Afghanistan? The war zone is right here!

The 10,000 Maranaos and other Moros – who angrily demonstrated in Mindanao in support of Osama bin Laden, the Taliban and denounced the US-British air strikes – should be given their wish. They shouted they wanted to "volunteer" to defend Afghanistan and fight the Americans. Fine. Let’s give them one-way airplane tickets to Kabul, or Quandahar, or the Panjshir Valley (they can be parachuted in) – or at least to Quetta, the ardently pro-Taliban city in Pakistan where the biggest, most virulent pro-Osama and hate-America rallies are being held.

According to Douglas Frantz of The New York Times, who sent a dispatch from Quetta last September 26, long before the air strikes, the Pushtun ethnic group which dominates political and business life there, was already poised to join the fight if Afghanistan was attacked. They told him in no uncertain terms: "The Afghans are our brothers!"

That’s the background to the ferocity of feeling demonstrated in Quetta today.

I can’t claim acquaintance with Quetta – having spent most of my time in Peshawar (also Pushtun-dominated), Rawalpindi, Islamabad, and further south in Lahore in the Punjab and Karachi, a tumultuous city sandwiched between desert and sea. But Quetta is well-known as an old trading city which thrived for centuries as a major outpost for the camel caravans that wound down the ancient Silk Road which stretched from Persia to China. Just as some of the fortress-protected kingdoms of Rajasthan in India waxed wealthy on such trade, which naturally included opium, Quetta remains in the contraband business, but this time the commodities traded here are guns, television sets, soap – and, still opium and heroin.

Quetta came back to life briefly during the anti-Soviet war when it became a major staging area for the delivery of American weapons to the Afghan rebels or mujahideen fighting Russian invasion in 1979.

It has an additional notoriety. In 1983, the entire staff in Quetta of ISI, the Pakistani military intelligence service, was removed by the government after they were discovered trafficking for their own profit in drugs and the weapons destined for the America-backed resistance fighters.

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Quetta is the best example of the power of brainwashing. It occupies a vast plateau so bleak that it is surrounded on three sides by tall, forbidding mountains, and was called for many years "the dump where Allah put the rubbish of Creation."

Quetta, and, indeed, the surrounding Baluchistan province, the biggest but most sparsely-populated of Pakistan’s four provinces, used to be indifferent to religion until the late 1970s when Pakistan’s strongman, Gen. Mohammad Zia al-Haq, who afterwards died in a plane crash along with the US ambassador, decreed the creation of 7,000 religious schools so the secular-minded Pushtuns and Baluchis could develop a sense of Muslim identity.

Many leaders of the Taliban were graduated from these schools, and hundreds of mujahideen who went off to fight the Russians. It’s said that some of the Taliban leaders still keep their families, for safety’s sake, in Quetta – where their daughters, according to gossip, manage to go to school despite the stern Taliban prohibition that women should not study in schools nor work outside the home. It’s a classic case of "do as I say, not as I do."

Anyway, that explains the background on why the center of anti-American, pro-Taliban protest in Pakistan is Quetta.

By all means, let’s send our bellicose Moro "volunteers" to Quetta, from where they can hop into Afghanistan – and fight the attacking Yankees and "crusaders." (Perhaps, Do-Gooder First Gentleman Mike Arroyo can tap PCSO funds to finance the venture. But I’m afraid, our Muslim militants may find – aside from desert dust, lack of food, the biting cold of approaching winter – the barrier of language: They don’t speak Pushtun and most of them, certainly, don’t understand Arabic. The least of their problems there will be the American assault, in whatever form it takes.

And one more thing: They should take their loud-mouthed politicians along with them. One thing our Muslim and Christian politicians have in common is a propensity for noise-pollution.

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From the reports coming out of bomb-struck Afghanistan, one can imagine Kabul, Quandahar (also spelled Kandahar), and other targetted areas there wreathed in acrid smoke from the ordnance dumped on them by the American-British assault. We pity the Afghans. Yet, all we have to do is walk outside to begin pitying ourselves.

Yesterday, lunching at the 33rd-story Tower Club, I looked through the window-glass to see Makati and what could be seen as the rest of Metro Manila, smothered in gray mist – not fog, or even ordinary smog, but a poisonous cloud of fumes. We are a metropolis choking to death, not just on an obnoxious mist of pollution but on our own garbage.

The terse dispatches from our domestic "war zone" retail stories as deadly as those emanating from Afghanistan. Yesterday alone, lurid headlines stated: "Six Arrested in Case of Kidnapped Teen: Two are Army Sergeants"; "Suspect in Deadly Chinatown Shooting Jailed" (the suspect had shot dead a businesswoman and wounded her husband last Monday); "Housewife Killed by Stray Bullet"; "8 Charged with Rape-Slay of Girl, 10, in Marikina," "Businessman Gunned Down in Quezon City"; "Former Army Man Arrested" (in foiled pawnshop robbery in Pasig); "Scavengers Wanted for Homicide" (he killed a fellow scavenger in Malabon); "P200 Thousand for Info on Ilocos Sur Auditor’s Slay"; "Bemedalled Soldier Found Dead in Barracks"; "Ship Engineer Shot, Killed in Tondo" (while fighting off four suspects who tried to rob him); "Kidnappers Gave Victim Taxi Fare" (to go home); et cetera.

