Recently the Grenadier Guards of the British Army have experienced some of the heaviest contact with enemy fire since the Second World War. A 2007 Canadian Broadcasting Corporation documentary, ‘Taking on the Taliban’, followed the Queen’s Company of the Grenadier Guards into Helmand Province, Afghanistan, where this small band of men faced the toughest challenge of their lives. When the British moved into Helmand in 2006, they were meant to provide security for reconstruction, not to fight ferocious battles. Instead, ‘Taking on the Taliban’ noted the dramatic increase of violent incidents in one year alone, to an average of 550 a month according to the UN. The cost of British military involvement had been over a billion pounds in the last eighteen months alone.

This is only a tiny snapshot of the overall conflict in Afghanistan. If we widen the lens of the camera today, we see a war already eight years old. Over 43 countries have troops in Afghanistan; the majority (roughly 68, 000) come from the United States, while Britain is the second-largest contributor with roughly 9, 500 troops. As Gordon Brown expresses commitment to the policy of training and supporting Afghanistan’s security forces, (‘we cannot, must not and will not walk away’[1]), and as President Obama decides on whether to send in more troops to the region, the fundamental question on everyone’s mind is ‘why are we there?’. ‘Should we be there?’

A popular line of argument stresses that the war against the Taliban is an unjust invasion, not the liberation of Afghanistan. A favourite bedfellow of this argument is the claim that Afghanistan is another example of American imperialism forcing democracy onto an unwilling population. Unfortunately, this argument gains credibility from the Iraq War, a war which stemmed from a foreign policy which many Muslims would agree was ‘straight out of the Mafia’ to use Noam Chomsky’s famous words.[2] America is thus the perfect scapegoat in the hands of imams, the Taliban and jihad recruiters. This Anti-Americanism (the cause of which at least is understandable) is unfortunate because the Afghanistan conflict is not the same as Iraq. But unsurprisingly, claims of American imperialism in Afghanistan do not mention the Muslim-majority countries like Turkey, Jordan and the UAE who join the coalition of forty-odd nations in Afghanistan. Also unsurprisingly, claims of American imperialism never seem to mention that most of the people now dying because of suicide bombers, most of the victims of Al-Qaeda- and Taliban-inspired jihadists, most of the orphaned children, and most of the childless mothers are Muslims. Although it is well documented that the Taliban and Al-Qaeda’s propaganda statements attribute this violence to Muslims’ political grievances, such as ‘American imperialism’, or America’s support for Israel, what we must not ignore is the theology and ideology of the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, in their own words. As Raymond Ibrahim notes, the Taliban and Al-Qaeda’s theology makes no mention of current political grievances; for instance, when Ayman al-Zawahiri was asked about the status of bin Laden and the Taliban’s one-eyed Mullah Omar, he confidently replied:

Jihad in the path of Allah is greater than any individual or organization. It is a struggle between Truth and Falsehood, until Allah Almighty inherits the earth and those who live in it. Mullah Muhammad Omar and Sheikh Osama bin Laden—may Allah protect them from all evil—are merely two soldiers of Islam in the journey of jihad, while the struggle between Truth and Falsehood transcends time (from Raymond Ibrahim’s The Al Qaeda Reader, 182).

This suggests that the root cause of extremist Islam is the violent and fascist ideology that motivates them, an ideology strengthened and grounded in a God replete with eternal damnations and rewards, and thus not easily discredited. ‘Fight them [infidels] until there is no more seduction and all religion belongs to Allah alone’ declares Sura 8:39 of the Quran. As Ibrahim notes, ‘no “radical” Muslim fabricated these verses and others like them. These are understood to be the everlasting words of Allah and his prophet’.[3] This alternative view, which recognises the Taliban and Al-Qaeda for the dangerous and radical Islam they adhere to, suggests that if the stability and security of Afghanistan is not achieved, the likely alternative would be another civil war that Taliban warlords would probably win. Losing in Afghanistan would also boost the morale of Islamist extremists worldwide, and would again provide a safe haven in Afghanistan for the terrorists this world cannot and should not tolerate. 

[1] Gordon Brown, address to the Royal College of Defence Studies in London, on 6 November 2009, http://www.number10.gov.uk/Page21232

 

[2] Noam Chomsky, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/nov/07/noam-chomsky-us-foreign-policy

[3] Raymond Ibrahim, ‘Hydra of War’, http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NGIxMmVmZjRjYTEzNGVlYjJjNDBhNTA4ZTQ3OTdhZTY=&w=MQ==

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