rahmanbabaThere was an excellent Op-Ed yesterday in the New York Times from Douglas J. Feith and Justin Polin of the Hudson institute describing how Taliban fighters in the Swat Valley bombed the shrine of Rahman Baba, the most revered Pashtun poet.

The bombers took aim at the poet’s shrine because it represented Sufism, the mystical form of Islam that has long been predominant in India and Pakistan. The Sufism of Rahman Baba generally stresses a believer’s personal relationship with God and de-emphasizes the importance of the mosque. It refrains from exalting violence and war and praises such virtues as tolerance, devotion and love. Its practice relies extensively on dance, music and poetry. Some of Sufism’s most esteemed poets and scholars are women.

The extremists are determined to destroy Pakistan’s moderate Sufi tradition — by claiming the exclusive right to fly the banner of Islam and asserting this claim through cultural, educational and violent means. Through intimidation, they silence musicians, still dancers and oppress women. As a result, artists and performers areleaving Pakistan’s Swat Valley and the North-West Frontier Province in droves.

Feith and Polin go on to write how the United States should work to support the local Pushtun tribes who oppose the Taliban and even suggest building a radio station to broadcast shows that would “revive the collective memory of Sufism and inspiring opposition to the Taliban. Other programs could highlight the cultural and physical devastation wrought by the Taliban and Al Qaeda.”

The question then becomes: Who is this man and what did he do with Doug Feith? Where was this kind of nuanced thinking when Feith was the former undersecretary of defense for policy during his time at the Pentagon? For those that don’t know, he is a major neoconservative thinker and was one of the main authors of the dummied up intelligence that drove us into the Iraq War.

Despite the source and though I don’t know much about this kind of cultural diplomacy (yet), this idea strikes me as sensible. We won’t win if we try to make the average citizen pick between the United States and the Taliban. People in that area don’t really like the US that much and don’t know enough about it to view it as something to aspire to; ideas like “democracy” and “freedom” are too intangible to inspire much of a following. However, by investing in forms of mass communications promoting the Pushtun’s own culture (Radio, internet, text messages), we could actually inspire some resistance to the Taliban. The downside to this are that we could also inspire backlash against the United States and Pakistani governments by inflaming Pushtun tribalism. Also, the Taliban is much better at fighting this kind of war (they know the area and major players better than we do and won’t hesitate to kill suspected collaborators). Still, imho this approach is a more nuanced and at least as important as just sending guns and supplies to our allies in the region or the Pakistani government.