Then there’s the unsettling daytime robbery in SM North EDSA of last weekend. The 15 gunmen – who raided three jewelry stores and a foreign exchange office, carting off millions of pesos worth of loot, cowing the security guards and killing one of them as they made their escape – brought as much fear to our citizenry as a terrorist attack. For if a heavily-secured shopping mall where security guards are supposed to frisk every person before permitting shoppers, visitors, and delivery personnel to enter, can be so easily infiltrated by armed men, some of them brandishing M-16s and other automatic weapons, who’s safe from a terrorist bomber? An explosive device which could wreak great havoc is appreciably much smaller than an M-16.

Sniffing dogs won’t suffice. It’s time we unleashed the Dogs of War – on criminals and crime.

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Everybody’s writing about Afghanistan all over the globe. There is a lot of scolding going on. And a great deal of soul-searching, too. A caveat: Too much soul-searching and debate weaken resolve and dampen military initiative.

NEWSWEEK (Oct. 15 issue) had the most comprehensive collection of stories and analyses behind its cover blurb: "WHY THEY HATE AMERICA: The Roots of Islamic Rage – And What Can be Done About It." In a similar vein, the latest issue of TIME magazine ran the cover headline: "CAN THE U.S. STOP THE RAGE?" The subhead was more verbose: "Bush’s Challenge: military action alone could inflame Muslims worldwide, so he must try to win their hearts and minds. Here’s the strategy."

Wow. Everyone’s apparently consumed with that word "rage." There they go again. We kept hearing about winning "hearts and minds" during the Vietnam War, the Cambodian conflict and the Laos side-show. In the end, the unfortunate Americans fighting and dying in places with unpronounceable names in the former Indo-China couldn’t even win the hearts and minds of students on US campuses or in the living rooms of America. It’s only belatedly that the "grunts" who suffered in Vietnam have been honored at home and given their due.

Stop Muslim "rage"? That’s a tall order. The Economist magazine of London puts a slightly different title, but the same spin on its coverage (Oct. 6 to 12th edition). The cover head proclaims, "THE PROPAGANDA WAR." Subtitles announce: "The Problem of Israel" and "After the Taliban."

What’s fascinating is what NEWSWEEK reports: "Most Americans would not believe how common the rumor is throughout the Arab world that either the CIA or Israel’s Mossad blew up the World Trade Center to justify attack on Arabs and Muslims. This is the culture from which the suicide bombers have come."

Britain’s The Economist says the same thing on page 19: " In almost every Arab capital today, you can find people who believe the theory that Israel masterminded the terror attacks on America on September 11th."

Sanamagan. That’s clever propaganda on the part of America’s enemies – who, in the same breath, hate Israel (America’s protégé, the radical Arabs argue), decry its storm-trooper treatment of Palestinians and continued occupation of large swathes of the Left Bank and Gaza, and demand that the Israelis be pushed into the sea.

The "rage" that exists between Jews and Arabs is open-ended, and was there long before the first and second intifada. When Egypt’s President Anwar Sadat had the temerity to make peace with Israel, he was assassinated by Islamic fanatics on Oct. 6, 1981, in full view of thousands at a grand military parade. When Israel’s Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, like Sadat a veteran of Israeli-Arab wars and a much-decorated general, signed a declaration of principles leading to a peace agreement with Yasser Arafat and the Arabs in 1993, he was shortly afterwards shot down in Tel Aviv by an Israeli zealot. Extremists on both sides there will always be; and they set the agenda. One of them, alas, is Israel’s current prime minister (the general who invaded Lebanon and more recently provoked the second intifada by swaggering into the Temple Mount) – Ariel Sharon.

The present crisis was foretold years ago. John L. Esposito, in his book The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality? (Oxford University Press, 1995), quotes William Pfaff who wrote in The New Yorker: "There are a good many people who think that the war between communism and the West is about to be replaced by a war between the West and Muslims." When were those lines penned? On January 28, 1991.

Professor Esposito described Islam graphically as "a worldwide religion and ideological force embracing one-fifth of the world’s population and its continued vitality and power in a Muslim world stretching from Africa to Southeast Asia." Truly, almost 1.3 billion Muslims, while disunited still, could solidify into a powerful force.

Even in the 1990s, Esposito recounted, the vacuum created by the end of the Cold War with the collapse of the Soviet Empire provoked headlines about a new threat. He retailed a few: "The New Crescent Crisis: The Global Intifada"; "Still Fighting the Crusades"; "Rising Islam May Ovewhelm the West"; "The Roots of Muslim Rage" (mind you, that blurb appeared in 1994); "The Islamic War Against Modernity."

In short, today’s burning headlines are simply a rehash of the fears expressed over half a decade ago.

Quo vadimus? What’s next? I’m afraid I can only say: More of the same.