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Afghanistan Is Like Eastern Kentucky On Steroids.

By Randy Barker

Why are mountain people so much alike ? It doesn't seem to matter where the
mountains are. They could be in Yugoslavia, Scotland, Sicily, Afghanistan or Eastern Kentucky. The people in those elevations have elevated levels of clannishness and often only a thin veneer of civility covering violent natures.

Of course, Eastern Kentucky's homicidal heydays were mostly in the late 19th
and early 20th century when the Hatfield and McCoy Feud, which supposedly
started over a hog, made the national news. But there were lots of other
feuds that were just as nasty. For instance, Clay County's Baker-White Feud, which started when someone's dog was insulted, and Harlan County's
Turner-Howard Feud, which started when a Turner spoke badly of a Howard's
mother.

But vendetta-wise, the hillbillies of Eastern Kentucky don't hold a candle to
the hillbillies of Afghanistan. Just imagine the murderous possibilities of 20 different ethnic groups speaking nearly 30 different dialects. Majority Sunni Muslim Pashtuns who enjoy persecuting and killing the minority Shiite Muslim Hazari. And the largest minority, Tajiks, who along with their northern neighbors, the Uzbecks, don't really like either the Pashtuns or Hazari. Overlay on this The Taliban, which means "religious students", who were largely educated in Pakistani Islamic schools where they memorized the Koran in Arabic, a language they do not understand. Plus, the very fundamentalist Wahhabi Muslim Arabs of Bin Laden's Al-Qaida, who would be unwelcome flat-land foreigners if they weren't so rich. And, of course, there are the complicating factors of Afghanistan's long-term drought, famine and overwhelming illiteracy.

Our armed forces will eventually get rid of Bin Laden's bunch and the "student government" in Kabul, something we really need to do because of a prophesy of Muhammad. He said "If you see the black (meaning war) flags coming from Khurasan (Afghanistan), join that army, even if you have to crawl over ice, for this is the army of Imam al-Mahdi and no one can stop that army until it reaches Jerusalem." That prophesy is why Bin Laden is in Afghanistan. He needs to be stopped there before radical Muslims all over the world "crawl over ice" to join him.

After the war, the problem then will be what to do with the millions of poor, ignorant, starving people that are left. After helping them win their war against Russia, we left them to their own devices. They then started killing each other with a vengeance. The Northern Alliance had their shot, literally and figuratively. And The Taliban wound up being seen as the way to stop the violence. This is the mess the U.S. is going to inherit. One that attracts troublesome people much too close to nuclear-armed and volatile Pakistan. We can't dictate directly, but we can't walk away from Afghanistan again, either.

Rebuilding a European state after WWII was comparatively easy compared to
what will be faced in Afghanistan. Europe had an institutional memory, educated people and a history of achievement. Afghanistan has nothing. Imagine how much American money it's going to take to help medieval Afghans rise to the level of a 19th century Appalachian mountaineer like "Devil Anse" Hatfield!

A Coincidence?

The last time Christendom was seriously threatened by Islam was when the Ottoman Turk army was stopped from entering Vienna, Austria by the army of
Polish King Jan Sobiesko. The year was 1683. The date was September 11.

Excerpts from NotSo SERIOUS MONEY,
a weekly online financial newsletter written by randybarker@aol.com