Blogs For Victory

From The Telegraph:

The arrival at the newly-established Patrol Base Shamal Storrai (Pashto for “North Star”) in late August 2009 of Serjeant Tom Potter and Rifleman Mark Osmond marked the start of an astonishing episode in the history of British Army sniping.

Within 40 days, the two marksmen from 4 Rifles, part of the Welsh Guards Battle group, had achieved 75 confirmed kills with 31 attributed to Potter and 44 to Osmond. Each kill was chalked up as a little stick man on the beam above the firing position in their camouflaged sangar beside the base gate – a stick man with no head denoting a target eliminated with a shot to the skull…

Why is this important? Here’s why:

…On one occasion they killed eight Taliban in two hours, ‘I wasn’t comfortable with it at first,’ said Osmond, ‘you start wondering is it really necessary?’ But the reaction of the locals soon persuaded him. ‘We had people coming up to us afterwards, not scared to talk to us. They felt they were being protected’…

It is rough business, make no mistake about it – and while these two Brits do seem a prodigy, I’ll bet that plenty of American sniper teams can tell similar tales. I don’t envy these men their job – it is a terrible thing to take another man’s life and while the troops will do it and, likely, tell us that they don’t worry about it the fact of the matter is that decent men always agonize over such things. But the enemy they kill, especially the leaders, are not like the men who kill them.

It was once said, I believe, that if you really can’t argue someone out of doing evil, then you must put a sword through him as far as it will go. Think about that – I’m not talking about trying to argue someone out of having more more drink than necessary: but trying to convince someone that, say, setting off a bomb in a civilian setting is wrong. If you can’t convince a man of the hideousness of his desire, then you’d better do something before innocent people get killed. That is what these snipers are doing – the Taliban are bent on killing the innocent and it seems that nothing short of the sword – in this case, a well-aimed sniper bullet – will do the trick.

And the payoff is in what happens – the innocent people come forward with a sense of relief. That is, in my view, the ultimate truth of radical Islam…whether or not most Moslems feel this or that way about it all, I am convinced that most Moslems just want to be left alone to live their lives as they see fit. Sure, we can expect that these people will not want to have the rank immorality of the West imported to their lands (and who can blame them for that?), but at the end of the day the Moslem father wants his sons and daughters to live; to grow, to have families of their own. Not have the lives cast away in suicide missions, or be executed because the strayed over some Taliban line in the sand. By killing the perpetrators of the evil, the snipers are giving the innocent the chance to express their real desires.

And this is why I’m still certain that we must see Afghanistan through to victory. There must be, by the time we leave, some reasonable approximation of democracy in Afghanistan and a general sense that the Afghans, themselves, can mind their own affairs without being used as tools by ambitious men. This is not to say that a post-war Afghanistan will become a vacation destination for Americans – in fact, I can’t imagine any possible Afghan government which I would be ok living under, even as a tourist…but that is their business. And as long as they aren’t harboring people who wish to kill my fellow Americans and as long as the average Afghan is just living his life, then that is all the victory we need…and more than enough to put paid to the Islamist lie that only Islamo-fascism can bring happiness to the Moslem people.

A sniper’s bullet is not a lovely thing – but the effect of brave men fighting for justice, is. And we owe it to these men – American and allied, and including those Afghans who do fight along side us – to see this trough to victory.