The stark reality of the U.S' position in Afghanistan is driven home by this foreign service agent who has resigned in protest of the futile situation there.

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Resignation letter

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Yeh when a Muslim's angry he'll kill 12 soldiers.... when a Christian's angry, he'll murder about 100,000 civilians and turn your country into a nightmare.

Some competition you got going there.

abu_rashid wrote on Nov 7^th, 2009 at 9:57pm:



Iraq and Afghanistan were not invaded by an angry Christian. They were invaded because they were sorely in need of some discipline. They were too hairy chested for effete diplomacy.

muso, the Talibaan are the true representatives of the Afghan people, hence their popular support, hence the West's complete inability to remove them.

Afghanistan is a land of Islam, and the Muslims there have fought the British 3 times, and eventually won, and then the Soviets, and next are the Americans.

As brother Yusef Islam told it:

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Actually, it was refusing to hand him over that set them apart from all the other sell outs, who merely nod their heads and perform their master's bidding. That one single simple act, may have cost them their position of rule, but it guaranteed their support by millions of Muslims worldwide and obviously the Afghan and Pakistani people. Even many Muslims who disagreed (and still do) with the Taliban and OBL, respect them because of that decision. They did not sell out, they did not cave in, even if it meant the tough road, and losing their worldly power. You gotta admit it was a pretty selfless act, I cannot think of another leader within living memory who would give up his power like that just to protect one single man.

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I think they knew the invasion was imminent. Whether they handed him over or not, they were going to be invaded, so they took a gamble and stood firm. That was probably the best judgement he's ever made in his life, and which guaranteed him a long lasting place in history.

I can't believe you actually think being a lackey would've been a better judgement. If he had done that, he would've been long forgotten by now, and nobody would care who he was. That judgement could eventually end up making him well known for centuries or even millenia to come.

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I find it so sickening that the West was so worried about statues, yet couldn't have given a stuff that so many Afghans were starving and living in such poor conditions (likewise I criticised the Talibaan at the time, for wasting money on explosives to blow up the stupid statues, instead of feeding their people)

Or when they invaded Afghanistan, the news coverage of the mangey lion in the Kabul zoo, whilst starving kids lined the street of their way to the zoo. Despicable. Statues and animals are the priority of a society that has gone astray.

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al-Qaeda was an orgnisation that the U.S pretty much bred. And which they used to funnel foreign volunteer fighters into Afghanistan. When the war was over, and they had nothing to do they turned their sights on their former 'handlers', all of a sudden they become criminals? The hypocrisy is pretty thick there muso.

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Yes, they will become immortal in a sense. They will live on in the history books for eons to come. They will not be swept away as just another collaborating power-mongering regime in the 20th. century chaos that was the Muslim world, but will be the first faint glimmer of hope for a new leadership to come, that is not just a pack of subservient puppets willing to do anyhting to it's people to satisfy it's foreign masters.

Believe me, the other choice would've been much worse for them. They have made the smart choice, you merely don't have the wisdom and foresight to see it.

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I'm really struggling to see where in that paragraph you quoted I said I support OBL. Just rejecting the prevailing view about the situation does not amount to supporting OBL, only a very shallow mind could come up with such an analysis of the positions I've taken there.

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More than human suffering?

Regardless, they are their "national treasures", they can do with them what they like. If someone else dictated to us what we could do with what exists in Australia, I'm sure most of those crying about the Buddha statues would be up in arms saying "What right does anyone else have to tell us what to do".

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Is someone not allowed to turn over a new leaf? If he did those things in his youth, and then repented and dedicated his life to helping others liberate themselves, does that mean nothing? Is it all just about what he did when he was young?? That's certainly not the way Islam views human beings. We believe anyone is capable of reform, and what they previously did, before repenting is irrelevant.

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What means are they? He sacrificed all the material things he had in this world to help those who were under brutal attack by the Soviet war machine... How is that using religion for ones own personal means? I think you want to be angry at him, for what he's supposedly done to the West, and you'll invent anyhting against him to justify that anger, but it's really unfounded. It's all based on the emotional responses the media and the governments who are his enemies desired to elicit in you. Step back and take a more objective look at the situation.

