WAR WITHIN THE WAR

According to the U.S. State Department, there isn’t even one Christian Church left in Afghanistan. The last public Christian Church was destroyed in March 2010. It seems that in our conscious effort to not offend Muslims we have eradicated Christianity in that country.

1,700 military personnel have lost their lives and thousands more have been wounded in the fight in Afghanistan at a treasury cost of $440 billion. General McChrystal recently said that we are half way to our Afghan goals after ten years of fighting. There is no doubt that there is more to the war agenda than fighting terrorists. We have spent a lot of money and lives training Afghans to run their country in a way that doesn’t rely on the Taliban. Yet, I’m not sure that leaving Christian values out of such formulas is ever effective for peace in the long term, especially amongst a warring culture.

Muslim values and Christian values have been at odds since they first interacted. It seems odd that Christian soldiers are dying and being maimed in an effort to build a country that will likely become even more hostile to us. Already, Christianity has been all but expunged from that country even while we are there trying to build it up…into a stronger Muslim country. Of course, we hope that this Muslim country will be friendly to this Christian country. Yet, meanwhile, Christians are being erased from the Afghanistan landscape in the war that is within the war.