Pragmatic Euphony  

Anecdotal understanding of the Afghan attitude is misleading.

Tom Ricks, in an interview with Fareed Zakaria:

Even when I lived there, it seemed to me that guerrilla warfare was the Afghan national sport.

One of my favorite books on this region is by John Masters. It’s called “Bugles and a Tiger.” It’s a memoir of being a British officer with a Gurkha regiment in Waziristan in the 1930s. At the end of that last war that the British had there, the Afghan cousins showed up rather angrily and confronted him.

“Where are our medals,” they said.

He said, “Well, you were the enemy.”

And they said, “No, no. You gave medals to the Pashtuns on your side. We want our medals, too. You couldn’t have had a good war without us.”

This is very much the Afghan attitude. This is a kind of sporting event for them in many ways.[CNN]

Well, that’s a great story to recount over a drink. But times have certainly changed since then. The sport has now evolved into a game, a brutal game of power, fuelled by the concept of jehad and embraced by the fanatical brotherhood of jehadis worldwide.

Let not such anecdotes influence national policies on Afghanistan. The policy decisions have to be based on hard facts and dispassionate analysis, and ultimately are a matter of political judgement.