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They did bring peace and stability to Afghanistan, unfortunately the West didn't want that. They wanted war and turmoil, so they used this situation as a pretext to disrupt it. Never in the history of mankind has a country gone to war merely over not handing over a person for extradition. Besides, how many IRA terrorists did the U.S refuse to hand over to the U.K?? Plenty... It was all a farce and an excuse to invade Afghanistan, they would've done it either way, the Taliban did the smart thing and didn't play their game, and will be remembered for it. You can feel all angry about that if you like, or you can recognise it for the smart and staunch action that it was.

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Even with the "implicit", I'm still struggling to see where my support was in that paragraph you quoted. Can you quote specific words that led you to that conclusion? Or is it merely that I'm on the opposite side of the argument to you, and that therefore logically means I implicitly support him?

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There will always be human suffering, so save the statues whilst we can? Yeh good retort.

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We've destroyed plenty of world heritage sites with our mining, and anytime anyone says anything about it, everyone jumps up and down about how the U.N have no right to tell us what to do.

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I was speaking purely hypothetically, since I give absolutely no merit to your claims he was a wayward youth in Lebanon. However, it does appear he left behind his youth of wealth and prestige and position, and spent a lot of money in the trenches and front lines in Afghanistan fighting the Soviet invaders. Back then to the Russians he was a terrorist, yet to the Americans and Saudi he was a heroic freedom fighter. Now since that time, his ideas and his beliefs have not really changed at all, only the target of his actions. Was he a reformed individual back then? I would say yes. Is he now? I'll leave you to answer that. I think if you were a Soviet citizen back then, you'd  have a very different take on his situation then and now, than you do as a Westerner.

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As I've stated previously I seriously doubt he did it, and I'm not alone, amongst the Muslims and non-Muslims alike. The amount of people who hold this position is growing more and more by the day.

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The only interview in which he clearly speaks about it, unambigiously is the one where he denies it. The other cases are not clear whatsoever. In none of them does he make direct mention of it. sorry but the clear and unambigious outweighs the obscure and implicit.

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Again as I've stated, I'm not a big fan of the whole "blind condemnation movement". Have you ever condemned the U.S and Australian army for all the innocent civilian lives they've taken? I'm yet to see it... when you start making condemnations, let me know, maybe we can discuss it further. Until then it's all empty speech.

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I'm not going to change the subject, but really I don't know enough about him to make any statement definitively about him. I believe the "image" of Bin Laden is mostly a media/propaganda mirage, and therefore I'm not really inclined to comment on that "image", since it's mostly a facade created to channel anger and condemnation onto. Bin Laden is not nearly as relevant to this whole situation as you might think. He was merely a catalyst, that was clumsily used by the West, and which has now grown into such a myth that it's taken on a life of its own. The myth of Bin Laden has actually become more powerful, for both sides, than the man himself. The naive and even outright stupid focus on him is testament to the failed strategy of the West in this whole saga. And quite frankly I'm surprised to find someone such as yourself muso, who usually displays a lot of intellectual prowess, making the same old tired and pointless ultimatums of being "with us or against us". You've reduced yourself to being intellectually on par with Bush, and that's really something to be ashamed of.

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That's right, and in Islam forgiving someone who has wronged you is greater than taking revenge. And the man who restrains his anger is the greater man. But the provision to take ones "haqq" (truth/right/reality) from the aggressor is also established and is not wrong.

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That's right I do know your position, and that's why I find your statements and questions here to be unfathomable. You're not one of the soren/sprint/yadda/calanen nutter/hate-mongers, so I don't understand why you view this in such an illogical and brainwashed way.

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Why is he? Even if he did plan that attack, does it make him even a thousandth as much a criminal as Bush and all the other Western leaders who've slaughtered hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians?

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Why is that so surprising? Contrary to the propaganda we get fed Qaddafi is very anti-Islamist. Almost any Islamist movement/leader would be in trouble if they ever found themself in Libya.

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As I said, the supposed claims he admitted it do not even reference the event in question. Thank you.

And that statement from him shows quite clearly that he was worried about the well being of women and children, not the kind of person who'd harm women and children. Or don't you consider Muslim women and children worth protecting? Is only Bush allowed to murder hundreds of thousands in defence of Western women and children, because they're real humans?

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This article obviously has no credibility whatsoever, since it lists some of the so called "19 hijackers" who are still alive and well and living in their countries till this day (such as saeed al-ghamdi).

See these articles: from BBC and The Telegraph.