This article was first published by the Stonegate Institute.

The beginning of the New Year saw only an increase in the oppression of Christians under Islam, from Nigeria, where an all-out jihad has been declared in an effort to eradicate the Muslim north of all Christians, to Europe, where Muslim converts to Christianity are still hounded and attacked as apostates.  According to the Chairman of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, “The flight of Christians out of the region is unprecedented and it’s increasing year by year”; in our life time alone, he predicts “Christians might disappear altogether from Iraq, Afghanistan, and Egypt.”

An international report found that Muslim nations make up nine out of the top ten countries where Christians face the “most severe” persecution.  In response to these findings, a Vatican spokesman said that “Among the most serious concerns, the increase in Islamic extremism merits special attention.  Persons and organizations dedicated to extremist Islamic ideology perpetrate terrible acts of violence in many places throughout the world: the Boko Haram sect in Nigeria is but one example. Then there is the climate of insecurity that unfortunately in some countries accompanies the so-called “Arab spring”—a climate that drives many Christians to flee and even to emigrate.”

Categorized by theme, January’s batch of Muslim persecution of Christians around the world includes (but is not limited to) the following accounts, listed in alphabetical order by country, not severity of anecdote.

APOSTASY

Iran: A Christian convert who was arrested in her home has been sentenced to two years in prison. Previously she endured five months of uncertainty detained in the notorious Evin prison, where the government hoped she would come to her senses and renounce Christianity. She was convicted of “broad anti-Islamic propaganda, deceiving citizens by formation of what is called a house church, insulting sacred figures and action against national security.” Likewise, Iranian Pastor Yousef Nadarkhani continues to suffer in prison.  Most recently, he rejected an offer to be released if he publicly acknowledged Islam’s prophet Muhammad as “a messenger sent by God,” which would amount to rejecting Christianity, as Muhammad/Koran reject it.

Kenya: Muslim apostates seeking refuge in Kenya are being tracked and attacked by Muslims from their countries of origin: An Ethiopian who, upon converting to Christianity, was shot by his father, kidnapped and almost killed, is now receiving threatening text messages. Likewise, a Ugandan convert to Christianity is in hiding, his movements severely restricted since “the Muslims are looking to kill me. I need protection and help.”

Kuwait: A royal prince who openly declared that he has converted to Christianity, confirmed the reality that he now might be targeted for killing as an apostate.

Norway: While out for a walk, two Iranian converts to Christianity were stabbed with knives by masked men shouting “infidels!” One of the men stabbed had converted in Iran, was threatened there, and immigrated to Norway, thinking he could escape persecution there.

Somalia: A female convert to Christianity was paraded before a cheering crowd and publicly flogged as punishment for embracing a “foreign religion.” Imprisoned since November, “the public whipping was meant to mark her release.” She received 40 lashes as hundreds of Muslim spectators jeered. An eyewitness said: “I saw her faint. I thought she had died, but soon she regained consciousness and her family took her away.” Likewise, “Somali Islamists arrested a Muslim father after two of his children converted to Christianity” and fled.  He is accused of “failing to raise his sons as good Muslims,” because “good Muslims cannot convert to Christianity.”

Zanzibar: After being robbed, a Muslim convert to Christianity called police to his house; they discovered a Bible during their inspection. The course of inquiry immediately changed from searching for the thieves to asking why he “was practicing a forbidden faith.” He was imprisoned for eight months without trial, and, since being released, has been rejected by his family and is now homeless and diseased.

CHURCH ATTACKS

Azerbaijan: A pastor has been threatened with criminal proceedings following a raid on his church during Sunday service. Earlier, he was told that “a criminal case had been launched over religious literature arousing incitement over other faiths,” and was pressured by authorities to leave the area, which he did, traveling great distances each week to lead church services.

Egypt: Before a bishop was going to inaugurate the incomplete Abu Makka church and celebrate the Epiphany mass, a large number of Salafis and Muslim Brotherhood members entered the building, asserting that the church had no license and so no one should pray in it. One Muslim remarked that the building would be suitable for a mosque and a hospital.

Indonesia: A sticker on the back of the car of a member of the beleaguered Yasmin church saying “We need a friendly Islam, not an angry Islam,” distributed by the family of the late Muslim president, prompted another Islamic attack on the church: scores of Muslims “terrorized the congregation and attacked several church members.” Since 2008, the congregation has been forced to hold Sunday services on the sidewalk outside the church and then later in the home of parishioners. Not satisfied, hundreds of Muslims later searched and found the private home where members were congregating and holding service and prevented them from worshiping there as well: “It crosses the line now. The protesters now come to the residential area, which is not a public place.” A new report notes that anti-Christian attacks have nearly doubled in the last year.

Nigeria: Soon after jihadis issued an ultimatum giving Christians three days to evacuate the region or die, armed Muslims stormed a church and “opened fire on worshippers as their eyes were closed in prayer,” killing six, including the pastor’s wife. Then, as friends and relatives gathered to mourn the deaths of those slain, “Allahu Akbar” screaming Muslims appeared and opened fire again, killing another 20 Christians. Several other churches were bombed, and seven more killed.

Floating a trial balloon for the White House, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta announced last week that the Obama administration is planning to speed up its withdrawal timetable in Afghanistan. “By mid- to the latter part of 2013, we’ll be able to make a transition from a combat role to a training, advise and assist role,” Panetta said. That would be a year earlier than what the Obama administration had initially proposed.

This should come as no surprise. In fact, it’s exactly what President Obama has been pushing for, itching for, advocating, from the very beginning of his administration.

Recall that in 2009, after a lengthy re-review of his own policy, the president concluded that “it is in our vital national interest to send an additional 30,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan,” before promising that “after 18 months, our troops will begin to come home.”

That announcement raised red flags for many observers.

First, the notion that “our vital national interest” somehow has an expiration date was nothing short of bizarre.

Second, the much-ballyhooed surge of 30,000 troops was less than what the generals asked for—Gen. Stanley McChrystal wanted 40,000—and arguably never had the full impact it was designed to have. In fact, the White House was trying to get the military to accede to a faster draw-down—and arguably shorter withdrawal timetable—last July.

As Defense News reported at the time, then-Defense Secretary Gates was “sparring at a distance with White House aides who are pushing for a faster draw-down of the 100,000-strong U.S. force.” Indeed, after the killing of Osama bin Laden in May 2011, the president declared that “it’s now time for us to recognize that we’ve accomplished a big chunk of our mission and that it’s time for Afghans to take more responsibility.” He then ordered the withdrawal of 33,000 troops by summer 2012. Again, the military advocated a more modest reduction of between 5,000 and 10,000 troops.

Third, letting the Taliban know when the U.S. military would end its offensive only made the mission harder—and the Taliban less open to some sort of settlement.

That helps explain why a leaked U.S. military report, based on interviews of Taliban prisoners, concludes that:

“Taliban commanders, along with rank and file members, increasingly believe their control of Afghanistan is inevitable. Though the Taliban suffered severely in 2011, its strength, motivation, funding and tactical proficiency remains intact…they see little hope for a negotiated peace. Despite numerous tactical setbacks, surrender is far from their collective mindset.”

Regrettably, it seems the very opposite mindset is at work in Washington.

To be sure, the American people and their military should not be expected to sacrifice more for Afghanistan than the Afghan people are themselves willing to sacrifice. Moreover, it is the president’s responsibility to determine and then to do what is in America’s national interest—not what is in Hamid Karzai’s interest. In other words, sometimes the wisest, most just, most appropriate decision a president can make is to pull back and turn away.

The Obama administration is redefining the War on Terrorism as a war on Al-Qaeda, with Vice President Biden going so far as to say that the “Taliban, per se, is not our enemy.” In June, Afghan President Hamid Karzai confirmed that the U.S. was negotiating with the Taliban, and talks have reportedly gone on since at least November 2010. Now, President Obama is even thinking about releasing five high-level Taliban leaders to Qatar from Guantanamo Bay, despite their direct ties with Al-Qaeda and the military’s warnings that they are likely to rejoin the violent jihad.

Marc Thiessen reviewed the biographies of the five Taliban leaders that the U.S. may set free. Mullah Mohammed Fazl was the chief of staff of the Taliban army and worked with Osama Bin Laden’s 055 Brigade. Abdul Haq Wasiq, the Taliban’s deputy intelligence minister, built alliances with terrorist groups and arranged for Al-Qaeda to train Taliban fighters. The governor of Herat Province, Mullah Khairullah Khairkhwa, was “directly associated” with Bin Laden, supervising an Al-Qaeda training camp and took part in Taliban dealings with Iran to jointly kill U.S. soldiers.

Mullah Norullah Noori, a former Taliban commander, was involved with senior members of Al-Qaeda and fought alongside the terrorist group. The Joint Task Force-Guantanamo describes him as a Taliban “hardliner.” Muhammad Nabi, a fundraiser for the Taliban, was part of an Al-Qaeda cell. The reason these five leaders are held is because the military believes they will go right back to what they were doing before their imprisonment. Yet, the Obama administration believes that releasing them will improve the chances that the negotiations with the Taliban will be successful.

