Good read...... ================================== Uncle Sam’s Koran: Islam On Afghan TV And Radio In the 1980s the United States possessed a distinct ideological advantage over the Soviets in the battle for Afghanistan. Whereas the Russians and their Marxist Afghan allies were publicly antagonistic towards religion in all forms, America staked out a small but crucial common ground with the Mujahedeen based on a mutual respect for devout, even fundamentalist faith. William Casey, the CIA director from 1981 to 1987, is said to have felt deep connections between his own Catholic faith and the religiosity of the anti-Soviet Islamists who would one day found the Taliban. Playing the role of provocateur, the U.S. was fully satisfied with the creation of an atheist/theist binary, correctly predicting that any successful Afghan government would need to reconcile itself with the profound role that Islam plays in local life. Two decades later, America found itself in a very different position. Seething with pain and desperate to construct a worldview in which terrorism was both comprehensible and preventable, the United States entered Afghanistan with a radically revised approach to Islam. America’s new “with us or against us” paradigm positioned Western (neo)-liberalism in stark opposition to a retrogressive Islam that was blamed for incubating Osama bin Laden and emboldening those who would race to their own deaths in order to realize his terrifying decrees. A new binary was crafted, pitting Western secularism against an Afghan Islam that was deeply, perhaps exclusively, associated with the Taliban’s efforts to restrict personal freedoms.
Posted on: Sat, 15 Jun 2013 14:09:19 +0000
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