A Probably Sadly Unteachable Moment — Recognizing the Emotional Identicality between Our Reaction to the Charlie Hebdo Terrorist Attack — and Islamic Reactions to Our Retaliatory Attacks on Them

© 2015 Peter Free

 

08 January 2015

 

 

As a general rule, beating sense into people does not work

 

The continent-uniting defiance that Europe is displaying in reaction to the terrorist murders and woundings at the office of Paris’ satirical Charlie Hebdo magazine parallels that which occurs after our too frequently indiscriminating attacks on alleged Islamic terror groups.

 

That most of us in America do not see the parallel says nothing good about our geopolitical smarts.

 

I make the overt connection because displaying empathy for other cultures is not a notable human mindset. Consequently, it might help us to:

 

 

(a) look at the feelings generated by the Charlie Hebdo attack

 

and then

 

(b) imagine that our Islam-associated geopolitical opponents feel the same way, when our weapons kill not only their jihadists but other obviously uninvolved people.

 

 

Empathy generally begins with a strong awareness of one’s own suffering and how that parallels similar feelings in those different than ourselves

 

What we feel today, after the Charlie Hebdo slaughter, is identical to what our adversaries feel, when we kill and maim their own innocents.

 

 

The moral? — There are lessons to be learned from outrage and sadness, but we have to be emotionally insightful and universal enough to recognize them

 

The lesson about the strategic futility of perpetual payback did not escape one of our pragmatically minded generals in Afghanistan:

 

 

A top secret "Kill/Capture List" used to target special operations forces "night raids" in Afghanistan reveals that the Gen. Stanley McChrystal, then the commander of US and NATO troops in Afghanistan, was so concerned by the political fallout from the killing of civilians in the raids . . . that he shut down the raids during March and April 2010.

 

Innocent civilians were being killed in the raids, not only because they were falsely targeted on the basis of their cellphone numbers, but also because they either defended their own homes or those of relatives or neighbors under attack in the middle of the night, as required by the ancient Pashtun code of conduct called "Pashtunwali."

 

McChrystal recognized the "effectiveness and operational value" of night raids, but made the surprisingly frank admission that the raids "come at a steep cost in terms of perceptions of the Afghan People." He said "nearly every Afghan I talk to mentions [night raids] as the single greatest irritant."

 

Gen. David Petraeus, who replaced McChrystal as commander in Afghanistan in July 2010, completed the expansion of the kill/capture program that McChrystal had begun.

 

Petraeus was soon touting them as the big success story of the US-NATO military effort. But the hundreds of Taliban that he claimed were being captured every month turned out to be almost entirely innocent civilians.

 

And under Petraeus, the US-NATO command leaked statistics in 2010-11 showing that as many as half of the nearly 3,000 Taliban said to have been killed in the raids over 10 months may have been civilians.

 

© 2015 Gareth Porter, Top Secret List Shows McChrystal Halting Night Raids After Controversy, TruthOut (06 January 2015) (extracts)

 

Being a pragmatist myself, if beating a sense of humanity into people worked, I might favor it. But it doesn’t, and thousands of years of recorded human history make that point in a seemingly endless supply of blood and hatred.

 

Even absent the historical lesson, we need only plumb our reactions to terrorist-inspired murder to see how our opponents might react to our own (too frequently indiscriminating) retaliatory drone and troop attacks on them.

 

The lesson is that managing terrorism requires more emotional control and more thoughtful skill than we are genetically constructed to think is necessary.

 

Recognizing that our enemies emote as we do is a start to designing more effective responses to their violence. The Miasma of Fear is never a good basis for strategic or tactical planning.

 

Of course — as I admit in the title to this essay — I doubt that many of us are going to make the connection. Wisdom is always a short supply.