zone. At that time, people didn't know much about the situation and were reacting to the report in ways that sounded less like reasoned analysis and more like the results of a Rorschach Test, revealing less about the hostages than about the commentors themselves.

Here -- from the Marmot's original posting on the hostage crisis -- are my own Rorschach results:

I think that every Korean Christian heading to Muslim countries has been perfectly aware of the potential cost ever since Kim Sun-il was beheaded in Iraq three years ago.

These Christians go to do volunteer work in health and charity services as well as to witness to their faith, which is by and large a peaceful one.

When they speak to Muslims about their faith, they speak of a God who loved the world enough to take human flesh and die for humanity, and they see as their mission to live a Christlike life, which for them means living -- and possibly dying -- in the service of others.

They don’t force anyone to become a Christian -- and in fact believe that belief cannot be forced.

They are among the last individuals whom I would look down upon. (Posted July 20, 2007 at 9:31 pm)

Later, in the comments to another Marmot post, I expressed my other opinion -- the Rorschach results this time revealing my Realpolitik views:

As I told the folks in my Sunday School class, these 23 missionaries chose to express their faith by going to Afghanistan to minister to the Afghans. They knew the danger, and they took the risk. They made their choice. The Korean government should not negotiate with the Taliban over these hostages. The Taliban are murderous, violent, fundamentalist Islamist terrorists. Negotiating with them will lead to more hostage-taking -- especially hostage-taking of Koreans.

If Christian missionaries wish to witness -- in word or in deed, or both -- to Muslims, then they should not expect their own governments to pay ransoms for their release. It was said -- perhaps by Eusebius -- that the blood of the martyrs watered the seeds of the church. If that’s so, then Christians should accept the possibility of martyrdom.

That said, I do not know what these missionaries have expected, nor am I sure that anyone knows clearly since their wishes have not been expressed in any reports that I’ve read. Doubtless, their faith is on trial. Faced with death, whose thoughts wouldn’t be concentrated? -- if I may borrow a thought from Samuel Johnson. I hope that they are released unharmed -- the 22 remaining ones, at any rate -- but that should be the decision of the Taliban, and nothing more than moral pressure should be exerted, with the exception of a rescue operation if that be the decision of the NATO forces in Afghanistan.

I suspect that the Korean government has already gained the reputation as one willing to pay ransom, based on the experience of hostage-taking by Somali pirates and Nigerian rebels. Unless I’m mis-remembering what happened in such cases... (Posted July 26, 2007 at 6:29 pm)

The Western Confucian (Joshua Snyder) corrected me:

[I]t was the heretic Tertullian, God bless him, who said it: "sanguis martyrum semen christianorum." (Posted July 26, 2007 at 9:44 pm)

Thanks, Joshua. For the benefit of those whose Latin is rusty, here's what Tertullian meant to say: "The blood of martyrs is the seed of Christians." I haven't located this exact quote, but Tertullian says something similar in his Apology: "semen est sanguis Christianorum" (Apologeticum (Apology) 50.13), i.e., "the blood of Christians is seed."

But Tertullian's insight may also be true for Islam: "sanguis martyrum semen muslimorum."