American Taliban, Treason or Tradgedy?

Somebody recently emailed me an opinion article on the parents of John Walker Lindh. He's the American teenager who went to Pakistan to study Islam and ended up in Afganistan fighting the Northern Alliance. There were instant cries of treason, and this article took a particularly cheap shot by blaming most of it on his parents. "They didn't say 'no' enough," the article maintained.

Of course the article had to make a few assumptions, assumptions without which the whole premise fell apart and the attack on the boy's liberal parents (and most of the Bay Area's residents to boot) became nothing more than a mean-spirited character assasination. The biggest of these assumptions is that John did something heinous.

I'm listening. Just what was John Walker's terrible crime? Was it converting to Islam? Only if you're a fundamentalist Christian convinced that your religion is the only true religion which should be observed by everyone in the world. But that puts you in the same philosophical boat as the Taliban and the other Moslem fundamentalists. Was it leaving the United States to pursue interests elsewhere? That puts blame on a lot of people, some of whose goals are simply to make a profit -- far less laudable than to study a religion from those who teach it most "purely."

Maybe it was craving the "discipline" he didn't get at home. Oops. The article I read implied that that was a good thing. So did he cross "the line" when he took up a gun to begin fighting? Since when did fighting for what you believe in become a crime? If that were the case we'd condemn our entire military force, or at least those portions of it we consider the best. (Who would want someone in the U. S. military that DIDN'T believe in what he or she was doing?)

I'm not an expert on current events, so I may have missed something, but when Mr. Walker agreed to travel to Afghanistan I don't think the country was at war with the United States. I'd wager that for most Americans, Afghanistan was in indistinct blob on the map of ... somewhere in Asia isn't it ... until the days after 9-11-2001. How could he know this country was (or would be) at war with his? In fact my muddled brain has come up with this idea that the United States used to support some of the very people he was fighting for. How was he to know that his country, which supposedly puts a premium on loyalty, had played a game of willy-nilly allegiance flip-flop?

Was his crime joining his buddies in their attempt to break out of a prisoner of war camp? Because of the experience of our soldiers in WWII and Vietnam, it has become a part of our culture that prisoners of war are SUPPOSED to try to break out.

What I'm saying is that if you leave out the confusing issue of "friends" and "enemies" Walker didn't do anything our own society would find particularly criminal. So to condemn him we have to condemn our own violent tendencies, or we have to play the "it's alright if you do it for us, it's a crime if you do it for our enemies" game. When you need a score card and a ticker tape to know who's a friend and who's an enemy, that's a tough game to play, and the young Walker didn't play it well.

If you've read some of my other papers on this site you know I put quite a bit of value on individual freedom. Granted, my freedom to swing my arm ends far enough from your nose to prevent startling you, but that's a practical, physical restriction, not an artificial, social order restriction. So I have a hard time faulting Mr. Walker's parents for granting him unusual freedom. Socially it might have been ill advised. You must be careful when you blame parents for their offspring's behavior. The experts haven't yet devised a method of parenting that guarantees good results.

So John craved "discipline" he didn't get at home. Maybe that was his crime. But we hesitate to condemn that, first because we socially need "discipline," and second because we'd then have to condemn that tendency in ourselves. We need control. I believe that we need it because we were created to control ourselves. But when we fail at controlling ourselves our need for control expresses itself in reaching out to control others. Controlling others is a lot easier when people are easily controlled, and much of the socialization we expect of parents is aimed at making the children easy to control.

But even as we reach out to control others there's still that need to be in control of ourselves. And since we seem to have failed at that we turn to others to see if they can exert the control we have not been able to exert. Hence the attraction of fundamentalist, controlling religions. Yes, the Taliban gave Walker what his parents would not. But to assume that the parents are wrong we must assume that the Taliban is right, in which case we're the devils for blasting the regieme out of existence. If the Taliban's brand of religious fundamentalism is wrong it must be wrong in ALL religions, not just in Islam.

Allow me to bolster my point by imagining a reverse scenario. Suppose a young Afghan student, given unusual freedom by his parents, studied a few world religions and decided to convert to Christianity. (I know this is hard to imagine since the Islamic world is extremely restrictive largely because they fear this is exactly what will happen.) He then decides to travel to the United States to study Christianity at one of the many evangelical universities in this country. There he is indoctrinated in both Christian though and in political conservatism. Being from Islam he can accept this readily.

Let's further imagine that some non-Christian nation bordering us had influenced some of our own citizens to fight against the government in Washington. Conservative Christians see this as a threat to themselves and their way of life, and begin training young men to fight these "traitors." This young Afghan joins the fight in defense of his newfound faith.

Now it will take some real imagination. Let's imagine that Afghanistan is far more powerful than the United States. Afghanistan decides rather suddenly that the United States is an enemy. Being unwilling to send its own ground troops into the country, it begins massive bombing in support of the rebels our young Afghan is fighting. With the added assistance, the rebels achieve victory, and capture many regular army along with the Christian militia that had been fighting alongside them.

Would this young Afghan be guilty of terrible crimes? How is his circumstance different than that of John Walker Lindh? Again, if it only matters what side you're on, the issue of criminality depends not on some universal principle, but on who wins. In this case who wins is dependent not on truth but on overwhelming might. Maybe John's crime was to fight for the loser.... Then again, I don't think we really want to criminalize losing............
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