For
Immediate Release
September 18, 2001
By
Congressman Joe Pitts
In the earliest days of Islam,
when the prophet Mohammed’s armies were spreading the new religion beyond
Mecca and Medina throughout the Arabian Peninsula, a woman was found dead on a
battlefield. When it was reported to him, Mohammed forbade the killing of women
and children. Osama bin Laden and
his allies are engaged in a Jihad, or religious struggle, against America and
the West. Their fight, however, is
based on a seriously skewed interpretation of the very faith they say they are
defending. Certainly, the men who
turned four airplanes into guided missiles last week ignored Mohammed’s
injunction against the killing of women and children.
Muslims everywhere are still recoiling in horror.
Every terrorist organization
has a cause, and bin Laden’s is the removal of all “infidel”
influence—cultural, economic, and military—from the Muslim World.
The presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia is, he believes,
blasphemy—even though they are there at the invitation of the king.
Through terror, death, and destruction, he and his cohorts believe the
Muslim world will be purified.
But few Muslims share his
views. His own family has disowned
him. Muslim scholar Masood Ghaznavi
told the Washington Post in the days after the attack, “War in Islam is
in self-defense. … It says you
should not kill women, children, old people, and non-combatants.
This is in the general writings of Islam and is not in dispute.
It says you don’t burn the property or the orchards.
There is to be no destruction of any kind.
In ordinary circumstances, anything of that kind is totally forbidden
because the basic principle of Islamic law is that life and property God has
made inviolable, that no individual has a right to take anyone’s life or
anyone’s property.”
Afghanistan, the nation bin
Laden now calls home, is a virtual wasteland.
Americans who are calling on their president to “bomb it back into the
stone age” forget that that has already been done. For ten years, the Soviet Union laid waste to Afghanistan and
little infrastructure is left. Even
the road between its two largest cities is only a long string of wheel ruts
interspersed by bits of decades-old pavement.
In Afghanistan, poor families
often place their children in “madrasas”—religious schools—where they
receive free room, board, and education. But
the educations they receive are often radical ones, where they learn to hate.
A year ago, a New York Times reporter visited the Haqqania madrasa
to learn what he could. He wrote, “Two 11-year-old boys…would follow me around
wherever I went. They wore pots on
their heads, and their version of hide-and-seek was to jump out from behind a
tree or some other hiding place, scream “Osama!” and pretend to shoot me.”
The Haqqania madrasa, located
in the Northwest Frontier Province of Pakistan, has educated a large proportion
of the Taliban leadership of Afghanistan. Osama
bin Laden is an icon and a hero to its students.
The school is a training school for future terrorists.
The reporter asked a group of
students, “Who wants to see Osama bin Laden armed with nuclear weapons?”
Every hand in the room, he reported, shot up.
Osama bin Laden is a terrorist
and is rightly our number-one target. But
removing him will not end radical Islam. Mainstream
Muslim countries will need to be empowered, and schools like the Haqqania
madrasa will have to be shut down. Afghanistan, Syria, Iran, and the other nations that harbor
terrorists must be pressured to expel leaders like bin Laden and to shut down
their camps. Only then will we be
able to break apart the world’s terrorist networks.
The best way to accomplish
these goals is to greatly increase our “human” intelligence assets—in
other words: hire more spies. Our
relations with moderate Muslim regimes must be improved.
They are invaluable assets in our war on terrorism.
Americans must also be
patient. Much of what will happen
over the coming months and years will never be reported.
Publicizing victories against terrorism would expose our tactics and make
them unusable, and sources would be killed. Still, it is likely that there will also be sufficient
military engagements for the American people to know the war on terrorism is
moving forward.
In the end, though, ending
terrorism will require changing hearts and minds—and that is a very long
process indeed.
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