Afghanistan Read Free Page B

in a united worldwide Sunni Khalifait is the path for humanity. The defeat of current elected governments in Afghanistan and Pakistan is a first, necessary, step. The Muslims that hold authority there are tools of an anti-Islamic world order and so are takfir , worse than infidels. There will be no place in the future they envision for Muslims who have put worldly power first; even less so for Shias and non-Muslims.
    The isolation and underdevelopment of the Vortex that makes up the battlefields of Afghanistan and Pakistan and is trying to engulf the rest of those two struggling countries suits the hard men’s purpose. They are not fighting for development, for schools, clinics, and roads; they often destroy these when they have been built by outsiders or their money. Much as they will use, often effectively, modernity’s tools, they fundamentally oppose the idea of modernity. Modernity makes women immoral and men lust after money rather than living for honor and Islam, which they consider the proper end of existence. This is a vision of fundamentalists, those who look to return to a mythic Islamic past, not that of Islamists, those that see Islam as a sharp sword to clear away all the traditional and colonial hangovers that keep the Vortex poor and backwards. Most of Afghanistan’s Islamists are in Kabul, trying to modernize the country. A few are fighting with the Afghan insurgents despite philosophical differences. That is how the fundamentalist Mullah Omar, leader of the Afghan Taliban, and the Islamist Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, leader of the Hezb-e-Islami (HiH) party, ended up running parallel efforts in the Afghan insurgency, launched from the Pakistan side of the Vortex. They have targeted a government in Kabul that styles itself the Islamic republic of Afghanistan, contains democrats, conservatives, and Islamists alike, and has a constitution that makes Islamic Sharia the wellhead of Afghanistan’s laws.
    Islam permeates and directs life, culture—and instinct—to an extent that outsiders find alien. The people of the region, certainly not limited to Pushtuns, know that they and their faith are always going to be there and that Pakistani and Afghan governments and especially infidel foreigners have always proved transient.
    Pound’s invocation of the importance of race and race-memory would be embraced by many of the Pushtuns living in both Afghanistan and Pakistan. Their oral tradition provides a very real race memory of resistance to outsiders and an embrace of Islam. It is a patriarchal and patrilineal race-memory, which puts aside the unpleasant fact that without the hard work done by women, everyone starves. It seeks an Islamic justification for its folkways and prejudices. What Pound called race-memory is not a crankish theory for the hard men. It is real, as real as tribal lineages, tradition, and laws—transmitted orally rather than what is understood by the readers of treatises—that guide their lives. People there have long memories of the past, which have been received from earlier generations.
    Since 2001, Al Qaeda and the sympathizers of radical Islam have succeeded in adding another chapter to this memory, that Islam and their own culture are both under attack by a infidel conspiracy led by the US, and that only the people of the borderlands are uniquely situated to defeat this and wreak a terrible vengeance on those Muslims that would have made common cause with the infidels or have lived in peace next to them.
    The hard men of the Vortex share Pound’s vision—insert the obligatory references to Islam and it could be used by them—as well as his predilection for looking for conspiracies that underlie the realities of everyday life. Pound painted a large bull’s-eye on the pre-1914 version of the established order of a Western, progressive, increasingly globalized world. The hard men who have never read him are going to have a shot at its present-day counterpart.
    The better educated among