Stardate 20020128.0704

(On Screen): There is a backlash in Pakistan against the religious radicals who convinced thousands of men to cross the border and fight for the Taliban. It's not that the men of Pakistan were afraid of fighting, or of dying in a good cause; but the families of the men who died resent the fact that they died for nothing at all. This story is typical:

"It wasn't a proper jihad. It was a mess," scoffed Qari Saqib Shah, a teacher at a nearby religious school. Shah's 21-year-old nephew was killed -- not gloriously in battle, but riding with other volunteers in a bus that was struck by a missile near Mazar-e Sharif, he said.

A Pakistani journalist observed:

"The people are not terribly pro-Taliban, but they are anti-American," he said. "People feel Americans abandoned Pakistan, and we became the most sanctioned country in the world. So they hoped the Americans would find themselves in another Vietnam," and cheered the Taliban.

With the Taliban defeated, that attitude has been replaced by "a heavy dose of realism," he said. "The people quickly retreated into their cynical sense, saying, 'Oh yes, America is a superpower and it was foolish to go up against the superpower.'"

That's what American propagandists need to push. The wrong approach here is beat our chests and proclaim how cool and powerful we are, and generally to act proud. If our propagandists try to push a boastful attitude, then it will convince thousands more that the US needs to be taken down a notch.

Better is to make American might look both invincible and workmanlike. American power needs to be viewed almost as a force of nature. The view of Jihad as a romantic and desperate struggle leading to the deaths of infidels must be replaced in their minds with the image of jihadis dying in hordes and accomplishing nothing at all. If America is seen as eager to destroy jihadis, then we will be viewed as evil. Better that we are seen as disinterested, swatting them aside as if they were mosquitoes.

The one thing they cannot accept is for their sacrifice to be completely irrelevant.

So the way to do this is to try to push news stories of how Pakistani jihadis were slaughtered by high tech weapons that cannot be stopped by courage or religious purity, and how they died without even seeing an enemy, without any opportunity to show courage, without any glory at all. They do not fear death, but they despise a useless death; a wasted death. The image of Jihad must be changed from that of a heroic struggle demonstrating the ultimate in religious dedication, into that of a man throwing himself off a cliff to spite the rocks at the bottom. It must be seen as an empty and totally useless gesture, one which has no potential whatever to succeed or even to be noticed.

There must be no glory in jihad.