There have been around six meetings between the U.S. and Taliban representatives in Germany and Doha, Qatar. Among those participating are Mullah Omar’s secretary and Ibrahim Haqqani, the brother of the leader of the Al-Qaeda-tied Haqqani Network. The U.S. was encouraged by the Taliban’s agreement to open up a political office in Qatar, where Sheikh Yousef al-Qaradawi is acting as a “mediator.” Qaradawi is a terrorism-supporting, anti-Semitic cleric and leading member of the Muslim Brotherhood.

It was officially called the State of the Union Address, but what President Obama actually delivered on Tuesday night was a campaign speech targeted directly at his base. The message went something like this: “Unions, environmentalists, teachers, Hispanic immigrants, women, I’m your president…I’m your candidate.”

Consider the code words and messages sprinkled throughout the speech.

The president began with a shameless signal to the Code Pink crowd and anti-war left—the folks who fueled his rise and run for the White House. “For the first time in nine years, there are no Americans fighting in Iraq,” he declared, sidestepping the unraveling situation that has emerged as a result. And he went on: “We’ve begun to wind down the war in Afghanistan. Ten thousand of our troops have come home. Twenty-three thousand more will leave by the end of this summer.” Again, never mind what is left behind.

For Big Labor, he boasted about his efforts to get “workers and automakers to settle their differences” and get a government-owned, union-run General Motors “back on top as the world’s number one automaker.”

He gratuitously mentioned a “unionized plant in Milwaukee” and cited key union cities in key states for good measure: “Detroit and Toledo and Chicago…Cleveland and Pittsburgh.”

For the teachers’ unions, he lamented how “tight budgets have forced states to lay off thousands of teachers” and called on Congress to give states “the resources to keep good teachers on the job.” Drifting into meaningless platitudes, he promised that in exchange he would support programs to “replace teachers who just aren’t helping kids learn.”

While on the subject of meaningless platitudes, the president boasted that “there are fewer illegal crossings than when I took office.” The reason for that, of course, is that he’s presiding over the worst economy in four decades. In other words, there are no jobs to entice immigrants to cross America’s southern border—legally or illegally. (See Mitch Daniels’ sparkling rebuttal for more on why.)

But the president’s main message on immigration was for the amnesty lobby: “Hundreds of thousands of talented, hardworking students in this country face another challenge: The fact that they aren’t yet American citizens. Many were brought here as small children, are American through and through, yet they live every day with the threat of deportation,” he chided. “Let’s at least agree to stop expelling responsible young people,” who, it pays to recall, are not responsible enough to legalize their status.

It was, shall we say, an interesting week in Norway.  On Tuesday, January 17, a video was posted on YouTube that called for Norwegian soldiers to be withdrawn from Afghanistan.  Over images of Norwegian soldiers and of Norway’s prime minister, foreign minister, and crown prince, a text calling for Allah to “destroy them and let it be painful” was read aloud in Arabic, with subtitles in Norwegian.  The video, which concluded with an image of Norway’s flag in flames, urged Muslims to show up for a protest rally on Friday outside the parliament building in Oslo.

The video provoked instant outrage.  On Wednesday, the security police arrested a suspect, but announced that even if the rally organizers proved to be responsible for the video, their permit wouldn’t be withdrawn.  It soon emerged that there were connections between the video and a Facebook group whose members included Arfan Bhatti, one of four men arrested in 2006 for shooting at the Oslo synagogue.  (Bhatti was also suspected by police of plotting to blow up the U.S. and Israeli embassies.)  Another member was Mohyeldeen Mohammed, who at a jihadist rally two years ago threatened Norway with its own 9/11.

And guess who else turned out to be an active member of the Facebook group?  None other than Aisha Shezadi Kausar (20), whom I wrote about a couple of weeks ago – the girl who’s being sent around to schools by the Norwegian literary establishment so she can brainwash kids into thinking the niqab is just dandy.  (Her essay, “You, Me, and Niqab,” has been reprinted in a collection of essays being distributed to students all over the country.)  On Facebook, Kausar clicked “like” on the news of the upcoming rally.

On Thursday, the Communist daily Klassekampen ran a sympathetic interview with Kausar.  When Niqab Girl walked into a café with interviewer Åse Brandvold, the customers emitted audible groans.  Brandvold: “Her garment provokes them….Only the eyes show.  They are radiant.” Kausar: “I want to go over to them and say: Hi, I’m Aisha, and I’m an ordinary person.” Yes, an “ordinary person” who admitted to Brandvold that she planned to take part in the Saturday rally and who, when asked to comment on the video, said: “It’s just a video.” Though Brandvold pressed her (ever so slightly), Niqab Girl refused to condemn the video:  “I’m tired of Muslims always being expected to distance themselves from one another all the time.”

At some point during the week came the stunning announcement by the Norwegian Police Security Service (PST) that Islamists represent the major terrorist threat to the country.  Needless to say, this news should not have been stunning to anybody, but (as I describe in a forthcoming e-book) ever since last July 22, when anti-jihadist Anders Behring Breivik bombed a building in Oslo and massacred several dozen teenagers on the island of Utøya, the Norwegian political and cultural elite has done a very effective job of suppressing criticism of Islam on the grounds that the “lesson” of Breivik’s actions is that ethnic Norwegians must stop saying unpleasant things about Islam and embrace their bold, bearded, berobed, and belligerent fellow countrymen as friends and neighbors.

So it was that PST got slammed on a Thursday night TV debate program by Muslim leaders who called for it to stop demonizing their community and pay more attention to the threat of violence by Islam-hating “Christian terrorist” groups in Norway.  (Never mind that, as a terrorism expert bravely pointed out on the show, there are no such groups in Norway.)  On the same broadcast, the head of the aggressive, fast-growing Islam Net, Fahad Qureshi (whose every comment was greeted by a storm of applause from his followers in the studio audience) attacked a politician for having called the perpetrators of the threatening video “vermin”: instead of being dehumanized, Qureshi insisted, the jihadists who’d made that video should be accorded respect and invited to take part in dialogue.

Two recent news stories about Afghanistan reveal the delusional mentality of those conducting our foreign policy. The first is about some Marines who urinated on the corpses of Taliban fighters. Such behavior, of course, is mild compared to the sort of brutal treatment of both the living and the dead typical of all wars ever fought. Nonetheless, this act is contrary to the rules of war and the professional code of the Corp, and as such should be punished. That’s all our official spokesmen need to say about the matter, for it concerns a violation of our military’s high standards that have helped make it the most professional, lethal, and ethical force in the world.

The foreign policy establishment, however, has fallen all over itself issuing solicitous apologies. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expressed her “total dismay,” a reaction stronger than her comments about the Egyptian military slaughtering Copts. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta phoned the utterly corrupt and duplicitous beneficiary of our power and money, Afghanistan president Hamid Karzai, to assure him that those responsible would be found and punished for such a “deplorable” act. Of course, this is a part of the world where brutal violence against civilians is routinely used as a tool of politics, and where torture and mutilation of the living, let alone the desecration of the dead, are standard operating procedure. Yet we cede the moral high ground to Karzai, who said the soldiers’ behavior was “inhuman and condemnable in the strongest possible terms,” something I don’t recall him ever saying about the terrorists murdering our soldiers. Even more risible was the response of the Taliban, who condemned the “inhuman act of wild American soldiers,” one “in contradiction with all human and ethical norms.” This from a group that when it ruled Afghanistan, used a European-built soccer stadium to bury non-shari’a-compliant women up to their necks and then stone them to death, and to machine-gun and behead other miscreants.

I know the rationale for all these anxious protestations of our “dismay.” As one of the consistent purveyors of such pointless public relations efforts, The New York Times, put it, the video raised “fears in Washington that the images could incite anti-American sentiment at a particularly delicate moment” in the war. This is the same old delusion that has conditioned our behavior for a decade now: the notion that jihadist hatred of us is the consequence of our bad behavior and offenses against Muslims, and so we have constantly to apologize and remind them how much we respect and honor their wonderful religion. Even before 9/11, our foreign policy officials took every opportunity to tell Muslims how wonderful their faith is. Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, called Islam “a faith that honors consultation, cherishes peace, and has as one of its fundamental principles the inherent equality of all who embrace it.” Except, of course, for women, homosexuals, and infidels. George Bush wasn’t much better, claiming in his first address after 9/11 that Islam’s “teachings are good and peaceful, and those who commit evil in the name of Allah blaspheme the name of Allah.” Bush’s Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, called Islam the religion “of love and peace.” Hillary Clinton is on record praising Islam’s “deepest yearning of all––to live in peace.” No surprise, then, that these days official government policy proscribes any mention of “jihad” in public communications, and forbids any linkage of jihadist terror to Islamic doctrine. Of course, all this puffery is contradicted by Islamic theology, jurisprudence, history of conquest and occupation, and the continuing record of religiously sanctioned terrorist violence––18,283 attacks just since 9/11.

