Editor’s note: Doug Woodhams has served several tours in Iraq and Afghanistan and offered his personal thoughts on current events transpiring in the region.
As I write this, 12-year-old girls are being seized to become sex slaves for Mujahid (“holy” warrior) fighters. Throughout Afghanistan, women have essentially been placed under house arrest. Education for females has been suspended indefinitely.
Believe it or not, there are Christian pastors in Afghanistan, asking for prayer because they are afraid to leave their homes — for the sake of their families’ lives much less their own.
Men will be beaten or killed if their facial hair appears to be newly grown, indicating they have not till now been maintaining full beards in accordance with the Taliban’s brand of Shari’a law.
After 20 years almost to the day, the group that provided shelter to the 9/11 terrorists is now back in control of an entire nation. They did not arrive there by popular election.
The Taliban is, in fact, a small minority establishing a grip of terror over the populace, empowered and emboldened by the sudden retreat which involved no coordination with the existing Afghan government.
Countless weapons and vehicles have been needlessly abandoned to the Taliban mujahideen. It is all very reminiscent of the sudden and uncoordinated withdrawal from Iraq in 2014, when tons of war materiel were abandoned to ISIS who opportunistically filled the vacuum, and “surprised” everyone (not really) by rolling boldly into Mosul with American made Humvees brandishing the black Jihadist flag.
We will eventually pay our own price for this current folly in terrible ways, but as always, the first and greatest victims of jihadists are their own local populations, where the brutality is about to commence in earnest.
For the brave men and women who served in Afghanistan, all the way from Operation Rhino in 2001 to yesterday’s Kabul evacuations: I have never been so convinced of the moral rightness of what we did over there. We provided a glimpse of what freedom looks like to a population that has known centuries of suffering.
Day after day, the man in the photo above provided the best bread I have ever tasted to tired men on patrol. He kept a small U.S. flag hidden in the back of his bakery as a symbol of hope. To those who have never truly experienced living abroad, you will never know how much others throughout the world yearn for just a chance at the opportunities we have in America.
We laughed with the Afghanis. We trained with them. We shared risk, hardship, and loss with them to defeat a common enemy… and defeat them we did.
In the way President Lincoln described the hallowed ground at Gettysburg, there has been a consecration of the land in Afghanistan. Its soil was literally soaked by the blood of my friends.
But all good things can be undone by cowardice and betrayal. As Edmund Burke pointed out: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
Right now, there are demons dancing on rooftops when they otherwise would be hiding in shadows, and that is not meant figuratively.
The true impact of all that has happened is known only to the Lord above. At least I know that Christ sees all, and He will return to judge the quick (the living) and the dead.
Till then dear God, give us wisdom and strength to act rightly, and provide comfort and protection to the persecuted Afghanis.
Author: caLegion Contributor
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