from Mark Bowden's book "Blackhawk Down"

[tagryn]

I was rereading Bowden's "Blackhawk Down" this week, and this passage seems as relevant today as it was back then, for a lot of different places: Libya, Palestine/Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Pakistan, Iraq, Afghanistan, Korea, etc.:

"(Somalia) was a watershed," said one State Department official, "The idea used to be that terrible countries were terrible because good, decent, innocent people were being oppressed by evil, thuggish leaders. Somalia changed that. Here you have a country where just about everybody is caught up in hatred and fighting. You stop an old lady on the street and ask her if she wants peace, and she’ll say, yes, of course, I pray for it daily. All the things you’d expect her to say. Then ask her if she would be willing for her clan to share power with another in order to have that peace, and she’ll say, 'With those murderers and thieves? I’d die first.' People in these countries - Bosnia is a more recent example - don’t want peace. They want victory. They want power. Men, women, old and young. Somalia was the experience that taught us that people in these places bear much of the responsibility for things being the way they are. The hatred and the killing continues because they want it to. Or because they don’t want peace enough to stop it." (pg 334-335)

Comments

[erikred.livejournal.com]

We really just don't get tribalism here in the States, not like this, and certainly not like it is in Afghanistan. I don't even want I-told-you-so points for this, but trying to engage the Taliban with anything less that eradication is an absolute mistake, and we will see it bite us in the end before this is over.