Complementing this flattery has been our hysterical reactions to bad behavior, both real and invented, perpetrated by our forces. The abuse of prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison, most of which rarely rose above the level of a fraternity hazing, was labeled “horrific” by the Times, making us wonder what adjective the Times could use to describe what went on in Abu Ghraib when Saddam Hussein ran it. Then too, multiple investigations and public apologies followed from the government. Worse yet is the reaction to outright fabrications, such as the lie that prisoners in Guantanamo were abused and tortured, or the absurd allegation that a Koran was flushed down a toilet. Once again, apologies and investigations poured forth from the government in response to transparent propaganda. The reason for all this public breast-beating is the fallacious belief that Muslims really want to like us, but our insensitive misdeeds against their religion leave them psychologically vulnerable to terrorist “highjackers of Islam” who promise justified payback for infidel disrespect.

Anyone interested in seeing the future of Afghanistan need only take a short plane trip from Italy across Libya and Sudan to what is the most dysfunctional territory in Africa. Somalia can’t be properly called a state, more of a prolonged clumsy civil war fought between rival gangs of Islamists, some of whom have American backing and some of whom don’t.

Somalia is Afghanistan on caffeine, not because it’s more violent, but because it covered the same span of history in half the time from when Operation Enduring Freedom expanded into the Horn of Africa during Bush’s second term, pushing out the Islamic Courts Union, the local equivalent of the Taliban, to the negotiations several years later that brought members of the Islamic Courts Union into the Transitional Federal Government and made them the majority, to the ongoing civil war between the ragged bands of Islamist militias fighting over the remains of the country under the watchful eye of peacekeeping troops.

Somalia is what Afghanistan will look like if the Obama administration and its Brotherhood friends succeed in convincing some Taliban leaders to split off and join the government. The bloody farce in which the former commander in chief of the Islamic Courts Union, Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, serves as the president of a Somalia, and Sharif Hassan, who was a IUC supporter, serves as speaker of a Somali parliament which is dominated by Islamists and which voted to implement Sharia law two years ago, could be the bright and shining future of Afghanistan.

While the “moderate” Islamists of the UIC run that small portion of Somalia which American drones and African Union troops keep under their control, the “immoderate” former members of the UIC’s militias try to push them out while forcing children and the elderly to fight for them, and stoning young girls to death who don’t agree to sexually service their troops.

The agreement which led to this ridiculous Somali standoff was the work of the same diplomatic corps that thinks sending in the Muslim Brotherhood’s Yusuf al-Qaradawi to split off some “moderate” Taliban leaders will secure the future of Afghanistan. Last time around the Brotherhood talked the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group into taking a few discreet steps away from Al-Qaeda and signing on to a political solution with Qaddafi. The political solution allowed the LIFG to join in a broad front civil war that will likely see Libya end up under Islamic rule. That is probably what Qaradawi also has in mind for Afghanistan.

But Afghanistan is more likely to look like Somalia than Libya, which had the relics of a national structure that Afghanistan still lacks. With Pakistan, Iran and countless other players sticking their thumbs into the mix and backing their own militias, the stage could be set for the kind of prolonged and bloody insanity that has seen multiple Islamist militias fighting each other across Somalia.

Somalia also represents the early phase when the War on Terror descended into an incoherent mission whose purpose was no longer to fight Islamic terrorists, but to find some Islamic terrorists willing to run for office. But no matter how often foreign policy experts praised the Islamic Courts Union for bringing stability to Somalia, the only kind of stability they brought was at the point of a sharpened machete or an AK-47.

For three years, Barack Obama’s engagement policy with Islamists, most notably in Iran, has proven dangerous. The Iranian regime exploited Obama’s show of weakness by moving ahead aggressively with its nuclear weapon program. Now the Obama administration is doubling down on its disastrous engagement policy. It is serving as the midwife to the takeover of Egypt by the Muslim Brotherhood and of Afghanistan by the Taliban. And there is a distressing link between the two.

A front page article in the New York Times on January 5th reported what has been obvious since Obama took office. The administration has sought to “forge close ties” with the Muslim Brotherhood – “an organization once viewed as irreconcilably opposed to United States interests.”

Senator John Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat who is chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee and recently joined with the ambassador to Egypt, Anne W. Patterson, for a meeting with top leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood’s political party, compared the Obama administration’s outreach to President Ronald Reagan’s arms negotiations with the Soviet Union. “The United States needs to deal with the new reality,” Senator Kerry said. “And it needs to step up its game.”

That is a ridiculous analogy. Reagan negotiated with the Soviet Union, but never waivered from his belief that the Soviet Union was an evil empire whose ideology must be defeated.  The Obama administration’s outreach to the Muslim Brotherhood is based on its mistaken belief that it has reformed in a way that brings it much closer to the Western model of a pluralistic party committed to individual freedoms.

To the contrary, when push comes to shove, the Muslim Brotherhood’s dominance of the civil government in Egypt, by virtue of its parliamentary election victories, will mean the imposition of sharia law and jihad against infidels. Nothing the Obama administration is trying to do through its aggressive overtures, including recent high-level meetings with Muslim Brotherhood officials, will change that fact.  Jihad is embedded in its history, as evidenced by the violent Islamic jihadist organizations such as Hamas that it spawned. And let’s not forget that it was the Muslim Brotherhood that gave Osama bin Laden’s former deputy and current leader of al Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri, his start.

Jihad remains in the Muslim Brotherhood’s DNA. Its motto includes the words: “Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.” The Brotherhood’s new offices are emblazoned with its emblem of crossed swords.

The Obama administration’s ostensible rationale for engaging with the Muslim Brotherhood is that it is simply bowing to political reality. Based on the results of Egyptian parliamentary elections so far, the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party looks set to play a dominant role in Egypt’s new parliament and in the civil government to which Obama administration officials are pressing Egypt’s military to hand over the reins of power. But, in fact, the Obama administration is not simply being reactive. It helped bring about what is now unfolding in Egypt by throwing Egyptian president Mubarak under the bus and lending its hand to legitimize the false image of the Muslim Brotherhood as some sort of alternative moderate advocate of peace, pluralistic democracy and freedom for all Egyptians.

At the same time, in order to find a face-saving way out of the quagmire in Afghanistan in which the Obama administration finds itself after escalating the war there while simultaneously announcing a timetable for withdrawal, the administration is pursuing talks with the Taliban. It is using an untrustworthy Muslim Brotherhood connection to do so.

According to a report appearing in the Indian newspaper Hindu, diplomatic sources have said that Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who is regarded as the spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, has emerged as a key mediator in secret talks between the U.S. and the Taliban:

Mr. al-Qaradawi helped draw a road map for a deal between the Taliban and the United States, aimed at giving the superpower a face-saving political settlement ahead of its planned withdrawal from Afghanistan which is due to begin in 2014.

In return for the release of prisoners still held by the United States at Guantanamo Bay, the lifting of United Nations sanctions on its leadership and its recognition as a legitimate political group, the Taliban was expected to agree to sever its links to transnational organisations like al-Qaeda, end violence and eventually share power with the Afghan government.

But what can the Taliban negotiators really deliver, even if it were serious in wanting to reach a peaceful settlement? There is no indication that these negotiators are in a position to turn over the Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar and his inner circle, who harbored al Qaeda when the Taliban was in control of Afghanistan. Nor will they be able to diffuse the growing power of the new generation of Taliban commanders ideologically committed to al-Qaeda’s vision.

The Obama administration’s idea of negotiations is to consider releasing Taliban detainees who are likely to return to jihad against U.S. forces without even any commitment reported to date that the Taliban would return the U.S. soldier it kidnapped. The only concrete step the Taliban negotiators have reportedly agreed to undertake in the short term is to set up an office in Qatar for talks.

It’s bad enough that the Obama administration is even considering talks on such terms – a prescription for appeasement. The fact that the Obama administration is foolish enough to trust al-Qaradawi as an intermediary with the Taliban is mind-boggling. Have they not read what this jihadist has been preaching?

The Muslim Brotherhood’s spiritual leader’s call for jihad extends not only to the conquest of Israel and the killing of Jews. It includes the conquest of Europe and beyond.

In 2003 al-Qaradawi issued a fatwa declaring that

Islam will return to Europe as a victorious conqueror after having been expelled twice. This time it will not be conquest by the sword, but by preaching and spreading [Islamic] ideology […] The future belongs to Islam […] The spread of Islam until it conquers the entire world and includes both East and West marks the beginning of the return of the Islamic Caliphate [.]

A 2009 State Department cable, published by WikiLeaks, quoted a sermon by al-Qaradawi in which he condemned Jews for spreading “corruption in the land” and called for “the revenge of Allah” upon them. And he didn’t spare the United States. He condemned the United States for acting “like a god in this world” and cautioned the U.S. and the West that “according to the law of Allah, they should collapse.”

