The U.S. military denied Monday it has allowed soldiers to try to convert Afghans to Christianity, after a television network showed pictures of soldiers with bibles translated into local languages.
General Order Number 1 from the U.S. military's Central Command forbids active duty troops -- including all those serving in Iraq and Afghanistan -- from trying to convert people to their religion, considered a crime in many Muslim countries.
Qatar-based Al Jazeera television showed footage of a church service at Bagram, the main U.S. base north of the Afghan capital Kabul, in which soldiers had a stack of bibles in the local languages, Pashtu and Dari.
A military chaplain was shown delivering a sermon to other soldiers, saying: "The special forces guys -- they hunt men basically. We do the same things as Christians, we hunt people for Jesus. We do, we hunt them down."
But a U.S. military spokeswoman, Major Jennifer Willis, said the comments from the sermon were taken out of context and chaplains were told to make clear to soldiers that they could not proselytize while serving.
She said the bibles had been mailed to a soldier by a church back home in the United States and were never distributed.
That we even have to have such a general order says a lot about the challenge we face in winning. Until Moslems don't get all agitated over the concept of conversion from Islam, there will always be a ready pool of suicide bombers and other assorted mayhem-prone recruits for the fanatics to use against us.
It really is a long war that we are in.
