CAIRO: Many many years ago, in Tangiers, before I had become a Muslim or understood much if anything about Muslim ways, I was sitting at a traditional outdoor Arab café, one of several that ring the perimeter around the small midan or square that was the intersecting point for the flow of traditional life in the old walled city . It was sufficiently long ago for everyone – save us hipsters – for nearly all Moroccan men and women to be dressed in traditional jalaba but for the women, also a dainty face veil.
A Moroccan woman, walking unescorted in the square directly in front of my café, was accosted by a Moroccan male who said something so offensive to her that she thrust the thumb of her left hand quickly and briefly into his open mouth, gave it a quick twist, withdrew it and walked on alone leaving her harasser stunned and humiliated.
The entire sequence, which lasted but a few seconds, seemed to me both curiously dramatic and weird, whereas all of the other men in the café had a bemused and knowing smirk written across their faces.
What did they know that I didn’t know?
First that the woman was a prostitute, and secondly in light of Muslim hygienic practices (which I quickly came to appreciate and adopt, even before I adopted the religion that inspired the practices) she had gravely insulted the man – she had literally demonstrated to one and all that he now had, literally as well as metaphorically, a dirty mouth.
I thought of this today after reading about the Iraqi journalist who had thrown his shoes at my President, George W. Bush. Bush made a light-hearted remark, a joke even, as the second shoe sailed by, just past his head – It’s a size ten! – in part to ease the tension, in part to reduce the gravity of someone throwing anything at the President of the United States, but in large part because he had no idea how deeply he was being insulted.
If the man had thrown a stone or even a grenade – the former more dangerous than a shoe, the latter potentially lethal, it would have been a more respectful gesture; an attack on the president s physical safety but not on his honor.
It also invoked a certain symmetry that marked the high point of Bush s ambition and the dregs of these last days of his rule. For at the moment that the statue of Saddam Hussein was pulled down by a relatively small crowd of Iraqis on the day Baghdad fell to American forces, several members of the crowd, curiously small in number given this momentous moment of seeming liberation, took their sandals and shoes off and, with them in hand, started beating the dethroned statue.
So even at the end Bush didn’t get it; just as he probably never got it about the success of the surge. What has relatively reduced violence in Iraq over the past year, was not moving 30,000 more American troops into the country but the combination of several factors including the decision by Muqtada al Sadr to stand down his Mahdi Army.
Above all the reason for relative success was the co-option of a large number of former Sunni insurgents into The Awakening Movement or the Sons of Iraq – an anti-Al Qaeda militia armed and funded by the Americans; in a modest way a reversal of that stupidity based upon profound misunderstanding when shortly after Baghdad fell, the American liberators underscored their transformation into occupiers by dissolving the entire Iraqi regular army, dissolving what was probably the only legitimate national, rather than sectarian, institution in Iraq still functioning after a couple decades of Saddam Hussein.
The regular Army invariably is in many Muslim countries, upholders of civil order as well as guardians of the frontier; two basic functions in the exercise of political authority according to the Quran. In the process the Americans provided a vast trained pool of angry fighters for the Sunni Insurgency that rose out of the ashes of the demobilized Iraqi army, including a number of Sunni officers who had been in mobile phone contact with US forces in the first days of the invasion, had been promised a role in the future Iraq that would soon replace Saddam s regime if they disengaged forces under their command or simply sent those forces home, which many did, and then when it was all over, were to be betrayed by Rumsfeld and the cadre of Neo Cons staffing the civilian leadership at the Pentagon.
(On the other hand maybe it wasn’t stupidity but cupidity – a concession to Ahmed Chalabi the Intended One – the secular Shia version of the promised Mahdi, in the Neo Conservative and pro-Likud game plan that covertly had so much to do with the means and ends of this tragic war. But that is the beginning of another column or perhaps a book.)
And it was the cultural sensitivity so absent those first, blundering years of American occupation and so belatedly applied by General David Petraeus – not the 30,000 extra troops (nor even a hypothetical hundred thousand more troops) that no doubt inspired the decision to accommodate and turn around much of the Sunni resistance-insurgents with American blood on their hands .
Pertraeus was advised at that critical moment by an Australian counter-insurgency expert, Colonel David Kilcullen, a professional soldier with a PhD in anthropology on loan to the US armed forces and the author of some very insightful and culturally sensitive commentary on counter-insurgency.
Frankie Martin, a research fellow at The American University in Washington DC in touch with Kilcullen recently wrote in the online Huffington Post that the deciding factor was that new approach which emphasized culturally sensitive policies and a newfound humbleness and respect on the part of the US helped improve America s fortune.
One example, according to Martin, of the Kilcullen approach was when visiting an Iraqi mosque, Kilcullen instructed the soldiers accompanying him to remove their weapons and check them at the door.
“I see you ve removed your weapons, said his host. “How do you know I won t capture you and take you hostage? “Because if you did, Kilcullen responded, you would have no honor. The surprised Iraqi laughed and put his arms around the Colonel in welcome.
It was this method which enabled the Americans to sit down with Iraq s tribal groups, drink some tea and listen. They began to understand tribal culture and tribal codes of honor and hospitality. And they realized that organizations like Al-Qaeda were antithetical to traditional culture.
The author works closely at AUDC with an old friend of mine, Dr Akbar Ahmed who not only is the chair of Islamic Studies at AUDC, but also the former Pakistani administrator of Waziristan, who has been urging the US to change tactics in the way it deals with Afghanistan, Pakistan and the general Muslim world.
If, instead of isolating Al-Qaeda and those elements in Taliban totally committed to Al-Qaeda, by working closely with the Pashtun tribes on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistani border, America will be repeating the same mistakes it made in pre-Petraeusian Iraq. That means persuading the overwhelmingly non-Pashtun elite of Pakistan that the Pashtun, like the Iraqi Sunni tribes, deserve a full seat at the table; that means, according to Dr Ahmed, restoring the Pakistani civil service sidelined by former President Pervez Musharraf in favor of the military and pumping money into schools and development projects for the Pashtun on both sides of the border, money now allocated to the counter-productive over-militarization of the struggle against the Taliban.
But if an Afghan Surge that President-elect Obama talks about means, in Martin s words, going in guns blazing with drone strikes which have too often taken out Afghan wedding parties or non-combatant Pashtun villagers on both sides of the border, then the US will simply be declaring war on the Pashtun, and Afghanistan will become Obama s Iraq; another lost war.
Abdallah Schleifer is distinguished journalism professor at the American University in Cairo (AUC).