Yet this is the man in whom the Obama administration places its trust to help mediate a peace with the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Just as the Obama administration trusts al-Qaradawi, the spiritual guide for the Muslim Brotherhood, to help it escape the mess in Afghanistan, the Obama administration has come to believe in the good intentions of the Muslim Brotherhood itself in how it plans to govern in Egypt.

Interestingly, President Obama himself, during his 2011 Super Bowl Day interview with Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly, wanted viewers to know he was concerned “there are strains of their [Muslim Brotherhood] ideology that are anti-U.S.” But he dodged the question whether the Muslim Brotherhood represented a threat to the U.S., saying that they were only “one faction in Egypt” that lacked majority support.

Despite that brief glimmer of Super Bowl Day reality about the Muslim Brotherhood coming from Obama himself, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said just a few days before Obama’s interview that any new Egyptian government “has to include a whole host of important non-secular actors that give Egypt a strong chance to continue to be [a] stable and reliable partner,” a remark most likely directed at U.S. support for the inclusion of the Muslim Brotherhood in any future government.

In February 2011, U.S. director of National Intelligence James Clapper said during a House Intelligence Committee hearing that the Muslim Brotherhood “pursued social ends, a betterment of the political order in Egypt, et cetera….. There is no overarching agenda, particularly in pursuit of violence, at least internationally.” However, his characterization of the Brotherhood as “largely secular” went a bit too far, even for the Obama administration.

In June 2011, well before the recent parliamentary elections, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton explained the Obama administration’s decision to ignore the “anti-U.S.” strains in the Muslim Brotherhood’s ideology and engage them in concert with its policy to deal with “peaceful” organizations. She said that “We welcome, therefore, dialogue with those Muslim Brotherhood members who wish to talk with us.”

In December 2011, Sahar Gul, a 15-year-old Afghan girl and underage bride, was freed by Afghan police after having been severely tortured for six months by her in-laws in an attempt to force her into prostitution. During her captivity, Sahar had been kept locked in a basement, tortured with hot irons, her fingers broken and fingernails ripped out.

While Sahar’s horrific ordeal sparked justifiable outrage among many Afghans, her agony is all too commonplace in Afghanistan, a country in which violence against women and girls is both pervasive and growing.

The violent abuse used against Afghan females also entails the widespread and socially accepted practice of forced child marriage, a cultural and religious reality that has led to over half of the marriages in Afghanistan involving girls under the age of 16.

So, given that, it’s not surprising to find that in the decade after the ouster of the Taliban from power in 2001, Afghanistan still remains one of the world’s most dangerous places for women. According to the UN’s Gender Inequality Index, Afghanistan ranks as the world’s sixth-worst country for women due to violence — including domestic abuse — sexual harassment, poverty and lack of healthcare.

Moreover, Afghan women and girls — in addition to underage marriage — are also subjected to honor killings and the traditional Afghan practice known as “baad,” whereupon women are given away to pay family debts or settle disputes.

Unfortunately — despite the rise of scores of women’s advocacy groups and the enactment of laws guaranteeing women’s rights — both the Afghan justice system and its patriarchal society remain heavily stacked against Afghan women and girls.

For example, in April 2009 Afghan President Hamid Karzai signed the Shiite Personal Status Law, legislation which applied to Afghanistan’s minority Shiite populace. Provisions in that legislation allowed 14-year-old girls to marry as well as men to rape their wives.

After outcries by Afghan women’s groups that the government was legalizing marital rape, Karzai said the law would be amended to bring it in line with the Afghan constitution, which guarantees equal rights for women.

To that end, the Afghan government enacted later in 2009 the Elimination of Violence Against Women (EVAW) law which criminalized acts like early or forced marriage and rape.

Despite its passage, however, a UN report in November 2011 found that the EVAW act was rarely enforced, citing as an example the 2,299 crimes reported in 2010, of which only 155 cases, or just 7 percent, were prosecuted.
According to the UN report, “Judicial officials in many parts of the country have begun to use the law — but its use represents a very small percentage of how the government addresses cases of violence against women.”

Of course, it’s not terribly surprising that given the treatment of women in Afghan society the response by Afghanistan’s police and judiciary is to either ignore crimes launched against women or, in most cases, send the women back to their abusers.

Nowhere has that latter point been better demonstrated than in the recent case of Gulnaz, a 19-year-old Afghan girl who was raped by her cousin’s husband and imprisoned in 2009 for “forced adultery.”

After spending two and a half years in jail, during which time she gave birth to a daughter fathered by her defiler, Gulnaz was offered a pardon in December 2011 by Afghan President Hamid Karzai on the condition Gulnaz marry her rapist.

While Karzai’s decision may have engendered outraged disbelief from those in the West its foundation was deeply rooted in Afghan custom and Islamic law. Specifically, Gulnaz’s little girl, having been born in prison, is considered to be illegitimate, a disgrace to her family and, as a consequence, never to be accepted by Afghan society unless her parents marry.

Yet, whether prompted by domestic pressures or by a need to polish Afghanistan’s international image, Karzai graciously released Gulnaz without the precondition she wed her rapist. In a bitter irony for Gulnaz, however, she has now traded the relative safety of the jail cell for a life on the run.

About the only people having a Happy New Year in the Muslim world aren’t the Christians who are huddling and waiting out the storm, but the Islamists who use a different calendar, but are having the best time of their lives since the last Caliphate.

The news that the Obama Administration has brought in genocidal Muslim Brotherhood honcho Yusuf Al-Qaradawi to discuss terms of surrender for the transfer of Afghanistan to the Taliban caps a year in which the Brotherhood and the Salafists are looking to carve up Egypt, the Islamists won Tunisia’s elections, Turkey’s Islamist AKP Party purged the last bastions of the secular opposition and Libya’s future as an Islamist state was secured by American, British and French jets and special forces.

Time Magazine declared that 2011 was the Year of the Protester, they might have more honestly called it the Year of the Islamist. In 2010 the Taliban were still hiding in caves. In 2012 they are set to be in power from Tunisia to Afghanistan and from Egypt to Yemen. They won’t go by that name of course. Most of them will have elaborate names with the words “Justice” or “Community” in them, but they will for the most part be minor variations on the Muslim Brotherhood theme.

2011 will indeed be remembered, but not because of any Arab Spring or OWS nonsense. It will be a pivotal year in the rise of the next Caliphate. A rise disguised by angry protesters waving cell phones and flags. And clueless media coverage that treated Tahrir Square as the new fall of the Berlin Wall.

This was the year that Obama helped topple several regimes that served as the obstacles to Islamist takeovers. The biggest fish that Ibn Hussein speared out of the sea for Al-Qaradawi was Egypt, a prize that the Islamists had wanted for the longest time, but had never managed to catch. That is until the Caliph-in-Chief got it for them. Egyptian Democracy splits the take between the Brotherhood and the Salafists, whom the media is already quick to describe as moderates. First up against the wall are the Christians. Second up against the wall are the Jews. Third up is all that military equipment we provided to the Egyptian military which will shortly be finding its way to various “moderate militants” who want to discuss our foreign policy with us.

But there’s no reason to sell the fall of Tunisia short or the transition in Yemen. And when mob protests didn’t work, NATO sent in the jets to pound Libya until Al-Qaeda got its way there. Turkey’s fate had been written some time ago, but 2011 was the year that the AKP completed its death grip on the country with a final crackdown on the military, which has now ceased to be a force for stability.

Left out of the picture is Somalia. Liberals fulminated when Bush helped drive out Al-Shaab and its jolly Muslim lads with a habit of beheading people who didn’t grow beards or watched too much soccer. Any number of editorials complained that we had destabilized the country and that the Islamic Courts Union were really a bunch of moderates in disguise.

Sadly Obama has not been able to salvage the position of Al-Shabab which is low on money and has turned to forcing 12 year old girls into prostitution and torturing and murdering those who refuse. They’re also forcing the elderly to join its militias. But there is good news. Like every terrorist group, Al-Shabab has gotten itself a Twitter account and when O finds 5 minutes in between vacations and golf tournaments, the White House will order neighboring African countries to withdraw their armies and send in Al-Qaradawi to negotiate.

But even if the Islamists don’t get Somalia, they’ve got a nice chunk of North Africa to chew over, not to mention a few more slices of the Middle-Eastern pie, and Afghanistan will be back in their hands as soon as they manage to outmaneuver Karzai, which given his paranoia and cunning may admittedly take a while. But the Taliban are not big on maneuvers, they have the manpower, which means it’s only a matter of time until they do what the Mujaheddin did to the puppet Soviet regime. A history that everyone in the region is quite familiar with.

The ugliest part of this story isn’t what Obama did. It’s when he did it. If he really had no interest in winning Afghanistan, and if as he had said, the Taliban are not our enemy, then why did we stay for so long and lose so many lives fighting a war that the White House had no intention of winning? The ugly conclusion that must be drawn from the timing of the Iraq and Afghanistan withdrawals is that the wars were being played out to draw down around the time of the next election.

