I'm listening to the NPR staff racking their brains over the question of why the Afghan population isn't as a whole more upset over the ghastly massacre in Kandahar province than they were over the Qur'an burnings of last month—like, have the years of war just made them place less of a value on human life than we do? Are they just clinging to their Qur'ans and guns?
It seems pretty obvious to me that NATO forces are to blame for the massacre insofar as if they hadn't been there it wouldn't have happened, but not guilty beyond that; the soldier was plainly not following orders, he was out of his mind, amok. The Qur'ans, on the other hand, were coolly and deliberately detroyed by order—it was NATO's intention to burn them, and why was that? Why wouldn't the Afghans think it was meant maliciously? It's an occupying army, isn't it?
The conceptual error from NPR and the commentariat is their starting by thinking "Why are these people different from us?" Whereas you can come up with an answer by starting with the assumption that they aren't different; what's different is the point of view from which they are interpreting what they see—the point of view of a people under occupation.
It's a failure of empathy that goes right up the chain of command (past those generals who think Muslims are idolators to those who hold doctorates), and it causes a lot of problems. Of course if they started thinking that way they might start thinking the whole operation was doomed to failure no matter what they did, and I guess that wouldn't be very cool.
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| Mohammad Sabir Khedri, fourth from left, displays the biggest Quran in the world to Afghan officials at the Hakim Nasir Khosrow Balkhi library in Kabul, 17 January 2012. Photo by Reuters. |
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