06 NOV

10 days until I am homeward bound. I can see it, I can taste it, and I can feel it. It has been a long journey that has gone really fast in the grand scheme of things. The way I see it, this is my second to last Afghan entry, made in Afghanistan. I will probably write during my travels and post a final Afghan Blog upon my return to the U.S. of A.

The elections getting canceled hasn’t really been a hot topic of discussion around here. We were prepping for the pending elections up until Monday night when they finally called off securing sites for an election that had been canceled hours earlier between two guys, one of which said he quit the day before…shouldn’t be making any sense to you because it doesn’t. My personal feeling on the whole election debacle is one of uncertainty. I think the whole thing makes a statement on Afghanistan's readiness to operate independent of outside help...they are far from it. The runoff was the result of fraudulent ballots, yet nothing was changed with the election commission or any other factor to ensure an improvement in the integrity of the process; however, they were going to go on with an election. That is the reason Dr. Abdullah dropped out, he new that there would be wide spread fraud. When I questioned locals during all of this, the consensus was Karzai is better be cause he is Pashtun (the same tribe as most of them)....sad.

I have been thinking considerably since writing last week in response to Mr. Hoh’s resignation. I also started and finished a book titled Because They Hate. The non-fiction book is written by a Lebanese Christian woman who spent the first part of her life in a peaceful Christian village in southern Lebanon, then all hell broke loose in her perfect bubble of a world and war ensued and lasted for 7 years. Seven years of living in a bunker with her aging parents and seeing death and destruction daily. Seven years of seeing people killed for being Christian or Jewish at the hands of crazed Islamic extremists killing in the name of a god I don’t want to know. Robbed of her childhood, she escaped to Israel where her eyes were opened to the reality of Islamic hatred. Much of the world will say that Israel INVADED Lebanon. Her version of the story is that Israel came to the aid of a group of Christian people who took up arms against the Islamic aggressors. She goes on to explain her feelings about the true the Islam that we are blind to and what America and the West must do to stop them. Without going into great detail, I will outline what she says we must do to protect our country followed by my own commentary:

1. Close the borders…there is a legal way for people to enter our country. She did it herself and thousands of people do it every year. The problem is thousands also enter our porous borders with ill intent for our country and our way of life.

2. Reform the immigration process in our country…according to Mrs. Gabriel (she married an Israeli), The INS approved Mohamad Atta’s student visa six months after he died while blowing up the WTC on 9/11/2001...your tax dollars at work.

3. Increase Human Intelligence (HUMINT)…this means spend more to train more people to go deep under cover in our country and others to infiltrate groups of bad people. Satellites and drones are neat, but there is no substitute for good HUMINT. Someone has to have the guts to act on this HUMINT (Kill bad people). G.W. signed off on it. The CIA was trying to do it, but Congress called foul play because they weren't informed. Now the American people and the World are informed. Quite frankly, there are people that get paid to know and do stuff that the average American citizen doesn't need to know or cannot handle, infact, most don't want to know.

4.” Profile, Profile, Profile” she says. Racially that is. We waste time, money, and energy searching white haired little ladies at the airport with the same scrutiny as we look at Arab men between the age of 16 and 40. If we spend more time searching the people that fit the bill for blowing shit up, and waste less on those of us that don’t, we might actually be able to call the searches worthwhile.

5. Silence any teaching of intolerance against our country…including the close monitoring of Islamic websites. According to Mrs. Gabriel, there are mosques all over our country spewing hate for America and our way of life. All literature that calls for the destruction of America or the death of Americans should be burned and anyone preaching it who is not an American citizen should be shipped home to their country of origin. People who are not citizens of the U.S. should not be afforded rights such as freedom of speech or due process...you messed up, game over, go home.

6. As individuals, she recommends we watch where we invest to make sure we aren’t supporting terror (www.divestterror.org), promote western values in our homes, report suspicious behavior, lobby for patriotic education, and of course, support our troops.

Brigitte Gabriel’s book is a good read and brought many things to my attention that I previously had not considered. What I find most interesting about her book is that she is an Arab woman who lived terror long before the twin towers collapsed. She is not a middle aged white guy who gets paid to talk. She has seen it first hand and stands to warn us of what is to come if we don’t put aside the political correctness B.S. and fight back.

If what Mrs. Gabriel says is true of Islam (I am trying to find a “real” English translation of the Koran), our mission in Afghanistan needs to wrap up. We need to collapse our security perimeter to our borders, support Israel in their military endeavors, and stand by to defend our nation against the impending attacks. This seems like dooms day talk, but why do we have handguns in our homes…there are police right? We lock our doors at night. We have neighborhood watch and street lights. Sure we have all of those, and no real reason to suspect that someone is coming for us and our stuff, yet most of us stand ready to shoot the first S.O.B. that wants to get at us and our stuff…white, black, yellow, Christian, Muslim, Jewish…our bullets in the closet don’t care. Why should our borders be any different? If you mean America harm, if you preach or find delight in the idea of the destruction of my way of life, if you run around thinking that you are going to turn my country into an Islamic state, please, I beg you come to my house first to try to convert me by force.

Geaux Tigers. God Bless.

BMP