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  johnpi 12:39 am on January 2, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: 'forced reIslamization', Afghan Taliban (41), afghanistan (396), iran (364), sectarianism (34), taliban (260), Turkey (65)

  Iran, Turkey rule out ‘military solution’ for Afghanistan.

  That’s a commendable change of heart for Iran, considering that 12 years ago it had over a quarter million troops massed on its border with Afghanistan, and the UN and the rest of the world were working hard to head off the perceived threat of an invasion of Afghanistan.

  This was taken very seriously at the time, as this Iranian writer communicates:

  I don’t want another war, no matter what the excuse. I don’t want us to march on Herat or further afield. No reason that has been stated by the Iranian government is good enough basis for an invasion of Afghanistan. I was devastated when I read the Amnesty International report stating that the 11 Iranian diplomats in Mazar-e-Sharif were killed after the fall of the city. The image of the bodies left in the Consulate for two days without burial shattered me. I thought of the rubble, I thought of the sound of artillery in the background and of rivers of blood. But even this atrocity and the humiliation attendant to it is not a reason good enough for a war. Nor is the Iranian government’s crying foul of the brand of Islam practiced by the Taleban. It is NONE of their business.

  That was during the time that the Taliban had taken control of the major city of Herat – predominantly Shiite and Farsi-speaking – and were engaged in their now infamous acts of ‘forced reIslamization.’ There was a concern that if Iran engaged with the Taliban it could draw in Pakistan (Iran had believed the 11 murdered diplomats had the protection of ISI personnel who were traveling as military advisors with the Taliban).

  One way for Americans to look at this is that withdrawing troops from Afghanistan to let some other military power step up that is convinced it cannot live with a Taliban government such as Iran or Russia would be just fine.

   

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  johnpi 10:25 am on December 6, 2009 | 3 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: 'forced reIslamization', afghanistan (396), Muslim-on-Muslim violence (76), Salafis (17), salafism (24), salafists (14), saudi arabia (135), wahhabi (7), Wahhabis (9), wahhabism (14)

  The Taliban movement in Afghanistan, when it controlled large parts of the north and west of that country in the 1990s, had a goal of “forced reIslamization” (Rashid’s phrase) toward the other ethnic peoples they gained control over in placed like Herat and Mazar-e-Sharif. The “correct” practice they sought to instill in local populations was – of course – Wahhabi-Salafism.

  So can “forced reIslamization” work? the answer is ‘yes,’ and it’s been done before – in Saudi Arabia. But it comes with a price, and by looking at the Saudi-Wahhabi project we can estimate and make some projections.

  Khalid Abou El Fadl writes about it in The Great Theft.

  …the various Wahhabi rebellions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were very bloody, as the Wahhabis indiscriminately slaughtered Muslims especially those belonging to Sufi orders and the Shi’i sect. In 1802, for example, the Wahhabis executed a large number of Sunnis in Mecca and Medina, whom they considered for one reason or another heretical. The number of those executed or massacred by the Saudi-Wahhabi alliance has never been counted, but from historical accounts it is clear that it is in the tens of thousands if not more. In the course of the second conquest of the Arabian peninsula, for instance, acting under orders from Ibn Sa’ud, the Wahhabis carried out 40,000 public executions and 350,000 amputations.

  So what would be the comparable figures for executions and amputations today in Afghanistan? I’m going to have to make a few assumptions here, but follow along.

  The population of Afghanistan today is roughly equivalent to that of Saudi Arabia – around 28 million. The Saudi population was probably around 3 million in the 1800s. Assuming Afghanstan’s population has always been close to Saudi Arabia’s, we can set up simple equations:

  40,000 is to 3 million as ? is to 28 million. And,

  350,000 is to 3 million as ? is to 28 million.

  Among today’s population in Afghanistan, if the Taliban executed an equivalent proportion of the population for heresy that number would be 373,333.

  An equivalent proportion of amputations among the currently living Afghan population would be approximately 3.2 million.

  El Fadl refers to these figures as only accounting for those slain in the “second conquest,” most likely the “heretical Sunnis.” So we should probably double these numbers (at least) to capture the slain and disfigured Sufi and Shia.

  So there you have it: The price in lives would be over a half million, and the cost in amputations would be more than 6 million, following the historical Saudi model of ‘forced reIslamization.’