Thieves and Brigands

No, not politicians, though I've been reading about them, too. What is it with professional politicians? Why did Harry Reid feel he had to apologise for a political assessment he made years ago which turned out to be right? Are we really so tense here that we can't admit that white people would feel more comfortable with a black candidate who has a neutral accent? Apparently so. Is that fair, that white people have that bias? No, it isn't. We should care more about what people say than how they say it. But that's not the way people tend to be. We judge people based partially on how much they're like us -- and accent's part of that.

But the thieves and brigands I'm thinking about is (are?) the Taliban and their thugs-in-partnership. It seems that we assume they're swift, sleek, and effective, and therefore scary. They are scary. They're killers, assassins, and just plain horrible people. They're the Mafia in turbans, only not the American Mafia, whom we've more or less come to accept as part of the criminal landscape, but the Sicilian Mafia, the one that that holds to the eye for a eye theory of justice. And then they go further, killing or maiming not just specific targets of their ire, but anyone who happens to be in the vicinity. We are stunned by the ferocity of the Taliban and their goons because we can't imagine people who hate so much that if the object of their hate suddenly disappeared, they'd wither up and die. We don't hate that much. We reason, talk, judge. In an early episode of West Wing, the newly-elected President wants to devastate a country where Americans have been killed. He rages that in Roman times, a citizen could walk without fear across the empire because he knew that if anything happened to him, the full might of the Roman Empire would come thundering down on that land, and decimate it - from the Latin Decem, referring to every tenth man who would be killed in furious retribution for that act. He finds out that such isn't the way of a great power, these days, and so do we. We could send a fleet of bombers to destroy the country and everyone in it, and promise to do the same to any other country that dared give free rein to people like that. We don't. We think, and reason, and communicate. Because that's what we call civilized, these days. We don't drop to their level. We try to bring them up to ours. And we frequently fail, spectacularly. It almost makes you understand the attraction that torture had to Cheney. Not that it worked -- I don't know if it did or not, though I suspect not. But because it was punishment. We got one of the criminal bastards.

Because that's what they are. Criminals. Not glorious freedom fighters, not defenders of the faith. Criminals. Pure and nasty.

That doesn't make them easier to combat. They've got a snug hiding spot, and they live in an environment which is much more interested in surviving to tomorrow than doing the morally right thing. Morals are for people with power, or people with nothing left to lose. Stomping out this infection isn't helped by the unwillingness of many other countries to get involved. Being involved means paying a high price for something that seems at times to be not much worth it, because like many nasty, foul things, they always come back. There's always someone wiling to proclaim jihad this, jihad that, and there's always someone willing to follow him, to die gloriously. It's hard to stop them all, and the power of explosives and biological agents multiplies the effectiveness of that one follower. What do they have to lose?

So - what do they have to lose? Does anyone know? Certainly, no one I know. I don't think that going for what they need, and we can take, is the answer. But it's an answer. I wonder if we're pursuing it. Want to bet no one would answer that?