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Retired Indian diplomat M K Bhadrakumar makes an important point in the midst of the idiotic blather over this tragedy:

Following the Friday Prayer, a crowd that was leaving the famous Blue Mosque found another set of religious leaders in a Toyota Corolla fitted out with loudspeakers urging people to join them at the burning of the effigy of a militant fundamentalist Christian pastor in the US by name of Terry Jones who oversaw the burning of a copy of the Koran at his church in Gainesville, Florida, on March 20.

The crowd then turned and started walking the one-kilometre journey toward the UN compound. The Gurkhas who provided security for the UN were somehow overwhelmed and killed while a larger group apparently broke into the compound. In the violence that followed, all Afghan national staff and the Russian head of the UN office were spared, while the crowd went for Westerners, namely, three workers from Norway, Romania and Sweden.

What stands out is that the victims were deliberately murdered rather than killed by an out-of-control mob. Meanwhile, agitation against Jones has spread to Kandahar and the violence in Mazar-i-Sharif and Kandahar has somehow become coalesced, as if originating from one vast reservoir.

Afghan authorities and De Mistura have instinctively blamed the Taliban for the violence in Mazar-i-Sharif. The Taliban flatly rejected the imputation. Indeed, there are intriguing questions as to what really happened.

You know when the Gurkhas can’t handle the situation you have a serious problem, and Bhadrakumar goes on to pinpoint that problem.

Americans easily forget that the Taliban is as much an ethnic Pashtun phenomenon as an Islamic religious one.  Americans have also forgotten that one reason why the U.S. won such an early victory in Afghanistan in 2001 is because of the non-Pashtun groups’ (remember the “Northern Alliance?”)  early support for the U.S. invasion.  The Taliban’s policy towards non-Pashtun minorities in Afghanistan had been, in a word, genocidal up to that time.

Now the Obama Administration is mulling over releasing some of the Taliban’s leadership from Club Gitmo as part of a peace deal with the Taliban.  Needless to say, the ethnic minorities are unenthusiastic about their former Pashtun masters reasserting control over the country.  Jones’ pyrotechnics were a convenient excuse to whip up an attack against the international presence there, which many of the locals (justifiably) believe will facilitate the Taliban’s return to power.

Before we go off on another politically correct tangent and start to pitch our First Amendment rights in the name of “tolerance,” we need to step back and look at what’s really going on rather than another knee-jerk, politically correct reaction.

It’s set forth in detail by Syed Saleem Shahzad, perhaps the most knowledgeable correspondent of Islamicist groups in Afghanistan and Pakistan:

International Islamic militancy that had its roots in the decade-long war against the Soviets in the 1980s was broadly divided into two main schools of thought; both considered themselves righteous despite embodying contradictory themes. These were doctrines of armed struggle espoused by Palestinian Sunni Islamic scholar and theologian Dr Abdullah Azzam, and Egyptian ideologue and Bin Laden’s deputy, Dr Ayman al-Zawahiri.

Azzam preached in favour of defensive jihad by Muslims to help the Afghan mujahideen against the Soviets. He firmly believed in a broader Muslim bloc including Muslim ruling establishments and never supported revolt against Muslim regimes. Despite being Palestinian with Jordanian nationality and a background in the Muslim Brotherhood, Azzam kept himself aloof from the Palestinian revolt against the Jordanian monarchy in September 1970 (called Black September).

Azzam was very close to the Saudi Arabian royal family and considered it essential to lobby it for support of Islamic armed movements like the Afghan resistance against the Soviets and the Palestinian resistance against Israel. He struggled to achieve unity among Muslim rulers and Islamists to resist Western hegemony. He was less dogmatic than others in his strategic purview.

After Azzam’s assassination in Pakistan in 1989, Zawahiri emerged as the main ideologue of Islamic armed opposition. Coming from the same ideological background of the Muslim Brotherhood as Azzam, Zawahiri faced an entirely different world after the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s when, under American instructions, Muslim regimes were intolerant of Islamic militancy.

Zawahiri therefore promoted the idea of ideological divides within the Muslim world, and encouraged revolts and terrorism to polarize societies to such a point of chaos that they would be unmanageable and amenable to Western intervention. It was believed that such intervention would open the gates for a battle between the West and the Muslim world.

Like Azzam, Zawahiri is not too dogmatic, but he encouraged narrow ideological views in resistance movements as a strategy to boost revolts against Muslim-majority states.

Students of Marxism will recognise the parallel between this and the division between the Stalinists (“revolution in one country”) and the Trotskyites (“revolution everywhere.”)  In the case of the Communists, that ended up with a Lenin-style two party system: one party in power and the other dead and in jail, the Trotskyites swept away in the Purge and Trotsky himself assassinated (a good Islamic term) in Mexico.  But it also paved the way for the “fifty year wound,” the Cold War.

In first siding with Zawahiri, bin Laden believed that, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the power challengers in a polarised United States (Al Gore?) would see weakness in the power holder (George W. Bush) rise up, destabilise and weaken/overthrow the administration.  But the U.S. isn’t (or at least wasn’t) the Middle East, where such a reaction would have taken place.  Instead the attacks produced unity and the invasions, first of Afghanistan and later of Iraq.  The major players in the Middle East, Muslims all, went along with the U.S. with the exception of Shi’ite Iran.

Now bin Laden can look and see many of the U.S. allies either swept away in the current round of Arab revolts (Egypt,) moving towards Islamicism on their own (Turkey) or in varying degrees of trouble (Yemen, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia.)  It’s certainly a tempting time to go to a more “Stalinist” strategy of making gains on the home front.  This would not only make bin Laden’s immediate objective more possible (getting the U.S. out of the Middle East in general and Saudi Arabia in particular) but also make the “dar-al-saalam” more of a cohesive base for assaults against the major non-Muslim regions/countries of the world: to the West, Europe and the United States, to the North (Russia) and to the East, India and China.

Bin Laden’s biggest challenge is to end up with a unified Middle East, no mean feat considering the nature of Middle Eastern politics and the Sunni-Shi’ite divide (Iran.)   If he can pull it off, his opponents to the West probably don’t have the stomach for another protracted conflict like the Cold War.  (The rest of them are another story…)

His opponents’ objective is to keep Middle Eastern politics in their usual chaotic state without breaking the oil supply.    The U.S.’ track record on pulling this off isn’t inspiring, either in the narrow dogmatism of the Bush Administration or the indecisive dillying of the Obama one.  It’s here where others-especially the Chinese–have a golden opportunity to step into the vacuum.

As I had predicted earlier, we now have this:

Apple has pulled the Exodus International app from their iTunes App Store.

Recently, Jeff Buchanan, Exodus International’s Senior Director of Church Equipping & Student Ministries, told The Christian Post, “In no way shape or form is our message about trying to cure or do we try to promote that type of methodology or message… This is a label (gay cure app) that has been put forth by opponents to the application to serve as propaganda in order to stigmatize and really label the application in a false way and provoking a response such as you are seeing with the application.”

Life in these United States is so predictable these days…