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"Moderate politicians and the media had urged President Pervez Musharraf to crack down on the Red Mosque radicals far earlier, and despite the bloodshed newspaper editorials have shown broad support for the decision to finally use force." [1]
Reporter Kamran Haider's wrap on the Red Mosque story posted about three hours ago. At the moment, it's my latest news on the event and has one radical cleric, about 50 fighters with 14 AK-47's between them, and hundreds of students holed up in a mosque under siege on the grounds of a large Islamic school campus. Reports have suggested that the militants are shooting any who try to surrender and are themselves rejecting the government's demand for unconditional surrender.
A few days ago, an Associated Press story running on CNN.com featured a photograph of a handsome enough young man dressed fully in robes and red scarf like head covering ("keffiya" may be the term) and sporting and firing a lovely AK-47, nut brown wood stock and barrel support, gun metal black on top, and gray polished steel on the business end. The end of that young man's art: death; the purpose of it: glory in the bosom of The Prophet and a pretty good Paradise.
One overlooks the aspect of vanity in those going off to war in the name of God and country, and yet, martial vanity has been always a great part of the expression of righteousness on the part of warriors-- not for nothing the fine brocade and hammered armor of the joust, the banners of legions, the braided ropes and medals becoming officers.
For that matter, thumb through a hunter's catalog. The boys (usually boys but good ol' girls too in the U.S.) will tell you how functional everything is--camouflaged, insulated, dry--but from WalMart to Filson's [3], it sure is pretty too.
If hunting were only about gamekeeping for the state and stocking a freezer, no one would throw upwards of a thousand dollars (much less $15,000, and such are on the market too) for a shotgun. Instead, with hunting, which is never far from adventuring toward war, utility provides the excuse: it takes romance to really drive the market.
Back at the Red Mosque, there are young men wearing robes and keffiya and sporting AK-47's in their role as the bravest of the brave, the advanced guard of Islam, practically hardwired to Allah and empowered to take life and sacrifice their own as willed so by a force greater than themselves. All Muslims who die in the course of their fate, whether infants or old men, have waiting for them a place in Paradise (while all who oppose them are only going to Hell in any case).
So the story goes.
The military and paramilitary forces providing services to secular administrations have their pride too, but it so much more humble or even humiliating a thing: instead of Paradise, a paycheck; instead of a direct pact, even close conversation, with God, they have only to garner the appreciation of their families and the humans they have kept safe from harm; instead of the billowing finery becoming to heroic young men, they get to go off to work in olive drab or "civvies"; and instead of melding their lives with religious studies and glorious battle, most have to look forward to the next round of orders, paperwork, reports, statistics.
No wonder reasoning governments stand either at a loss or patiently before "fiery" clerics and young Mujahideen.
I've been a bit pointed thus far in this piece, but there are large differences between civil and spiritual motivation in war as well as between the desire to defend lives, whatever the content of their experience and psychology, versus the will to dictate to others one way of being or another at any price.
Asymmetry in force has been described elsewhere. I don't have at hand Hannah Arendt's book On Violence [4], but for those who make a study of armed conflicts, the familiar language of "the weak" versus "the strong" runs through it. More recently, similar language has crossed my desk in the form of an e-mailed circular from the American Enterprise Institute's Middle East Forum titled, "Asymmetrical Threat Concept and Its Reflections on International Security" [5]. Both speak some to the practical or structural aspects of guerrilla warfare, low intensity conflict, and terrorism and to the business where a comparatively few personalities develop some power within their local communities and then appear in public to challenge a a dominant incumbent culture or government.
As theory, the approach owes no loyalty to governing ideologies or religious affiliation: it works as well with American colonial raiding parties against the British as it does with methods pursued by the contemporary Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Taliban, Hamas, and Islamic Courts efforts. As a potential applied tool, however, it brings to the forefront the issue of whether a mechanical and sterile interpretation of "asymmetrical warfare" can bear with relevance against cohesive, impassioned, and secret movements and societies.
The simple answer: they cannot, have not, and won't.
I believe the thing that ultimately derails small organizations in the field is loss of support among their own, and that phenomenon is not about tactics that get to the whereabouts of arms and fighters, as effective as those may be for one party or another in a practical sense, but rather, the alteration in the sustained myth and poetry of the culture supporting essentially entrepreneurial violence.
Total defeat accompanied by unconditional surrender may induce such a change, but the world hasn't seen that sort of war for some years.
In fact, speaking informally, the "end state" in contemporary conflicts seem to play to a draw or, and worse, a seesaw of flipped governments and their insurgencies with most civilians expressing little interest in the fortunes of either side while unfairly bearing the brunt of the destructive power of the violence.
More helpful these days: reduction in the numbers of charismatic personalities leading and organizing various challenges to state authority, and that's the look of the Red Mosque at this hour: the Pakistani government holds one of two leading clerics and its military has contained about 50 fighters and their 14 Kalashnikov submachine guns.
However, and President Musharraf knows this, whatever blood gets spilled in returning the mosque to civil law will probably reflect more on the government (the strong) than the militants (those poor, beautiful, youthful, and right-minded students who wish only to live as Muhammad advised) even though the stand-off has not drawn in partisans from across Pakistan's Islamic community.
On the part of the besieged, there's undoubtedly the hope that martyrdom may succeed where words have not, and that's possible, for whatever happens next, the government knows it has the means--certainly, the military power--to resolve the crisis but not address the problem, which is cultural, mythical, poetic, and spiritual and sustained so far by the rejection of competing language and thought in the culture generating the children who have taken up arms and most recently used them to kill and intimidate their peers.
I'll have more to say about culture, language, youth, and spirituality, but while I've been working on this piece, Pakistani President Musharraf has made his appearance: "If they don't surrender, I am saying it here, they will be killed." [6]
Those may be fine fighting words, but President Musharraf has been forced to speak them with this pressure applied by the besieged militants (I'm still quoting from Faisal Aziz's story at Reuters):
"About 1,200 students left the mosque after the clashes began but only about 20 came out on Friday, among them a boy who said older students were forcing young ones to stay. On Saturday just one boy ducked out of the compound and handed himself in. Officials say they don't know how many people remain but there are believed to be hundreds."
State organized military forces in these struggles, from Somalia to Israel, from Afghanistan to Iraq, eschew the use of other humans as pawns and shields in their operations. They don't plant innocents between themselves and their guns; they make no claim as to the spiritual desirability of injury and death for those unlucky enough to have been with them on the way to work.
The boy in the CNN picture, he with the red keffiya, the white robes, the power of the AK-47, and the blessings of Islam as it has been passed through others and on to him, would seem to know no such compunction. So far, and through the picture, he exists in most readers' heads as an icon, not a boy with a name and parents somewhere and crazy dreams familiar to teens everywhere, but rather as a young man with a mission--and what a mission we are all of us about to witness through the media.
I'll have more on culture, language, and violence as the days go by.
I may even delve into other than Islam on the way--at the moment, Islam strikes me as representing one-fifth of the world's population dominating about 80 percent of the international reporting on conflict.
Stay tuned.
2. Associated Press. "Pakistan: Militants must surrender or else." CNN.com, July 3, 2007.
3. Filson.
4. Arendt, Hannah. On Violence. New York: Harvest, Harcourt Brace & Company, 1969, 1970.
Correspondence and Permissions: James S. Oppenheim
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