http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2010/1007.blake.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6oleUh83z4. Sorry about this but via the “Comments” section I cannot provide a link. Just try pasting it into your so-called browser bar. Worth the trouble, I promise.

2. Now, then, continuing with my amateurish assessment. The scenario as you describe it is very close to what the actual scenario is throughout much of the Islamic world. The spread of Islamic brainwashing is well underway and the fact that the Taliban will join won’t make much difference. It remains my amateurish guess that the Taliban and the entire Islamic world will never be much of a threat to the Western world. We already know that Israel alone, if not kept under a tight leash by the West, needs only 6 days to take our Syria and Iran. A heavily armed Taliban can be disposed of in 30 minutes.

The weapon of asymmetry that the Taliban might use, deliberately or not, is the system of madrasahs. My scenario, which I hope has some persuasiveness, is this: The only credible force against them, the U.S. military, makes a significant withdrawal. The Taliban return to take over the government. Their interpretation of Islam begins to be taught in the madrasahs, effectively brain washing children in how to think and how the world should work. These children, like today’s students from current madrasahs, then become a part of an international jihad aimed at Western interests, mainly those of the United States and Israel. The schools continue to prey on refugee families that want their children to live a better life than they had. The madrasahs continue to breed fundamentalist Muslims bent on the destruction of Western culture, which they view as a threat to their own.

The Taliban have often been likened to Christian evangelicals. The latter travel as missionaries, and the Bible is their weapon. The former are even more aggressive: Just today, the Pakistani Taliban took credit for the suicide bombing which killed 53 Shiites in Quetta. To the Taliban, Shiites are apostates and, unlike some other Muslim sects, death is the Taliban’s punishment for apostasy. They can’t abide living in the same world with infidels. That, in general, is why I think the madness of an ascendant Taliban cannot be considered a local problem.