What the Taliban believed is hard to square with our supposed actions that "caused" the jihadis to hate us:
Other accusations were paranoid and delusional. Seven years after 9/11, they continued to insist that the attacks were hatched by American and Israeli intelligence agencies to create a pretext for the United States to enslave the Muslim world. They said the United States was forcibly converting vast numbers of Muslims to Christianity. American and NATO soldiers, they believed, were making Afghan women work as prostitutes on military bases.
Their hatred for the United States seemed boundless.
Ah yes, let the "why do they hate us" debate continue even as the jihadis make no secret of the bizarre reasons expressed as to why they hate us.
But the Taliban are not joyless killers. This is what the Taliban enjoyed:
The videos were impossible to avoid at night, when I was confined to the room the guards were in. They were little more than grimly repetitive snuff films. The Taliban executed local men who had been declared American spies. Taliban roadside bombs blew up Afghan government trucks and American Humvees. The most popular videos documented the final days of suicide bombers.
Say whatever you will about their reasons for hating us and their love of Infidel blood, these guys do think big. Their goals, too, seem incompatible with compromise:
Over those months, I came to a simple realization. After seven years of reporting in the region, I did not fully understand how extreme many of the Taliban had become. Before the kidnapping, I viewed the organization as a form of “Al Qaeda lite,” a religiously motivated movement primarily focused on controlling Afghanistan.
Living side by side with the Haqqanis’ followers, I learned that the goal of the hard-line Taliban was far more ambitious. Contact with foreign militants in the tribal areas appeared to have deeply affected many young Taliban fighters. They wanted to create a fundamentalist Islamic emirate with Al Qaeda that spanned the Muslim world.
Of course, Rohde doesn't write about this aspect of the jihad, but the jihadis also believe that the non-Moslem world is just a problem to be corrected by bringing us into the Moslem world eventually. Insane? Perhaps. But that's what they want to do.
We can't deal with these jihadis. We have to kill them. Oh sure, after we've killed a lot, the remainder will likely be willing to be cut a deal and be quiet as the price for making sure we no longer seek them out to kill them, but we're a long way from that day.
And for Pete's sake, support Moslem moderates so they can replace the appeal of the wild-eyed radicals who pose as "true" Moslems. Otherwise, the killing of jihadis will have to go on a lot longer than it would otherwise. In the long run, the civil war within Islam is just as important as any battlefield that we fight on today.
It's a long war, if you'll recall. And it's long because our enemies aren't willing yet to stop trying to kill us and too many angry Moslem young men can be recruited because they believe jihad is a great thing.
