Pursuant to the Team Obama-approved COIN doctrine, the posture our troops in harm’s way in Afghanistan must adopt is one of doing everything possible not to give offense to the Afghans. In fact, in February, the military distributed to U.S. forces in theater a handy pocket guide titled “Inside the Wire Threats — Afghanistan Green on Blue.” It is all about establishing a “bond of trust” between Afghan army and NATO personnel.
Interestingly, another document, produced for the military’s use in May 2011 by Jeffrey Bordin, a military behavioral scientist, shows why, as a practical matter, that can’t happen. This unclassified “red team” analysis suggested that the problem is, as its title suggests, “A Crisis of Trust and Cultural Incompatibility.” It found, based on extensive interviews with U.S. and NATO troops, that practices inspired by, condoned or even mandatory under the brutally repressive Islamist doctrine of Shariah — such as the “poor treatment and virtual slavery of women in Afghan society”; the practice of child abuse, including the “raping and sodomizing of little boys”; and the torture of dogs — contributed to a “cultural gap” that alienated U.S. and Western personnel from their trainees and other native counterparts.
As noted by Shariah expert and blogger Andrew Bostom, one of the recommendations (albeit, the 40th out of 58) offered by the red team for addressing this underlying problem, clearly at variance with the COIN party line, was to “Better educate U.S. soldiers in the central tenets of Islam as interpreted and practiced in Afghanistan. Ensure that this instruction is not a sanitized, politically correct training package, but rather includes an objective and comprehensive assessment of the totalitarian nature of the extreme theology practiced among Afghans.”
The Obama administration responded to this red-team analysis and its findings by classifying it. Then, the
