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PETERS |
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Coddling Killers
by Ralph
Peters [author,
novelist] 10/15/07
The fighting in Pakistan last week has been more intense than any current operations across the border in Afghanistan. President Musharraf is paying, with interest, for trying to cut a deal with Islamist fanatics.
The combat operations in North Waziristan involve thousands of ground troops, artillery barrages and attack aircraft. This isn't internal policing. It's war.
Contributor
Ralph Peters - Contributor
Ralph
Peters is a retired Army officer and the author of 19 books,
as well as of hundreds of essays and articles, written both
under his own name and as Owen Parry. He is a frequent columnist
for the New York Post and other publications. [go to Peters Index] |
And it's all the uglier and deadlier because the Pakistani government convinced itself that appeasement could work. Last year, the generals believed they had an agreement with the truculent tribals on the Northwest Frontier: The tribesmen would behave, and the army would leave them alone.
Well, the army left them alone. And Taliban and al Qaeda fanatics, allied with the most extreme local leaders, took over vast tracts of land in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), creating a safe haven for terrorists.
For its part, the Islamabad government never got any positive returns. Instead of containing the threat in the wild FATA mountains, Pakistan's security forces found that the Islamist terrorists used their sanctuary to inject extremists into the country's cities.
This subversion climaxed with the bloody siege of the Red Mosque in Pakistan's capital city a few months back. Instead of bringing peace, Musharraf's attempt at benign neglect enabled the spread of extremism.
That's the way it always comes out in the end. Religious fanatics can never be appeased. And the degenerate conditions in the Muslim heartlands only make fanaticism more virulent.
But we never learn. There are many in our own country who insist that, if only we didn't annoy Allah's assassins, we wouldn't have any problems with them. We just need to "respect their culture."
No matter that their culture is murderously intolerant, criminally vicious toward women and deadly not only to those of other faiths but even to fellow believers who don't measure up to the absolutist doctrines of the fanatics. If only we made nice, the world would live in harmony. All those suicide bombers are our fault.
Well, the historical fact is that the world has never lived in harmony. Never. Peace has never prevailed across the planet. And the most intract- able butchers have been those who believed they were on a mission from their god.
It would be lovely, if it were otherwise. But we need to deal with the facts we face today and the factual patterns of history. And those facts insist that no compromise is possible with men who believe they know exactly what their god intends for all of us.
Our Western cult of negotiations produces no lasting successes for the simple reason that those ablaze with lethal faith never hesitate to break deals with unbelievers the moment they find it useful to do so.
Musharraf, who hoped to buy peace by ceding a vast stretch of his country to fanatics, soon found that the fanatics were only encouraged to believe that all of Pakistan is theirs for the taking.
In Iraq, Sunni Arabs who imagined they could find common ground with al Qaeda in their insurgency learned the hard way that the terrorists have no interest in any form of compromise - compromise isn't in Allah's vocabulary.
For decades, the Saudis sought to buy off subversive extremists, bribing them to take their jihad elsewhere. The result was that the terrorists saw the blubbery princes in Riyadh as weaklings. And terror came home.
Even Israel, pressured by the West, attempted to bargain with terrorists. But negotiations are pure protein to terrorism, encouraging killers to believe that more killing will bring even greater rewards.
I can find no single instance in 3,000 years of history when violent religious fanatics were pacified by concessions. Religious fanaticism, with its apocalyptic currents, can never be contented. The appetite for blood only increases.
The rule is brutal, but ironclad. If you don't kill the killers, the killers will kill you.
Musharraf, who should've known better, has learned that lesson the hard way. But the price has been radicalization and violence in Pakistan's major cities, hundreds of soldiers taken hostage, the torture and beheading of military prisoners, growing casualty lists - and frontier tribes more confident than ever that they can resist the central government.
What's the worst thing that could happen now? That would be if Musharraf folded and, faced with mounting casualties, called off the current military offensive.
But Musharraf is hardly alone in his dilemma. The worst thing that the United States could do would be to imagine that, if we quit the fight, we could find an accommodation with Islamist terrorists.
Appeasement has never worked, and it never will. This is a war to the death. ExileStreet
Ralph Peters' latest book, "Wars of Blood and Faith," is on the street.
This
piece first appeared in the New York Post
copyright 2007 - NY Post
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