The landlocked, war-torn country of Afghanistan lies at a geographic and cultural crossroads between East and West. Its proud Muslim people are caught between forces supported by the West, desiring to modernize their society, and the Taliban faction embracing the religious fundamentalists’ strict paternalism of the Sharia law. Tribal animosity rules as well, the Pashtun tribes (42%) and the Tajik tribes (38%) being in an uneasy alliance presided over by local war lords and a corrupt and weak puppet government maintained by the West.
The Taliban (“students”) are Sunni Muslims, predominately Pashtuns. They were young refugees from the brutal Soviet occupation of the country, who fled to Pakistan where they studied at the local hard-line Islamic religious schools. The movement was organized by Mullah Mohammed Omar and is controlled by experienced military leaders and religious teachers. The Taliban came to power in 1996 in the vacuum created by the removal of Soviet forces from the country.
During the 5 year Taliban regime in Afghanistan, Sharia law was implemented, harshly banning a wide range of activities including education for women and girls, television, music, dancing, and opium poppy production. The law was brutally enforced with public beating of women and by public executions.
The Taliban were overthrown in 2001 by the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force authorized by the UN Security Council. They are now making an attempt to return to power and are supported in the country by many religious Muslims who dislike the corrupt and ineffective government and the massive intrusion of foreign troops. It still operates Sharia law courts in the south of Afghanistan hearing civil lawsuits and tax disputes.
After the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center in New York , the US government moved to eradicate training camps in the country run by the militant Al-Qaeda, a Sunni Muslim organization, and to capture its leader, Osama bin Laden. The US global “War on Terrorism” acknowledged that bin Laden’s desire was to bring down all those opposed to Islam anywhere in the world, especially the USA and Israel. Although he is not a Muslim scholar or cleric, bin Laden twice issued a fatwa, or Islamic ruling, that Muslims should kill Americans and their supporters until they withdraw from Muslim countries and stop supporting Israel.
WODEN SAYS: This long ineffective war has been dragging on and on, and has only served to recruit more angry support throughout the Muslim world for al-Qaeda than there was before. While commanders on the ground may be exercised how to win a war that most people consider to be unwinnable, the rest of the world wonders how to overcome the tidal wave of hatred and threatened violence—on both sides.
The Masters of the Spirit World, however, look at the war very differently. Our guides are aware that people are willing to risk life and limb—on both sides—in support of their cause. That’s OK because, they insist, each person, each family member, belonging to every nation involved in the war chose to do so in advance. There are no accidents and no surprises on the soul level. Whether being killed by a US drone attacking al-Qaeda, or being blown up by a roadside bomb as a soldier from Belgium, Italy, France or Britain, the cause is the same: the soul involved is receiving a lesson it has already freely asked to be given,
Our eternal souls are down here on planet Earth to experience negativity and to compare the experience with what they already know as unconditional love. We have all freely chosen lessons to suit our personal stage of spiritual development, drawing from a huge variety of options ranging from very large and bitter experiences, such as dismemberment in battle, to real but less intense physical, psychological, and spiritual challenges.
We grow by having life-lessons, learning on the physical plane as children not to take tumbles, all the way through to not taking risks in battle. We may even plan our death. Usually, when it occurs in an un-timely fashion, we have made a contract with another soul to teach them a valuable life lesson in grief. Or the survivor may have to cope alone with a family when the other parent dies on the battlefield. In all respects it is the life-lesson that is chosen, not the means by which it is actually taught. That’s left to the energetic forces of the universe to provide for us.
Are souls are actors on the big stage set by planet Earth. The spiritual Masters insist that there is no right or wrong involved—that is the necessary judgment of the human society. Such a statement may seem bizarre were it not for the fact that on our training mission we come and go from a realm of unconditional love where there is no judgment, so no right nor wrong. We need to realize that the acting metaphor is essential for our understanding.
Is there nothing positive we can do for the people of Afghanistan? Of course there is! It is the very nature of the soul to be loving and to give service, providing no pre-chosen lessons intervene. Certainly some can try to be of direct service despite the everyday challenges that a war-torn society inevitably creates. Yes, we can serve the cause of rebuilding that nation. Or, even more likely, we can arrange for their young leaders to come to where we live and receive education and practical training so that they can give the service that their nation so badly needs. Perhaps that way the Afghan people might be enabled to fend for themselves and the al-Qaeda’s perceived “need” for war would die an untimely death.