Ten years on from the invasion of Afghanistan, America has grown weary of war. President Obama, having realized his long-held target of withdrawing from Iraq, is trying to wind down the war in Afghanistan with the aim of ending American involvement by 2014. As Washington has lost faith in the war effort, so too has the broader public. Skeptical of success and encouraged in their doubts by the political establishment, Americans increasingly want the war, like a tiresome, too-long movie, to end at last. This national resignation is fraught with peril – for America’s counterterrorism objectives, for our strategic allies – but perhaps most of all for the soldiers who did the fighting. The U.S. military has a policy of leaving no man behind.  But as the country turns its attention away from the warfront, it risks forgetting the servicemen who fought so valiantly on its behalf, and who have returned home bearing the wars’ indelible marks.

The official end of the Iraq war this month is an occasion to reflect that, for many of America’s wounded veterans, the war will never be over, that they will always carry its scars. Over 32,000 servicemen have been wounded post-9/11, spanning all branches of the military. In the sands of Iraq, and in the mountains of Afghanistan, they have suffered horrific injuries, of which the most painful often left no outward mark. Limbs lost, lives turned upside down, futures permanently altered. For those of us safe in the comforts of civilian life, the enormity of their sacrifice is utterly beyond comprehension.

Just as awe-inspiring, though, is their resilience, their relentless determination not to surrender to the hardships imposed by their injuries, mental or physical. Where lesser spirits might have yielded, they have worked to embrace life, going to school, finding jobs, raising families. While others their age were playing at rebellion on the streets of New York and Oakland, they, who have so many reasons to complain, refused to turn their personal struggles into a public spectacle. They’re not the protesting kind. For these daily acts of heroism, no less than for the heroism they showed in battle, America’s wounded warriors are Front Page Magazine’s “Man of the Year.”

They are men like Army Sergeant First Class, Leroy Petry. The product of a military family, Petry enlisted in the Army Rangers in 1999, at the age of 20, inspired by their motto: “Rangers Lead the Way.” Petry did just that in May 2008, when he and his platoon found themselves in the midst of a deadly firefight while attempting a raid on a Taliban compound in Afghanistan’s remote Paktia province. Inside the compound’s courtyard, Petry and a fellow Ranger, Private First Class Lucas Robinson, were pinned down by heavy fire from Taliban fighters when a bullet round pierced both of Petry’s legs. As the Rangers battled back, a live enemy grenade landed just a few feet away. Acting on instinct, Petry lunged at the grenade to throw it back, but could not release it fast enough. The blast blew off his right hand at the wrist. Undaunted, Petry placed a tourniquet on his arm and called in by radio that he and two other Rangers had been wounded. Then he added, “And I also lost one of my hands.” Not until the Taliban fighters were killed would Petry allow himself to be evacuated. During his recovery, Petry received a prosthetic hand and arm. To his new arm, author Peter Collier recounts, Petry added a plaque listing the names of the fallen Rangers in his unit.  For his bravery, Petry this July was awarded the Medal of Honor, becoming only the second living recipient of the medal for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The medal did not mark the end of Petry’s military career. He recently re-enlisted for another eight years of service in the Army.

Marine Staff Sergeant Chad Brumpton was serving in Iraq when an improvised explosive device blew up the tank he commanded in 2005. “Both my legs from the knee down were shattered to little pieces,” Brumpton recalls. “My left hand, thumb, and wrist were shredded up and broken. I received four compression fractures in my lower back.” For two years, Brumpton went from one surgery to the next, undergoing 19 in all. He required heavy dosages of medication just to get out of bed. In the end, his legs could not be saved. Yet, Brumpton is anything but a broken man. Newly mobile on prosthetic legs, including a pair for running, he continues to defy his physical constraints. As he puts it: “I won’t let anything hold me down, especially my disability. After the explosion, doctors told me I’d never walk again, but on the day I was discharged from the hospital, I walked out. There was no way I was going to let anything stop me.”

Army Spc. Brent Whitten exhibits the same single-mindedness as he tries to move on with his life. Whitten was 20 years old when his Humvee was struck by a suicide bomber in eastern Baghdad in 2006. Flames engulfed the Humvee, but Whitten couldn’t move his legs to escape. Eventually, he managed to roll out of the Humvee’s roof and onto the street, where a rescue unit picked him up. Whitten’s pelvis was fractured and he suffered second-degree burns to his arms and face, but he still mustered the strength to call his wife back in Kansas and tell her not to worry. Now a broadcasting student at the University of Kansas, he urges other wounded veterans to look upon their injuries as a new battle to be won. “When I think of my recovery, my message to other wounded warriors is this: Your recovery is your new mission. You have to get victory. You’re still a soldier, so you have an obligation not to surrender. Your family is counting on you.”

Marine and machine gunner Mike Heller knows how difficult that recovery can be. When his Humvee hit a landmine in Iraq in 2005, Heller was violently ejected, seriously injuring his spine. But his immediate concern was not for himself but for his unit’s team leader, Cpl. Joseph Tremblay, who was badly injured in the explosion. For the next three hours, as they made their way to the hospital, Heller tried to keep Tremblay calm and divert his attention from his bleeding wounds. Tremblay did not make it to the hospital. Heller survived, but today he suffers from chronic back pain and the awful thought that he failed to keep his comrade alive. It has taken time and treatment for Heller to realize that he could not have changed what happened, that he could not have done more to save his friend. He is still working to come to terms with his memories. But he is also getting on with his life, raising his daughter, working as a stock analyst, and pursuing a business degree.

Something unexpected happened to the 300 full- and part-time staff members of the United States Institute of Peace last spring. Just before they moved into new headquarters — a $186 million architectural oddity in which federal office building meets Disney World — the House of Representatives voted to defund them.

Forty-one Democrats joined the Republican majority in opposing USIP. A subsequent House-Senate budget compromise sustained the institute but sliced $7 million from its allocation, leaving a $54 million target for next time.

And that was without scrutiny of the institute’s work on Iran, Israel and genocide.

Iranian leaders repeatedly call for the destruction of Israel, pursue nuclear weapons and long-range missiles contrary to U.N. sanctions and, from aiding Iraqi and Afghan insurgents to funding Hamas and Hezbollah, support violent international proxies. Decades of Western attempts at diplomatic outreach have failed.

Yet in November 2010, a 40-member panel from USIP and the Stimson Center — a Washington think tank dedicated to non-proliferation — produced Engagement, Coercion, and Iran’s Nuclear Challenge. It called on the Obama administration to implement “strategic engagement” to “rebalance” what the authors labeled America’s punitive dialogue-sanctions approach to the Islamic Republic. The study wanted no more public assertions that last-resort military strikes remain “on the table.”

Instead, it envisioned America connecting to “pragmatists” within the Iranian leadership. These links would aim at compromising Tehran’s nuclear arms drive in exchange for supporting legitimate goals, including peaceful nuclear development. Yet the United States concedes the latter and it was “pragmatists” including former President Hashemi Rafsanjani who early supported Iran’s covert nuclear weapons effort.

In 2009, USIP, in conjunction with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and the American Academy of Diplomacy, issued a 174-page report, Preventing Genocide: A Blueprint for U.S. Policymakers. The study, conducted by a foreign policy Who’s-Who, recalled the Nazi genocide of European Jewry and invoked the post-Holocaust assertion “never again!” It referred to mass murders in Kosovo, Rwanda, Darfur and elsewhere. But it did not mention Iranian threats against the Jewish state.

“Preventing Genocide was not meant to be comprehensive,” said USIP Executive Vice President Tara Sonenshine. Rather, it was intended to guide the Obama administration “regarding organization of the National Security Council and intelligence agencies … [about] how to recognize the danger of genocide” before it is committed.

USIP’s January 2009 Special Report, “Islamic Peacemaking Since 9/11,” surveyed  generalized anti-terrorism, pro-tolerance statements from Islamic leaders and Muslim organizations. It included, uncritically, soothing remarks from CAIR — the Council on American Islamic Relations — a Hamas/Muslim Brotherhood derivative, at least five of whose former lay leaders or staff have been jailed or deported — and Sheik Yusuf al-Qaradawi. He’s the influential Egyptian theologian, affiliated with the Brotherhood, who has called for “conquering” Europe and America by proselytizing and for a second Holocaust of the Jews, this time by Muslims.

USIP has hosted presentations by Palestinian Authority cabinet members and leading Israeli politicians, including, last April, Israeli President Shimon Peres. It makes grants to Israeli and Palestinian Arab groups discussing, if not building, peace. Institute Arab-Israeli publications have included:

• “Hamas: Ideological Rigidity and Political Flexibility,” by Paul Scham and Osama Abu-Irshaid, a June 2009 USIP Special Report. This paper claims that “experience with intractable conflicts in Northern Ireland, Aceh, and elsewhere suggests that ideologically rigid movements can change over time and that a peace process itself can play a critical role in shaping such an evolution …. While no one should be expected to trust blindly, repeated failures to achieve a lasting solution to this seemingly intractable conflict suggest that a reexamination of our assumptions and analytical frameworks is essential.”

