Khalid is not an ultraorthodox, unbending Muslim. Although he meets to chew qat wearing his Yemeni dress cut midcalf, in the style of an Islamic purist, he also wears button-down shirts and European hiking boots. He has lived in England for years and has befriended Westerners. Slight and handsome, he has the quiet charisma and modesty of the guy who is elected class president based on his low-key appeal. In short, he is not the kind of enemy we have been led to believe we are fighting. He harbors some of the same doubts that our own soldiers have about what brought them to fight and, perhaps, to die, in a place so far from home. To hear a polite and thoughtful man talk casually about his friends in Al Qaeda is to have the whole enterprise reduced to a more fragile, human scale. It is to see this war for what it is: a battle between men filled with contradictions, inconsistencies and weaknesses -- not a mythic struggle between our supermen and their ghosts.
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It is to see this war for what it is: a battle between men filled with contradictions, inconsistencies and weaknesses -- not a mythic struggle between our supermen and their ghosts.
That's about as articulate as it gets.
pretty ineresting article no? guy's like a "khatashin"
Yeah, but nobody ever knows how long a war will last. There are never any guarantees. War is utter folly, even as a last resort. It is always either an admission of colossal human failing, or the calculated plan of monsters.
Mocking the possibilties of peace ultimately leads to the questioning of genuine and twisted principles, after enough blood is spilt. A devotion to principle is admirable, until that devotion is manipulated to the point of compromising that very principle.
Seems everyone is asking wtf? Too bad it takes so much death and suffering for the scales to fall from the eyes of the extremists, the idiots, and the fools...on both sides.
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