(Further details of the Masters’ teaching may be found on their weekly blog at: www.mastersofthespiritworld.com )
Revenge
Thursday, March 11th, 2010A week ago, a Taliban fighter detonated a car bomb near a police checkpoint in Kabul. Ten died, among them two members of the United Nations delegation. They were not engaged in military operations. Both the men were Afghans, as was their assailant. Over fifty Afghans were injured in the blast. The UN expressed its distress at the loss of life, but does not intend to close its operation in the Afghan capital. Life must go on as usual, it seems.
The attacks on the World Trade Center in New York on Sept. 11, 2001, triggered this war. When the US invaded Afghanistan it was to remove the ruling Taliban who had created a safe haven for al-Qaeda. Hamid Karzai was installed as president after the rapid defeat of the Taliban. The Americans, who have never dislodged Osama bin Laden’s terrorists, effectively bungled the operation, and are still—eight years later—fighting the Taliban and looking for bin Laden.
There is a clear winner in this conflict:
• It is not America and its NATO allies, led by Britain. They are mired in a war that threatens to kill increasing numbers of troops and, some commentators have said, could last 50 years at the rate things are going.
• It is not the Afghan people, who are dying in increasing numbers in a conflict that they never asked for and that causes great suffering.
• It is not the Pashtun ethnic group, which we simplistically identify as the Taliban. They call the border areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan their homeland. Pashtuns see the war as an unfinished struggle for freedom and self-determination.
• It is not Pakistan, which has seen its borders invaded by NATO’s army and is now suffering from a hail of deadly explosions in its urban areas at the hands of the Taliban insurgents.
The winner—already—is al-Qaeda.
Despite losing some of its top commanders, the influence of this fundamentalist Islamic group has seen its campaign strengthened immensely by this war. Intending to win more hearts and minds of radical Muslims throughout the world, it has more than achieved its objective in every month of each of the eight years of conflict. In mosques and madrassas, in big groups and little terrorist cells, the world has seen an enormous rise in acceptance among Muslims of al-Qaeda’s anti-Christian, anti-Zionist thinking and organization. Were the Americans to kill or capture Osama bin Laden today, the event would only strengthen the movement’s radicalism. The West is infinitely more in danger of terrorist hits by al-Qaeda now than it was eight years ago.
WODEN SAYS: Sir Francis Bacon once called revenge “a kind of wild justice,” and there is plenty of revenge in this tangled situation.
I am reminded of the story of the old French farmer who had a traffic accident with his horse-drawn cart and a much younger neighbor riding a modern tractor. The magistrate ruled in favor of the neighbor, although the farmer was without doubt the injured party. So the farmer dragged the broken cart into his driveway, where the neighbor would see it every day. For years the farmer looked upon the cart and seethed in fury, plotting revenge. For years the neighbor passed by the gate thinking, “That old, broken-down cart looks quite picturesque there.”
The farmer’s wife knew the anger that was in her husband’s heart, a desire for revenge that paralyzed and sickened him. Worrying about him made her so ill that she died. Their son, a businessman, came from Paris for the funeral. Seeing the driveway blocked by the cart, he asked a neighbor to pull it to the dump with his tractor—yes, same neighbor, same tractor.
Without the cart to remind him, the farmer forgot about the injustice and lost his desire for revenge. He felt better, and even struck up a friendship with the neighbor’s widowed mother, and in the fullness of time, they married.
The NATO forces in Afghanistan include the German army, formerly a sworn enemy of France and Britain, Poland and the Netherlands, all of which are also with Germany in the European Union. Japanese goods and people are welcomed in the United States, which formerly opposed Japan and dropped atomic bombs on her cities. Making peace can be done, and has been successful. The symbol of change is the Berlin Wall that fell 20 years ago this week.
Revenge is indeed a wild justice, and it motivates this impossible war in all its aspects. So, with all the power that an Anglo-Saxon deity can muster, Woden says: “Enough is enough. Mr. Obama, pull out of this war.”
Tags: Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden, war
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