The Taliban moral standard and the USA moral standard

Dr Firoz Mahboob Kamal

Morality or immorality never remains hidden. It becomes more visible when one gets superior weapons or wins a war. The USA invented nuclear weapons before anyone else. Such a weapon of mass destruction gave the USA the ultimate opportunity to display its worst immorality before the whole world. The USA dropped those bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima of Japan and torched both the cities and their living beings in minutes. The shameless USA leaders never felt any shame for that highest act of crime in the whole span of human history. The country that is built on occupation, ethnic cleansing, genocide, settlement colonization, imperialism, slave labor, and white supremacism can only display such brutality and shamelessness.

The worst immorality of the leaders of the Hindutva BJP and its parent organization RSS was in their books and literature since its inception. But it came to the public space when the party won the election in India. The BJP leaders displayed their venom of the worst immorality and brutality by killing, raping, and causing havoc on innocent Muslims. More than 3 thousand Muslims were killed and hundreds of Muslim women were raped, and many men, women, and children were thrown alive into the fire in the state of Gujrat in 2002 while Narendra Modi –the current Prime Minister of India was the chief minister of that state. His brutality was so high that even the USA President Barak Obama had to put a ban on this political beast entering the USA. He let loot his murderous thugs to commit whatever crimes they wanted to do against the Muslims. At that time of the pogrom, Chief Minister Modi didn’t allow his police to stop the carnage. Since Narendra Modi has become the Prime Minister of India, Muslims are being tortured all over India. Excluding Muslims in the Indian government is now the BJP policy. Lynching and humiliating Muslims in public even on the false allegations of eating beef or for a scalp cap have been a very common practice on the Indian streets. This is the Hindutva moral standard.

The Taliban showed also their moral standard. They won the whole country of Afghanistan only in 10 days. It is very rare in the whole of human history. The Taleban won the city of Kabul –a city of 5 million without firing a single bullet and without killing or torturing a single man. It is also unknown in the whole history of mankind except the Muslims’ takeover of Makkah under the leadership of Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him). But in the western press, such a benevolent act of victory of the Taliban rarely got any mention. They are busy only lecturing the Taliban on human rights, women’s rights, and political rights.  

In Afghanistan, the USA also showed its standard. The USA won the war against the Taliban. The USA used all types of weapons of mass destruction against the Taliban. Not only cities and villages were bombed, but even many hills also were not spared. Thousands of houses were flattened to rubbles. After the USA takeover, what happened to the ordinary Taliban can be easily understood if one knows how a Taliban ambassador to Pakistan was treated by the USA. Abdul Salam Zaeef -the ambassador of the Taliban government in Pakistan tells his story of how he was treated by the USA Army in his autobiography “My Life with the Taliban”. The book also reveals the moral standard of the Pakistan Army –the bastion of hard-core secularists in Pakistan and also an ally of the USA’s war on Taliban and other Islamists. 

Mistreatment of an ambassador is unheard of in Muslim history. Mullah Zaeef had not hurt anyone. He was not part of any conspiracy to hurt America. The Pakistanis “arrested” him and handed him over to the Americans who brutally beat him and stripped him of his clothes. Much later he spent 4 years in Guantanamo Bay. Here are quotes from the autobiography of Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef:

“The Pakistani soldiers were all staring as the Americans hit me and tore the remaining clothes off from my body. Eventually, I was completely naked, and the Pakistani soldiers – the defenders of the holy Qur’an – shamelessly watched me with smiles on their faces, saluting this disgraceful action of the Americans. They held a handover ceremony with the Americans right in front of my eyes.” p.173

He was taken on several helicopter trips. After the helicopter landed “… a number of soldiers beat and kicked me. They behaved like animals for what seemed like hours. Afterward, the soldiers sat on top of me and proceeded to have a conversation as if they were merely sitting on a park bench…..”

The ambassador, Zaeef was put in a cage, “A soldier entered and handcuffed me to the bars of the cage.’ ” I was forced to kneel with my hands behind my head for several hours; from time to time the soldier would kick or push me to the ground ” [p.181

“Some abuses were worse than others and affected everyone in the camp. One afternoon I woke up to the sound of men crying. All over the camp, you could hear the men weep. I asked Mohammed Nawab what had happened. He said that a [American] soldier had taken the holy Qur’an and had urinated on it and then dumped it into the trash. We had been given a few copies of the Quran by the Red Cross, but now we asked them to take them back. We could not protect them from the soldiers who often used them to punish us. The Red Cross promised that incidents like this would not be repeated, but the abuses carried on. The search dogs would come and sniff the Quran and the soldier would toss copies to the ground.” [P183]

In his autobiography, Ambassador Mullah Zaeef gives details of his life in Guantanamo Bay. The Americans constantly tried to break the self-respect of the prisoners. They insulted and abused the Holy Qur’an so much that the prisoners returned the copies of the Holy Qur’an they had received. Mullah Zaeef’s book presents first-hand real insights on the American venom against Islam and Muslims. 30/08/2021