Southwest Asia

Pakistan - Hot Spot

Afghanistan - Hot Spot

One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.

 Northern Alliance fighters, castrate and shoot an enemy Afghan Arab. Yes the very same Northern Alliance that helped America remove the Taliban after 9/11.

From Kabul to Islamabad a series of accusations and counter-accusations about terrorism and who is to blame, has these two Islamic nations and neighbors, vying for the championship award of which Muslim nation is really fighting this so called “War on Terrorism”.

There was a time not too far in the near past the Afghan Mujahaideen were considered freedom fighters when the West (specifically America) planned the Soviet Union’s “Vietnam”. Then came the Afghan Pakhtoon Taliban, nurtured and funded mainly by Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Ossama bin Laden, using harsh sharia laws to make Afghanistan the birthplace of an Islamic caliphate.

With the ranks of the Taliban swelling with former Mujahaideen, the freedom fighters are now called terrorists.

Hamid Karzai had no problem accusing Pakistan of funding terrorism after a homicide/suicide bomber killed eight others in a provincial governor’s compound. The Islamic terrorists (Taliban)  having killed one provincial governor, narrowly missing another, and killing several police and intelligence chiefs since September, are emboldened by their success and fondly remember the fall of the Afghan Communist regime by the Mujahaideen in the late 1980s.With events such as the hanging of dead bodies in public places by local warlords, who oddly enough are sometimes selected to be provincial governors by Karzai's government, the people wonder if they are any better off than they were under the Mujahaideen, and the Taliban.

After forbidding anyone to teach under the current regime, the Taliban terrorists have killed over 20 teachers this year and have the unenviable record of burning down over 198 schools. With already limited jobs for women in Afghanistan, the destruction of a nation is staring the world in the eyes, when its women turn to prostitution to keep their families alive.

According to the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), over 25,000 women worked as prostitutes with over 5,000 in Kabul alone. At least they figure, under the Taliban there was no way they could have plied their trade, but now thanks to so called democracy and Womens Rights, they have gained some freedom.

Add to this boiling pot of Islamic terrorists, ethnic rivalries, distrust of neighbors, prostitution, a heavy dose of opium production, and you have a ticking IED (Improvised Explosive Device) waiting to take the lives of soldiers who are only doing their duty.

So much for drug eradication and democracy