Short-sighted American humanism absolutely unwanted in Afghanistan

"Our Doc and I ran up to the wounded pregnant woman who was lying on the ground bleeding. As soon as we approached her and tried to provide medical help, her husband came up to us - he had blood coming out of his ears. The man started saying something. Our interpreter said that the Afghan man did not want other men to take care of his wife. He asked us to help his son, who was sitting in a truck with a lacerated wound on his leg. Our Doc asked the interpreter to tell the Afghan man that if he does not let us help the woman now, his wife would die. The man went away and then returned carrying a blanket. He covered his wife with the blanket but did not let us help her anyway.

"I was shocked about what I had seen. How religious should one be not to let a foreign man provide medical aid to the seriously wounded woman?

"We called a chopper. The chopper took all the wounded to the hospital at the base. Later we found out that the woman had died. She could have survived if we had been allowed to help her, our Doc said."

A young American soldier serving in Afghanistan posted this message on his blog. The soldier believes that the attitude, which he described, testifies to extreme savagery of local residents, their deep religiousness that borders on bigotry. A Pravda.Ru correspondent asked Afghan war veteran Valery Gorbachev to comment on the above-described episode.

"America is a young nation. They are only 200 years - the Russian artillery is older - and they came to wage war in the country, whose history remembers Alexander III of Macedon, Genghis Khan and Timur. This land has its own pristine magic of thousands of years. When we were there, I often asked myself: how can one wage war amidst so much beauty? A soldier could not take so much beauty and would lose his sense of self-control. One did not want to wage war there. Skyscrapers of Manhattan seem miserably tasteless if compared to that immense power of Afghan mountains.

"This land is populated by the people, whose culture and lifestyle had been formed for thousands of years, not just for years or decades. The Americans have been waging war in that country for a long time, but still they don't know who they are dealing with. That country does not need any teaching - it can teach anyone instead, any empire. When Alexander the Great came there, the culture and mode of life had already been formed. The Americans do not understand what wisdom and which feelings are hidden behind the "barbarism" of the Afghan nation. They explain it as "devotion to Islam," but such an explanation is true "barbarism" and unforgivable ignorance. The Americans do not want to understand, what kind of honor the Afghans have and what honor means for them. Yes, an Afghan man would never let other men touch his wife. She will not let it either - she will choose death instead.

"Yes, this is how their houses are structured: the male part is separated from the female part, and a woman can not enter the male part of the house - it's considered an insult. One can explain it from Islamic positions, as an insult of a Muslim. But! The family relation, the relations between a man and a woman, parents and children, had appeared there long before the establishment of Islam. Living conditions in this country are brutal. In order to survive, each family member and each clan member must know their place, their field of responsibility. This is the basis of everything there. The land dictates laws of survival, and they are the laws of strict hierarchy. Every Afghan person comes to know this wisdom in early childhood: it is not land that belongs to people, it is people who belong to land.

"The constant struggle for survival in hard environmental conditions teaches people to be open and help others. Those people, who come from flat land, and who find themselves in the mountains for the first time, are always amazed about people's openness, about their readiness to invite a complete stranger to be their guest. The Afghans are very poor, but they have preserved the richness of their souls. If a guest likes something in the house, the owner will immediately ask his guest to take that thing as a gift. I remember when we were entering Afghan villages in 1979-1980, children would come out running to see us. They were so happy, they made it feel very welcome. Everything changed drastically when the Americans arrived.

"I think that the Americans is a nation that is not curious at all. Any little boy, who is going to play in a sandbox for the first time, tries to see and understand what it is and how it is all organized. This boy is moved by curiosity, this is how he comes to know the world. The Americans are not like that, they are not curious. They come to the sandpit and they already know how everything should be organized there. Everything that does not correspond to their interests they call barbarism. That is why they could not do anything about the situation, which the American soldier described. Any soldier is a carrier of their system. As a carrier of absolutely alien system of values, they do not know the language or anything else that could be convincing for that Afghan man. And that was it - help was rejected.

"The most terrible aspect about all this is the fact that the Americans do not draw any conclusions from that and keep making the same mistakes over and over again. That is why they can not be referred to as professionals, and they are bad warriors. It is not the first time when such things occur in the history of America. They have already had their asses kicked by other "savages" - the Vietnamese. It just boggles the mind! The local fighters were digging underground channels underneath the roads on which US troops were moving, they had mazes there. The Americans did not want and could not understand the Viet Congers and they lost. One should not understand enemies, one should understand themselves in the first place, wise men said. The Americans forget about it and bring destruction and perversion. That is why their presence in Afghanistan does not have any future."

Sergey Podosenov
Pravda.Ru

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