For anyone who wants to know what the rest of the world is watching on TV that gets beyond the American media's cartoon version of reality, French 24 years ago broadcast this report by an intrepid woman journalist who met with Taliban in the boonies and was granted the freedom to ask them any questions. What emerges is a three-dimensional picture of fighters who believe they are fighting a war of self-defense, for their country and their religion. One fighter interviewed talks about how he would like his daughters to be educated, and to learn to read and write.
This squares precisely with the trap the former head of the CIA's bin Laden unit, Michael Scheuer, says our armed presence here falls into. Bin Laden builds the case that Muslims are being attacked around the world, thus justifying "defensive jihad" which includes attacks on Western targets. Our attacks on Iraq and Afghanistan are persuading Muslims that their offense is their religion, and having the effect of unifying people, such as Pashtuns and Arabs, who ordinarily barely get along.
From Scheuer's classic "Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror"
For bin Laden, the Crusaders' offensive attacks on Islam are the main thing. The theological credibility of his call for a defensive jihad depends on Muslims being convinced that Islam is under attack by non-Muslim forces, those bin Laden identifies as the U.S.-led Crusader Christians and Jews. Unfortunately for America, U.S. policies and actions in the Muslim world provide Muslim eyes' with incontrovertible proof of what bin Laden describes as "an ocean of oppression, injustice, slaughter, and plunder carried out by you against our Islamic ummah. It is therefore commanded by our religion that we must fight back. We are defending ourselves against the United States. This is a 'defensive jihad' as we want to protect our land and people."...
Scheuer's business was to study bin Laden's words to understand his sway upon the Muslim mind. His book includes large passages of bin Laden's writings, key among them, bin Laden says:
"For God's sake, what are the documents that incriminate the Palestinian people that warrant the massacres against them, which have been going on for more than five decades at the hands of the Crusaders and the Jews. What is the evidence against the people of Iraq to warrant their blockade and being killed in a way that is unprecedented in history. What documents incriminated the Muslims of Bosnia-Herzegovina and warranted the Western Crusaders, with the United States at their head, to unleash their Serb ally to annihilate and displace the Muslim people in the region under UN cover. What is the crime of the Sashmiri people and what documents do the worshippers of cows possess to make them sanction their blood for more than fifty years. What have Muslims in Chechnya, Afghanistan, and the Central Asian republics committed to warrant being invaded by the brutal Soviet Military regime and after it communism's killing, annihilating, and displacing tens of millions of them. What evidence did the United States have the day it destroyed Afghanistan and killed and displaced the Muslims there. It even launched prior to that the unfair blockade of [the Afghans] under UN cover. Under the same cover Indonesia was ripped apart; Muslims were forced to leave Timor.... Under the UN cover too, it intervened in Somalia, killing and desecrating the land of Islam there. It is even the first to urge the Crusade ruler in the Philippines to annihilate our Muslim brothers there. There are many other countless issues. WE say that all the Muslims that the international Crusader-Zionist machine is annihilating have not committed any crime other than to say God is our Allah."
Bin Laden's strategy is to bleed the United States slowly but surely of its treasure, and it's finest sons. The war in Afghanistan is credited with playing a significant part in the economic collapse of the Soviet Union. But in the short term, some players win. Lockheed, General Dynamics, Halliburton, Blackwater.
WHERE DO YOUR CONGRESSMAN'S MILITARY CONTRACTOR CAMPAIGN DOLLARS COME FROM? Go to Maplight.org ("Defense")
And now this riveting report by a tiny French woman with cajones the size of... Take the red pill.