But Hamas leaders insist repeatedly that their movement’s raison d’etre is the destruction of Israel. The analogy between the Catholic-Protestant conflict in Northern Ireland and Arab/Muslim-Israeli/Jewish conflict in the Middle East fails: The Irish Republican Army never called for the destruction of England or its incorporation into Catholic Ireland, mainstream Irish Catholic clergy did not celebrate anti-Protestant bloodshed, and by the time negotiations took hold the IRA had lost outside support.

• Negotiating Arab-Israeli Peace; American Leadership in the Middle East, a 190-page paperback by Amb. Daniel C. Kurtzer and Scott B. Lasensky, published in 2008 as another guide for the incoming Obama administration. Claiming to come to grips with “lessons learned and opportunities lost,” it fails to account for one of the most obvious lessons: Repeated rejections by Arab leadership, including Palestinian, of peace proposals from the 1930s to 2008. In 2010, the Obama administration named Lasensky a senior advisor to the U.S. mission to the United Nations on Israeli, Palestinian, Syrian and Lebanese affairs.

An old notion brought to life after the Vietnam war, the institute spent 26 years in rented quarters before hosting President George W. Bush and Speaker Nancy Pelosi at a 2008 ground-breaking for its new building. Congress had approved $120 million toward  architect Moshe Safdie’s “dove-wings-over-boxes” design, with private funds paying the balance.

Across 23rd Street N.W. from the State Department, USIP raises a question. Given State and Defense’s policy planning sections, the U.S. Army’s Peace-Keeping and Stability Operations Institute, and private non-profits like the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, why the institute?

A suicide bomb blast at an important Shia shrine in Kabul, Afghanistan killed at least 59 worshipers and injured more than 160 on Tuesday while raising the specter of sectarian conflict for the first time in the war. Equally troublesome for authorities is the possibility that the attacks were based not on religion, but on the ethnicity of the victims.

Another attack on a Shia mosque in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif at about the same time killed four and injured 17. The mosque attack occurred on the holiest day of the year for Shias — the festival of Ashura — at the Abul Fazl shrine where hundreds of people were packed together mourning the martyrdom of the prophet’s grandson.

Almost immediately, a representative of the Pakistani-based terrorist group Lashkar-e Jhangvi al-Alami, a militant splinter group of the Lashkar-e Jhangvi (LeJ), claimed responsibility for the attacks, but no proof has been uncovered that would prove that assertion. LeJ has not been known to operate inside Afghanistan, but has been responsible for hundreds of terrorist attacks carried out against Pakistan’s Shia population.

The Taliban denied responsibility for the blasts and condemned the loss of life as “inhumane.” They blamed “the invading enemy” - a reference to the NATO forces in Afghanistan.

This kind of terrorist attack, targeting Shias during Ashura, has been almost unknown in Afghanistan. According to the CIA Factbook, about 19% of the population of Afghanistan is Shia Muslim. While there are the usual tensions between Sunnis and Shias, the relative freedom to practice religious rites and observances under the Karzai government has led to a wary accommodation between the two sects.

Now, that peace has been shattered by persons or groups unknown. Will the Shias respond? Tensions are certainly running high and the possibility cannot be dismissed.

But another aspect of the attacks cannot be ignored: that ethnic conflict may be at the bottom of these attacks. Most Shias come from the Tajik and Hazara ethnic minorities, who have historically been persecuted by the Pashtuns, Uzbeks, and other groups that make up the patchwork quilt of Afghanistan society. Splitting the country along ethnic lines would be just as effective for Afghanistan’s enemies as dividing it according to religious beliefs.

Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai cut short his visit to Europe and hurried back to Kabul to deal with the crisis. And in his first statement on the attacks, he pointed the finger at Pakistan. “Without any doubt, the enemies of Afghanistan are trying to separate the Afghan people,” Karzai said in a statement. He later told the press after visiting some of the wounded in a Kabul hospital, “We will pursue this issue with Pakistan and its government very seriously.” The Afghan president added, “Lashkar-i-Jhangvi is based in Pakistan, therefore the government of Afghanistan with all its strength and international support will pursue this issue. Afghanistan cannot ignore the blood of its children.”

Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry spokesman demanded that the government of Afghanistan supply proof that Pakistan was behind the attack, texting AFP, “Lashkar-i-Jhangvi is a banned organization. We would encourage Kabul to share with us evidence, if any through official channels.”

Another month, another incident with Pakistan. This time, it was a nighttime NATO airstrike against Pakistani border outposts that triggered the crisis. Pakistan says 25 of its soldiers were killed in the “unprovoked and indiscriminate” attack by NATO helicopters. NATO has issued apologies for the “tragic unintended incident.” But Islamabad has promised to retaliate for what it views as an act of aggression. In fact, the Pakistanis already have shut down the overland supply corridors that carry NATO war materiel into Afghanistan from Pakistani ports. In addition, Islamabad has demanded that the U.S. pull out of bases being used to conduct drone strikes.

To be sure, this could be what it appears on the surface: a friendly-fire mistake caused by the fog of war. There’s a reason the term was coined by the warriors of yesterday. Battle is chaos and confusion, especially at night.

Yet something tells me there’s more at play here than the fog of war.

As the Pakistani side rages about its innocent soldiers coming under attack while fighting our enemy, Afghan and NATO officials have made it clear that the helicopter strikes came in response to repeated fire from the Pakistani side of the border. More specifically, the fire came from “a Pakistan military outpost,” according to a Wall Street Journal report on the incident. That’s what triggered the NATO air attack, which, according to an Afghan official interviewed by the Wall Street Journal, “Pakistani officials were informed of…before it took place.”

This is nothing new. Pakistani forces have fired on U.S. and other NATO helicopters for years. Given that Taliban, Haqqani and al Qaeda forces have no helicopters, the Pakistanis cannot claim to be doing this by mistake.

Moreover, elements within the Pakistani security, military and intelligence apparatus—which helped create the Taliban in a short-sighted attempt to gain nominal control over Afghanistan—continue to support the Taliban and the Haqqani network. The Haqqani network, it pays to recall, has been involved in several terrorist attacks on civilians in Afghanistan (including the Kabul siege earlier this year) and in attacks on coalition troops.  In September, Adm. Mike Mullen called the Haqqani network “a veritable arm of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Agency (ISI).”

Haqqani operatives in Afghanistan, “with ISI support,” in Mullen’s words, have planned and conducted truck bomb attacks on U.S. and NATO bases, assaults on the U.S. embassy and deadly attacks on commercial and government facilities in Kabul. The ISI-backed Haqqani network was responsible for the 2009 attack on a CIA base in Afghanistan, which killed seven CIA operatives. According to the International Herald Tribune, ISI’s “S Wing” is coordinating Taliban operations in southern Afghanistan.

“The support of terrorism is part of their national strategy,” Mullen bluntly said of the dysfunctional, duplicitous Pakistani security, military and intelligence apparatus.

With the Taliban showing no signs of giving up their fight to topple the Afghan government, Afghanistan and the United States are currently attempting to negotiate the terms of a strategic partnership to determine the future of America’s military presence in Afghanistan.

Currently, the International Security Assistance Force’s (ISAF) 130,000 troops, 90,000 of whom are Americans, is scheduled to withdraw from Afghanistan by the end of 2014, at which time security of the country will fall into the hands of Afghan security forces.

Among the myriad of issues to be resolved is the number, if any, of American troops who would remain in Afghanistan beyond the scheduled pullout date and under what conditions they would operate.

It is believed that Afghan officials are looking for an international force of at least 20,000 troops to remain behind in Afghanistan after the 2014 deadline in order to provide support to the approximately 350,000 Afghan security forces.

So, in order to strengthen his political hand in the ongoing negotiations with the United States, Afghan President Hamid Karzai recently called upon a loya jirga, or grand council, consisting of over 2,000 Afghan tribal and village leaders for its support.

In particular, Karzai sought the loya jirga’s approval to negotiate a long-term security pact with the United States that contained a set of preconditions laid down by the Afghan president, including terminating American night raid operations, placing the Afghan government in charge of all insurgent detainees, and limiting the length of the pact to 10 years.

As an unelected body, the loya jirga is prohibited by the Afghan Constitution from making legally binding decisions, yet it nevertheless ended its four days of deliberations in the Afghan capital of Kabul by giving Karzai near unanimous approval to negotiate a security pact laden with his prerequisites.

While the loya jirga’s decision was met with favor by Karzai, not everyone in Afghanistan registered the same enthusiasm. In fact, a number of key Afghan figures, such as Karzai’s main rival, Abdullah Abdullah, and former ally, Abdul Rashid Dostum, had boycotted the loya jirga, deeming it unconstitutional and capable of fomenting greater conflict.

