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We still don’t understand what we’re up against.
By: Daniel Greenfield
“I recall one instance where we were ordered to turn over a shipping container of captured Taliban weapons to the Afghan government, and I told the Major in charge of the mission “You know these are going right back to the Taliban as soon as we leave, right?” Without hesitation he responded, “Oh yes, I know.”
This story that Jesse Petrilla tells in “If It Takes a Thousand Years: From Al-Qaeda to Hamas, How the Jihadists Think & How to Defeat Them” is part of the larger reason why we not only lost Afghanistan, but why we’re losing to Islamic terrorists around the world and at home.
Jesse Petrilla had been an Army Liaison Officer on the ground in Afghanistan and had taken part in the interrogation of Taliban and Al Qaeda terrorists. He had also witnessed the defeatist politics that foreshadowed the loss of Afghanistan and encroaches on much of civilization.
While Petrilla’s time in Afghanistan is at the heart of the narrative, he moves from Israel to Jordan, visits Egypt, travels to the Balkans and witnesses the incursion of Islam into Europe, and then back home into the United States where he served as an elected official. Along the way he sees Islam in its native environment and in our own, witnesses our growing willingness to appease it and surrender to it, and our refusal to come to terms with what it truly is.
This is an experience that began when he was in Afghanistan and encountered military officers unwilling to understand what they were up against or, like that major, unwilling to rock the boat.
Afghanistan was not lost in any single battle, but in our refusal to understand what we were fighting. And if our civilization falls the way that Constantinople once did, that will ultimately be the tragic epitaph to be carved on its tombstone. In Afghanistan, Petrilla encounters Islam at its most elemental, operating with a heedless disregard for reality and human life, motivated purely by a fiery mix of theological conviction and tribalism. The Muslim terrorists he encountered boasted of their willingness to keep fighting us for generations, even, as in the book’s title, if it takes a thousand years, they were willing to kill, to die and teach their children to kill us.
As Petrilla succinctly observes, “they just want your entire society to submit or die.”
Islam has already fought for more than a thousand years to force all non-Muslims to submit to Islam. It is willing to fight for another thousand years to make slaves of all mankind.
The Koran has a great deal of value, but human life has almost none. Human beings are mere vehicles for imposing Islam or resisting it. Much like the Marxist view of society, individuals don’t matter, only the movements of history do. In that realm, which one of the Afghans he encounters describes as a “planet”, nothing matters less than a man.
Unless it’s a woman or a child.
“I have seen cases where Taliban have fired mortars from the roof of a building full of children, only to run away before the counter- attack in which several children were killed, at which time the Taliban will play to the media and blame the Americans for indiscriminately killing civilians, further eroding our mission,” Petrilla describes in If It Takes a Thousand Years.
Westerners don’t understand Islam. And they try to deal with Islam on American terms.
After the recent anniversary of our retreat from Afghanistan, Petrilla describes a mission rotted from within. As an Army officer, he encountered a translator who supported the Taliban. “To make things even more unsettling, the pro-Taliban translator was an American citizen who held a Top Secret security clearance. I reported him to my superiors, and when they reported it to theirs, making its way all the way up to the General Officer level, they came back to me and said nothing can be done.” It would have been too politically incorrect to get rid of him.
That story casts new light on the recent arrest of an Afghan guard and his family brought to the United States who plotted an ISIS terrorist attack. And on the worthless ‘vetting’ of Afghans.
When Taliban Jihadis were captured, what was done with them?
Petrilla describes how the Afghans were allowed to run review boards during which “59 percent were recommendations for release” while 93% of older Taliban received recommendations for release. Those who remained locked up received average sentences of 4 years. The prisons were known as “Taliban University” for training and indoctrinating the soon to be freed Jihadis.
Nation building subsumed the mission of defeating the enemy until the enemy were in charge.
How could America’s mission in Afghanistan go so wrong? In If It Takes a Thousand Years Petrilla traces the common failures brought on by our inability to understand Islamic societies. Societies where, as he describes in an Afghan wedding, the husband can kill his new bride on their wedding night if she turns out not to be a virgin “and the bride’s family is obligated to replace her with a sister or other female relative at the same wedding.”
Petrilla urges readers to compare that to an American wedding. “Imagine yourself being at a wedding, and after the ceremony having the groom come out of a tent with the bride, murdering her in front of the guests, and then taking her sister and marrying her while the corpse of the murdered bride still lies on the ground.” That is what morality can be in an Islamic society.
As Petrilla travels through the Muslim world, he sees the degraded status of Christians, and as he travels through what used to be the Christian world, he sees our ignorance about Islam.
“If It Takes a Thousand Years: From Al-Qaeda to Hamas, How the Jihadists Think & How to Defeat Them” lays out some of the Islamist organizations, especially the Muslim Brotherhood, corrupting America and western nations, and what we can do about it, but the greatest thing that we can do is look at the horrors of Islamic terrorism and the Muslim world. And imagine.
Americans would rather imagine zombies, vampires and space aliens destroying us than look into the darkness and see what is really waiting for us out there. If It Takes a Thousand Years challenges us to look and to confront the threat that Jesse Petrilla saw in his encounters with hundreds of Islamic terrorists and that he increasingly sees rising in the United States.
Americans could retreat from Afghanistan, but where are we going to retreat to from America?
(If It Takes a Thousand Years: From Al-Qaeda to Hamas, How the Jihadists Think & How to Defeat Them b
