Note: the first part of this post was written over a week ago. Since then President Biden and the Taliban have confirmed that we will indeed pull all American forces out of Afghanistan on August 31. I simply got very busy with a number of ministry demands and hadn’t the time to complete the post.
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Today, whether or not we accept it, we are involved in an ideological conflict, a war with a determined enemy. Our enemy wants nothing less than the complete destruction or unconditional surrender of everyone who is not one of them. At least from our enemy's perspective, it is a war of survival -- our survival, for they are convinced they will ultimately prevail.
The enemy are Islamists and they are waging war on everyone else, throughout the world. You might think they have no real hope of succeeding because they must contend with superpowers like the United States. They have, however, a number of real advantages. Perhaps foremost is the fact that very few of their enemies understand the nature of the conflict or even realize they are at war. It's always less of a challenge to defeat an enemy that refuses to accept it is engaged in a war with a determined foe. If we were to approach the average man or woman on the street in, say, Frankfurt or Copenhagen or Naples or Los Angeles or Charleston, and ask, "Is your nation at war?" I'm pretty sure every one of them would answer, "No, of course not." And that's the problem we face today. Only the enemy knows we are engaged in a war for survival.
Now let's tighten things up a bit. This war isn't just ideological. At its core, it is a religious war. And that, dear friends, is something most Westerners, particularly West Europeans, don't want to hear. Indeed, they refuse to hear it, and in some nations to say we are in a religious war with Islam might well be a criminal offense. I'm sure I don't exaggerate when I say a significant majority of West Europeans are no longer believers. If a European discounts the importance of religious belief in his own life -- that is, if religion means absolutely nothing to him -- he's far more likely to project that unbelief on others. By ignoring the evidence of religious motivations, he will assume other causes lie behind the hostility he sees and cannot ignore. How can these Islamists be motivated by religion? After all, who would actually wage war for meaningless religious beliefs? No, they are obviously driven by poverty, or anti-colonialism, or resistance to Western imperialism, or pervasive Western arrogance, or climate change, or whatever...and, believing this, they ignore almost 1,400 years of history.
One need not be a historian to recognize the long and consistent record of Islamic belief put into practice. And yet our national leadership has been equally consistent in their failure, or perhaps simply their unwillingness, to face the truth about those who wage this war against us and all who do not share their hateful beliefs. We saw this when President Jimmy Carter and his foreign policy staff rejected the Shah and disregarded everything the Ayatollah Khomeini had preached before he took control of Iran. The result was predictable and led to the long hostage crisis that, along with a dozen other failures, cost Carter a second term, and led our enemies to underestimate us. Fortunately, Ronald Reagan came to the rescue, at least for a time.
The goals of the Islamists haven’t changed over the centuries. Back in the 14th century, the Islamic Arab philosopher Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406) wrote, “In the Muslim community, the holy war is a religious duty, because of the universalism of the Muslim mission and the obligation to convert everybody to Islam by persuasion or by force.” This isn’t an opinion of just one Muslim. This is the universal Koranic call to Jihad. Quite simply the desire is to create a worldwide social order based on the tenets of Islam and the imposition of Sharia law. That’s the goal. The means call for “persuasion or by force,” including violence of every kind, even terrorism and suicidal martyrdom. It also uses the infiltration of Islamists into Western nations through migration, both legal and illegal. Our response to this was the nation-building approach of multiple administrations, under the false assumption that the installation of a quasi-democratic political system and all it’s trappings would overwhelm these religious beliefs that have motivated Muslims from the beginning. Pick up a copy of the Koran, a good translation, and you can read exactly how Muslims are commanded to deal with unbelievers.
Many Muslims, of course, do not accept the calls to violent Jihad that we hear from Islamist terrorists and leaders of such nations as Iran. They manage to follow the religious precepts of their faith without turning to hatred of those whose beliefs differ from theirs. But I suspect many of these Muslims do not speak up and castigate the terrorists publicly for fear of their lives and the lives of those they love.
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Note: these final words were written today, August 31.
Today I am ashamed to be an American. Our government, a government that represents us, has, for completely political and largely irrational reasons, abandoned hundreds of American citizens and their families, plus thousands of Afghan allies who worked and fought alongside American troops over the past 20 years. But we didn’t just abandon these people. That would be bad enough. No, we left them in the hands of a collection of barbaric terrorists who enjoy torturing and butchering those whom they consider their enemies. And, believe me, their most hated enemies are Americans and any Afghans who supported us.
Today we mourn the deaths of 13 young Americans — marines, soldiers, and a Navy corpsman — who lost their lives in Kabul while serving their country by helping others in dire need. They and the many other Americans and Afghans wounded in that terrorist attack are the latest casualties of this centuries-long religious war. Pray for their immortal souls and for their families who are suffering today and will mourn for years to come. Listening to the president as he spoke to the nation just moments ago, it’s apparent how completely out of touch he is. Based on how he acted in his meetings with those families as the bodies of their loved ones arrived at Dover AFB, one also realizes how completely self-centered he is. More worrisome, he and his foreign policy team certainly don’t realize they’re in the midst of a religious war.
This is a religious war, and if we do not actually come to understand this, we will lose…unless, of course, our living and loving God, the God of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, takes pity on us and in His mercy answers our prayers and comes to our aid. Faith and trust, brothers and sisters…
“Do not put your trust in princes, in mortals in whom there is no help. When their breath departs, they return to the earth, so that very day their plans perish. Happy are those whose help is the God of Jacob, whose hope is in the Lord their God” [Ps 146:3-5].
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