Those concerns were immediately on display after the loya jirga had announced its support of negotiations when nearly 1,000 demonstrators took to Afghan streets burning effigy’s of Barrack Obama and demanding an end to the American presence in Afghanistan.

Not surprisingly, the Taliban also took displeasure with the loya jirga by quickly issuing a statement that read in part, “We believe that (the agreement) was already designed by the Americans and only used the name of loya jirga to announce it.”

In fact, the Taliban had signaled its displeasure weeks earlier by issuing stringent warnings that those attending the loya jirga were supporting a long-term US presence in Afghanistan and would be considered “traitors” and “deserving of harsh penalties.”

Those penalties first surfaced days before the opening of the assembly when a suspected suicide bomber carrying a bag of explosives was shot dead near the jirga venue. Then, the day after the meeting opened, Taliban insurgents fired two rockets at the conference site, although no one was killed or injured in the attack.

Of course, the Taliban had reacted similarly to another loya jirga convened by Karzai in June 2010 to discuss possible reconciliation talks with the Taliban, an overture to which the Taliban responded by having its fighters, clad in suicide vests, launch rocket attacks against the attendees.

Since that point, efforts to engage the Taliban in peace talks have further deteriorated as the insurgents infiltrated the ranks of Afghan security forces and conducted a series of assassinations against an array of high-level government and security officials.

These deadly attacks included the suicide bomb assassinations of Ahmed Wali Karzai, half-brother to Hamid Karzai in July 2011 and Afghanistan’s top peace negotiator and former president, Burhanuddin Rabbani, in September 2011.

So, while the current loya jirga may have displeased Afghan political leaders, protesters and the Taliban, it may have also helped serve to alienate the United States.

In particular, the United States military has chafed at the demand that it terminate its Special Operations Forces night raids targeting insurgent leaders, facilitators and bomb-makers. Coalition forces carry out hundreds of such night operations a month, which they claim are an effective way to keep pressure on militants.

On Saturday, Pakistan showed how dismissive it is of U.S. pressure. Only days after Secretary State Clinton’s visit to Pakistan and one day prior to her trip to Afghanistan, the Pakistan-based Haqqani network carried out the deadliest bombing in Afghanistan since the war began. Thirteen NATO personnel were killed by a suicide bomber and there is every reason to believe it will be traced back to Pakistan’s intelligence service.

The attack is a challenge from Pakistan. Haroun Mir, an Afghan analyst, said, “The Pakistanis are sending another message, too: They are not willing to abandon their support of the Taliban.” The Pentagon’s latest report on the war in Afghanistan states that the Pakistani safe havens and the weaknesses of the Afghan government present the most serious problems to the war effort. The fact that Pakistan allowed the Haqqani network to carry out such an operation shows it has no intention of changing its behavior.

Saturday’s attack is particularly brazen given the direct accusations leveled at Pakistan by senior U.S. officials. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, bluntly called the Haqqani network a “veritable arm” of the Pakistani ISI intelligence service. When asked to clarify, he responded, “I phrased it the way I wanted it to be phrased.” He also accused the ISI of orchestrating a truck bombing on September 10 that wounded 77 American soldiers, attacks on the U.S. embassy and NATO headquarters and a June 28 attack on an Intercontinental Hotel. The Afghan government accused the ISI of organizing the September 20 assassination of former Afghan President Rabbani, who was leading negotiations with the Taliban. Pakistan’s reaction has been to brush it off.

The unfortunate reality is that until Pakistan stops facilitating acts of terrorism in Afghanistan, the country cannot be stabilized. This support is also critical to Al-Qaeda’s survival. The Pentagon report says that the Haqqani network is the group’s “most significant enabler” and Al-Qaeda views the Taliban as “integral” to its own campaigns. In a new BBC documentary titled “Secret Pakistan,” a Taliban fighter says that Al-Qaeda operatives identify candidates for suicide bombings in Pakistani terrorist camps run by members of the ISI. These candidates are then set apart for specialized instruction.

American soldiers have launched a major operation this week that has seen hundreds of US and Afghan troops mass near Afghanistan’s eastern border with Pakistan, raising suspicions over a possible unilateral military strike in North Waziristan. If undertaken, the assault would end years of frustration with Pakistani military inaction concerning Islamic terrorists who take refuge there after staging hit-and-run attacks against American and coalition forces in Afghanistan.

Called “Operation Knife Edge,“ the allied forces are deploying right up to the Pakistani border with helicopter gunships and heavy artillery, blocking the main road between the two countries and conducting house-to-house searches. An Afghan Defense Ministry official said the operation was “largely against the Haqqani network,” the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) and the Afghan security forces’ chief threat in eastern Afghanistan. Last month, Haqqani fighters carried out an assault in Kabul itself that saw the US embassy attacked. They also wounded 21 US troops in a bombing in Wardak province.

“These networks are directly responsible for recent attacks against the people of Afghanistan and coalition forces,” said US captain Justin Brockhoff.

After US Navy Seals flew deep into Pakistan to kill Osama bin Laden last May at his luxury compound in Abbottabad where he was living undisturbed, the Pakistani government warned the United States not to violate Pakistani sovereignty again. But Pakistan’s army chief, General Ashfaq Kiyani, admits American forces may cross the border during this current operation, but this time to confront the Haqqani organization.

“They [USA] may do it, but they will have to think ten times because Pakistan is not Iraq or Afghanistan,” General Kiyani told the Pakistani politicians on Tuesday.

A story in the Washington Post last month further indicates Operation Knife Edge may extend into Pakistani territory. It states that American government officials warned their Pakistani counterparts a week after September’s US embassy attack that the United States would take unilateral action against the Haqqani network if they did not do so. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta told reporters the United States is going “to take whatever steps are necessary to protect our forces,” which could be interpreted as an ultimatum.

The American government has long been aware of the ties between the Haqqani network and Pakistan’s powerful Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) and wants these bonds cut. In a speech to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace last month, Admiral Mike Mullen, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, even accused the Pakistanis of waging a “proxy war” in Afghanistan through the Haqqani organization. Mullen told his audience he had had a four hour conversation with Pakistan’s army chief that included discussing “the need for the ISI to disconnect from Haqqani.”

Pakistani officials, naturally, deny any such ties exist. Which is not unexpected from a government that says it did not know bin Laden was living comfortably in its midst for so many years.

North Waziristan is a rugged, mountainous tribal area in north-western Pakistan that borders Afghanistan’s Khost province. The Haqqani network, headed by Jalaluddin Haqqani, made its name fighting Soviet forces in Afghanistan in the 1980s, for which he received American and Pakistani help. Pakistan’s tribal territories also served as his base during that conflict.

Haqqani took part in the civil war in Afghanistan after the Soviets were driven out and later sided with the Taliban, becoming a minister in the Taliban government. He fled back to the Pakistani tribal area after the 2001 US-led invasion and resumed guerrilla warfare there, but this time against NATO and Afghan government troops. He also became closely allied with al-Qaeda and may now be sheltering some of its members in North Waziristan.

It seems another demographic group Democrats once took for granted is snapping out of Obama fever. At the Daily Beast, David Graham reports that American Muslims don’t think the president’s actions match his pro-Islam rhetoric. Aside from insisting that Islam is a religion of peace and appointing a few Muslims to important positions, Obama hasn’t met enough with American Muslim groups or “remade the political landscape for Muslims”:

“Just like the last time, we’re quite happy if any president offers positive rhetoric toward the Muslim world or Islam, but it really needs to be backed up with concrete policy initiatives,” says Ibrahim Hooper, communications director for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a leading American Muslim group. “We’re still in Afghanistan, we’re still in Iraq, the Israeli-Palestinian situation has gone south. We’re not there—we’re just continuing with the previous policies.”

It’s not just foreign policy. Across the board, Muslims are expressing disappointment with Obama’s progress on issues relevant to them in the domestic policy realm. What they express is not so much anger as disillusionment, a recognition that the president hasn’t remade the political landscape for Muslims. (American Muslim opinions mirror international opinions. A Pew survey released Tuesday finds that citizens in majority Muslim countries remain skeptical of Obama.)

[…]

Exhibit A is the Park51 project, the proposed mosque and Islamic center in Lower Manhattan that opponents dubbed the “ground zero mosque”. After delivering what appeared to be a full-throated defense of the project, he walked back his comments the next day, saying, “I was not commenting, and I will not comment, on the wisdom of making the decision to put a mosque there.” It was a crucial litmus test for many American Muslims—and one that Obama failed. “He’s still missing the political courage to stand up for communities, and not just Muslim communities,” says Shireen Zaman, the executive director of the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, a think tank on Muslim issues.

As the Left always does when discussing different ethnic groups, it’s simply assumed at the outset that the positions cited are intrinsically anti-Muslim.

