Establishing a functioning centralized state in Afghanistan didn’t work. Neither did the backend Deep State take in that country: Corruption runs deep in Afghanistan, but it’s a decentralized affair.
Even so, it would appear that the “U.S. government helped the country set up” a mini-American Surveillance State, namely, “the ability to wiretap and monitor phone calls for surveillance purposes,” even helping “create some of the data through funding and efforts to modernize the government,” reports Politico.
A constitutional republic was not what was being exported to Afghanistan.
Certainly, the extent to which the US can surveil its citizens bellies the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution — that quaint notion that “the people [have a right] to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.”
As the quintessential surveillance state, the United States had tried to foist its spying ways on Afghanistan. At the behest of the US, “The former Afghan government started collecting biometric data about Afghan citizens, including military personnel.”
This was as recently as 2006. But ensconcing a remotely reliable records-keeping bureaucracy in Afghanistan would have taken many more centuries.
“Given Afghanistan’s low level of development,” concludes Mark Krikorian, “record-keeping there was [never] comprehensive and efficient, if it existed at all.”
Post decampment, Afghanistan, at a cost exceeding $2 trillion to American taxpayers, is still a tribal society without a functioning bureaucracy. It is highly improbable that the country has kept reliable birth, death, marriage and criminal records on its citizens — many of whom are making their way to the United States.
The best way, then, to vet immigrants is by the faith they practice. As the data show, young, second-generation Muslims are well-represented among terrorists acting out against their hosts across the West. Second-generation Muslim-Americans are more prone to act out on their faith than their parents.
Omar Saddiqui Mateen shot up a Florida gay nightclub, in 2016. He was a second-generation Afghan-American. Although Mateen’s father was an admirer of the Taliban, the moron media concluded that junior was no Jihadist, only a latent, self-hating homosexual, fixated on phallic symbols like big guns.
Another proud Afghan-American who’ll be welcoming the hundreds of thousands of Afghans airlifted and funneled into America is Najibullah Zazi, arrested for plotting to blow up stuff stateside, in September 2009. He was released in 2019.
Since public policy is aimed at the common good — a cohort that commits more faith-based murders than another, say Christian Afghans, is, on average, unsuitable as a source of immigration to the US.
The reason for second-generation terrorism is no mystery. More so than girls, boys need strong men in their lives — men who’ll affirm their masculinity. Young men crave manly mentors with a strong moral message. But in contemporary American culture, men are sissified and feminized and biological boundaries blurred. American boys, K-12, are mired in an estrogen-infused, cloistered world, where strong men in authority are an endangered minority.
When a Muslim male, moreover, hears American preachers, parents, pedagogues and politicians pounding on about our country’s Founding Fathers as the archetypal pale, patriarchal oppressors — he quickly learns to reject his adopted country’s heritage and look elsewhere for masculine inspiration, maybe at Muhammad and his acolytes.
The fact that there are moderate Muslims doesn’t mean there is a moderate Islam — or that these moderates won’t sire sons who’ll embrace the unreformed Islam.
As painful as it is to say, being Muslim is a predisposing characteristic, a risk factor, if you will, for eruptions associated with this religion.
By “risk factor,” I mean that Islam predisposes its believers to aggression against The Other. For in Islam, we have a religion that doubles up as a political system counseling conquest, not co-existence. “Islam’s borders are bloody,” cautioned famed historian Samuel Huntington. The data support his prescient and profound analysis.
“The World’s Muslims: Religion, Politics and Society” is a 2013 report authored by the Pew Research Center. In case you needed confirmation of Islam’s radicalism, this report found that there is universal support among Muslims in Afghanistan (99%) for making Islamic law the official law in their country.
“Muslims across all the regions surveyed also generally agree that certain behaviors — such as suicide, homosexuality and consuming alcohol — are morally unacceptable….” And most “Muslims say a wife should always obey her husband…”
Even in regions “characterized by relatively low levels of religious observance and strong support for a woman’s right to decide whether to wear a veil, seven-in-10 Muslims agree that a wife should carry out her husband’s wishes.”
Whereas church-state separation is a fulcrum of America, most Muslims think “religious leaders should have at least some influence over political matters.”
A preponderance of Muslims will remain dormant. But, as we’ve learned, a Muslim individual could be “triggered” at any time to act on his radical religion.
So what if moderate Muslims assure us that each and every terrorist was acting out-of-faith! That’s irrelevant to the irreversible outcomes.
As is it a distraction to claim, as the moderates do, that Jihadis are misinterpreting Islam, and that we must all do battle for the real Islam, a thing as elusive as Bigfoot or unicorns. Fact: A Muslim’s actions, be they in accordance with the “real Islam” or not — sanctioned theologically or not — could be deadly to Americans.
Afghans are as tough as teak. America, however, is a soft, feminized, sentimental and self-hating society. It is dangerous to import men from such a militant manly culture into a country that teaches its immigrants to hate American history and heroes, and to despise and dominate our naive, eager-to-please people and their customs.
More so than chaotic countries-of-origin, religion is The Risk Factor in vetting Afghan immigrants. In the popular parlance, we might say that their Muslim faith puts Afghan Muslims in a security risk group and that Islam is a religious comorbidity.
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Ilana Mercer has been writing a weekly, paleolibertarian think piece since 1999. She’s the author of Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America From Post-Apartheid South Africa (2011) & The Trump Revolution: The Donald’s Creative Destruction Deconstructed” (June, 2016). She’s on Twitter, Gab, YouTube & LinkedIn; banned by Facebook, and has a new Podcast
