March 11, 2012
M. Serajul Islam
The US has upped its schedule to withdraw its combat troops from
Afghanistan. In June last year, President Obama had made a public declaration
to bring the troops back by end of 2014. Recently, the US Defense Secretary announced that the US would
be bringing all combat troops home by 2013 instead.
The President’s commitment notwithstanding, no doubt necessitated
by the Presidential elections later this year, events in Afghanistan are not
shaping the way the President would have liked. The Karzai Government has failed
to show the potentials necessary to give the confidence to the US that the
country would be on track in which it has tried to put the country at great
financial and human costs in pursuance of the war on terror. The Talibans are
resurgent and negotiations are under way with US concurrence for a role for the
so-called moderate Talibans in a post-US Afghanistan.
To make matters worse for the US, its troops have become embroiled
in the country for burning the holy Koran. The incident occurred in Parwan on
February 20th . It has affected since every aspect of relations
between the two countries and all arrangements related to the withdrawal
schedule of US combat troops in Afghanistan. Afghans are outraged. In incidents
related to the Koran burning issue, 29 Afghans and 6 American soldiers were
killed in the week following the burning.
The US administration is very deeply concerned. The administration
went to action immediately to contain the dangerous post-burning effects. President Obama and the US commander in Afghanistan also apologized;
apologies that drew great flak in USA but nevertheless helped contain the
situation from going dangerously out of hand. In addition, the US ordered
immediately a joint American-Afghan investigation and the US military, its own
investigation. The powerful Afghan religious body the Ulema Council also
ordered a separate investigation.
The US-Afghan investigations have identified a chain of human errors
that led to the unfortunate event. The investigation revealed that six US
military personnel that included an Afghan-American interpreter were involved
in the burning. Importantly, the investigation did not find any pre-planned or
deliberate attempt by the six involved in the burning to incite Afghans’
religious sentiments. Nevertheless, the episode had the script of a mystery
drama and started with US suspicion of Afghans incarcerated in the Parwan
detention centre.
The US military in charge of the detention centre in Pawan became
suspicious that the detainees were using library books to scribble notes
internally and externally to organize an uprising. They feared a security risk
and 2 Afghan interpreters were assigned to sort out the books in which the
scribbling was reported to have been done. The two ended up with sorting 1652
books that included a few Korans but mostly books of secular nature, including
novels and poems.
What was actually scribed in the books and whether these writings
in anyway posed a security risk was not thoroughly discovered by the US
military personnel involved or the Afghans who assisted because there were too
many books involved and too little time to review the writings. The Ulema Team
that has also investigated the matter however found very personal writings on
the books such as their names and other personal records. On the Korans and on the religious books, the writings were merely to
explain the text in local Afghan dialects and had nothing to do with “terrorism
or criminal activities.”
Where the simple decision in the matter could have been to store
the 1652 books as they did not reveal anything suspicious or threatening, the
US military personnel involved in the matter simply went ahead and ordered the
books to be burned. In deciding, the relevant officials made one procedural
error and another of much serious nature, a total insensitivity and lack of
understanding to Islamic beliefs and traditions. The procedural mistake was not
to have retained the 1652 books for a while longer and instead deciding
straightaway to burn the total lot.
The cardinal error of the officials who ordered the burning was to
have overlooked that in the lot, there were a few Korans or not to have thought
that in lot, there could be a few Korans. Clearly, anyone even with a vague notion of
what a Koran means to the Muslims would have taken out the few Korans from the
lot and gone ahead with the order to burn the rest. The officials did not do
that. It was only when Afghans who were
ordered to burn the books found the Korans that the alarm bell was sounded but
by then the Korans were substantially burnt.
US apologies and orders of investigations however have not been
enough to appease the Afghans. The Ulema Council has said that Afghan custom
and tradition demands that those responsible for the burning should be publicly
punished. The US of course is not going to do any of it. US public opinion is
also strongly against such a demand. Some of the opinions on a report by the NY
Times covering the burning incident make very interest reading. Almost all the
100 plus letters that I sampled
expressed deep contempt for Islamic
and Islamic values that could lead one to conclude that still in the US,
Muslims continue to remain suspect even when their religion is violated and
humiliated.
The US has invested so heavily in Afghanistan that they should
have been leaving the country as heroes. Instead, the Koran burning issue is
surely going to be for the US the parting kick for all their sacrifices for the
people of Afghanistan; the final nail to seal the coffin on US unpopularity in
the country. In this Koran burning incident, the US has again underlined how
little they know of Islam, Muslims and the Islamic world. The Koran is a living
symbol of the Almighty in the lives of every Muslim, an overwhelming majority
of who are not fundamentalists. They not just believe that the Koran has been
authored by God; they believe that He gave it to Muslims through Prophet
Muhammad (pbuh). The Muslims show to the Koran the respect that a non-Muslim
will never perhaps understand.
The US is also being forced to bring the Talibans to the
negotiating table. Hamid Karzai has clearly proven that he would not be able to
live up to the expectations that the US and its allies have placed on him. The US would be spending the same amount of
time in Afghanistan till it withdraws its combat troops by 2013 as did the
Soviets in the 1980s. The Soviets had left in failure. It looks as if the US
would likewise as did all foreign troops in history of Afghanistan. Like the
dog’s crooked tail, Afghanistan is again about to go back to its own ways and about to prove that there is a lot of
truth in the cliché that history repeats itself.
Nevertheless, the US can take at least the comfort that it has
broken Al Qaeda substantially having killed most of its top leadership
including Osama Ben Laden. At its worst, even an Afghanistan free of US
occupation with Talibans in power in one shape or another, would be a problem
for the Afghans but little threat to the US or the West. The Muslim world would
like to expect that after the US leaves Afghanistan, it would not use what
happens there to humiliate them across the world. It is time for the US and its
allies to realize that Muslims have been the victims of the world on terror
that President Bush had started.
The writer
is a former Ambassador to Japan and Egypt
.
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