Whatever you think of the wisdom of starting or continuing the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, both conflicts were waged against specific governments the United States determined to be enemies, not against Muslims generally; indeed, both wars liberated their Muslim populations from nightmarish despots and gave them a genuine shot at liberty, so one could just as easily call a premature withdrawal from either theater anti-Muslim for enabling a descent back into totalitarianism.

Similarly, supporting the Ground Zero Mosque is only “pro-Muslim” to the extent that we associate that particular mosque with the radicalism of its organizers. Do Graham and Zaman mean to suggest that most American Muslims want sharia to be preached from a bloody site of Islamic conquest? The implication is far more Islamophobic than anything the average conservative has to say on the subject. And yes, that is the implication—considering that over 100 mosques have gone up in New York City without a peep from right-wing hatemongers, why make this particular mosque the litmus test for American tolerance?

Aside from CAIR-approved action on the preceding issues, just what are these groups looking for? What would a “remade political landscape for Muslims” look like? I submit that the United States doesn’t need to become more pro-Muslim. Polls indicate that the American people overwhelmingly distinguish between peaceful Muslims and jihad sympathizers, and a comprehensive study from the Center for Security Policy reveals that Muslims are targeted by hate crimes at comparable levels to Christians, and to a much lower degree than Jews. If anything, we go overboard in our fear of offending Muslims, as in the case of Ft. Hood shooter Major Nidal Hasan. We bend over backwards to avoid discussing the theological roots of our terrorist enemies.

For Obama, this is another demonstration that it takes a lot more than the sparkling personality of The One to satisfy people—responsible policymaking can’t help but offend somebody, and not every special-interest demand is susceptible to reason.

For the rest of the country, this should highlight the folly of leftist identity politics. Human beings are first and foremost individuals, and should evaluate political issues based on the facts and principles involved, not on superficial affinities for particular stances and groups that have been imposed by the Left.  The Founders warned us about such exploitation of factional impulses—it not only confuses and oversimplifies issues, all but guaranteeing worse policy, but it also conditions us to divide into insular cultural camps and practice the very us-vs-them thinking the Left claims to oppose.

Four Afghan women have achieved something that would have been unimaginable a decade ago: they are training alongside male recruits to become pilots in the Afghan Air Force. Amidst headlines about poverty, illiteracy, and breathtaking levels of violence against women, their accomplishments are beyond heartening.

Second Lt. Sourya Saleh hopes to serve as a role model for other Afghan women after completing her aviation training in the United States.

“We are very happy to be going to open these doors for the other women to come and join the military, to show them you can do this and make our country proud,” she said. “We want for all Afghan girls to know they can do anything.”

Another newly minted officer, Second Lt. Mary Sharifzada, told the Air Force Times that becoming a pilot has been her dream since she was a little girl:

“I want to show the people of Afghanistan that women are strong,” Sharifzada said. “We want to show the people of the world that the women of Afghanistan are strong and they can do anything they want.”

“They said I’m as brave as a man,” said Second Lt. Masooma Hussaini.

As brave as men, and according to Lt. Col. John Howard of the Thunder Lab training program, as capable as their male counterparts. But these women and future recruits may not get the chance to prove “they can do anything they want” if the United States selects Brazilian aircraft manufacturer Embraer to supply turboprop planes for the counterinsurgency effort in Afghanistan.

In the April 2011 issue of Smart Girl Nation, my friend Ashley Sewell explains how the Brazilian plane would bar skilled female pilots from flying Light Air Support (LAS) and light attack and armed reconnaissance (LAAR) missions:

The front-runners are the American-made Hawker Beechcraft AT-6 (a plane like the T-6 training aircraft that would accommodate 95% of women pilots) and the Brazilian-made Embraer EMB-314 (a plane that sticks to older standards thus eliminating the possibility of being flown by a woman).

Those older standards exclude more than 80 percent of women (and small men) from safely flying the planes that will be used to train and equip the Afghan Air Force.

There’s no question that operational performance and pilot safety should be the primary criteria in choosing between the Embraer and Hawker Beechcraft planes. But if the two aircraft perform comparably, can we afford to indulge the Commander-in-Chief‘s childish love affair with Brazil, forcing the struggling Afghan Air Force to sideline much needed talent?

That’s not the only reason the Hawker Beechcraft proposal is superior.

President Obama is basking in the after-glow of the successful operation that led to the demise of Osama bin Laden. As I have said previously, he deserves credit for making the gutsy decision to use a Navy SEAL team to take Bin Laden down. Of course, the lion’s share of the credit belongs to the special operations forces themselves, who overcame immense odds to mount the incredibly risky attack ordered by their commander-in-chief.

However, as President Obama savors the high point of his time in office to date, there are some questions that he needs to answer to the American people. Here are just a few of them.

1. Does the president have any change of heart about the harsh criticisms he leveled at his predecessor for using renditions of suspected terrorist detainees and enhanced interrogation techniques in light of the crucial information they yielded on the identity of bin Laden’s trusted courier, which in turn led us to locate Bin Laden himself?

Since taking office, President Obama has largely followed the counter-terrorism policies of President George W. Bush, despite criticizing them while campaigning to succeed Bush. Guantanamo remains open. Military commissions are still being used by the Obama administration to try some detained terrorist suspects. Renditions and indefinite detentions of high risk suspects without trial have continued. It’s time for President Obama to admit that he was wrong in castigating the Bush administration during the campaign and acknowledge the continuity of Bush’s policies that are necessary to fight an evil foe determined to kill as many Americans as possible.

2. Why have there been so many conflicting reports on what happened during the mission?

First we were told by the president’s chief counterterrorism adviser, John O. Brennan, who reportedly observed the mission in real time from a live feed transmitted by the Navy Seals as it went down, that Bin Laden had a firearm which he was using when confronted and shot.

Brennan said in his initial account that Bin Laden was

engaged in a firefight with those that entered the area of the house he was in

We were also told that he used one of his wives as a human shield.

The next day we learned that Bin Laden was not carrying a weapon when he was killed by our forces, but was somehow resisting arrest. We also learned that Bin Laden had not used any human shield. Given the fog of war in a fast-moving operation, why did Brennan speak with such certainty in the first place on what happened when apparently he did not know the whole story? Was there an attempt to justify killing Bin Laden, rather than taking him into custody, in order to satisfy international law sticklers including President Obama himself?  Will the Obama administration, in its usual deference to the United Nations, comply with the request from the UN’s senior human rights official, Navi Pillay, for detailed information on the operation to confirm its ‘legality?’

3. Why did the Obama administration show such concern in handling and disposing of bin Laden’s body to make sure it conformed to Islamic law?

President Obama said in his speech to the nation on Sunday night that

“Bin Laden was not a Muslim leader; he was a mass murderer of Muslims.

If Bin Laden represented a perversion of Islam, why obsess that he be buried within 24 hours and cleansed in accordance with Islamic law? Why not bury him in an unmarked grave or drop him into the sea to live with the fishes after making absolutely sure that we have confirmed his identity?

4. What are we going to do about double-dealing Pakistan where al Qaeda terrorists are finding sanctuary? Shouldn’t we re-focus our efforts in the region from counter-insurgency, nation-building in Afghanistan to more limited counter-terrorism operations in Pakistan and Yemen where our enemy is now concentrated?

The Obama administration wisely left Pakistan in the dark about the Bin Laden mission until it was completed. Elements of Pakistan’s military and intelligence services have a record of working with the Taliban and al Qaeda. There is no way that bin Laden could have been hiding in a town filled with Pakistani military facilities and within yards of Pakistan’s equivalent of West Point without the knowledge and support of members of Pakistan’s military and intelligence service. Advance information about the operation in the wrong hands would have ensured the failure of the mission and could well have brought about significant casualties to our forces.

After initially praising the killing of Bin Laden as a “major setback to terrorist organizations around the world,” the Pakistan government issued a statement yesterday complaining that the United States had undertaken an “unauthorized unilateral action.” It’s time for a major push back against this fair weather, duplicitous ‘ally.’

Is the Obama administration planning to revisit the billions of dollars Pakistan receives each year from our country? Will we continue, and even expand our counter-terrorist operations in Pakistan, including continued drone attacks and commando raids, without seeking Pakistan’s permission as their treacherous government demands?

And aren’t we wasting billions of dollars and sacrificing the lives of our soldiers trying to re-build Afghanistan when the global terrorist networks threatening America are now operating out of Pakistan and Yemen, not Afghanistan?

5. Finally, will the Obama administration continue to mistakenly look at radical Islamist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood and their U.S. affiliates such as the Council of American Islamic Relations and the Islamic Society of North America benignly, distinguishing them from al Qaeda, even though they are using more stealth means towards the same Islamic supremist agenda to impose sharia law as broadly as possible?

President Obama can take pride in his accomplishment of ridding the world of Osama bin Laden. But the American people deserve answers to these and other difficult questions in the days, weeks and months to come.

Joseph Klein is the author of a recent book entitled Lethal Engagement: Barack Hussein Obama, the United Nations and Radical Islam