Dwelling in Caves Does Not Make a Family Terrorists!

By Faith Chatham - May 16, 2017

I've been researching the 1980s for background for a fiction work. It has taken me into the cave dwellers of Afghanisthan. I had an acquaintance in Grad School who was a refugee from a village where they lived in caves. Some of the men of the village had joined the resistance when the Soviets invaded. They were not terrorists, but people who were fighting for the lives of their families. They got caught up in the East/West Cold War dance for power between outside forces.

From what I've been reading lately, forty years later, displaced familes continue moving into  caves. These are not necessarily ISIS or terrorists as much as displaced folks needing housing following decades of warfare in their land. The idea that we'd drop a megabomb on caves assuming that those who dwelled there were ISIS is problematic for me. Yes, we know that terrorists have fleed to the remote areas to hide. But that does not mean that everyone there is a terrorist. That would be like saying that because people who commit crimes live in Arlington and sometimes avoid arrest by living in neighborhoods where they go undetected that everyone in those neighborhoods are criminals. It is absurd to justify bombing an entire apartment building because one person inside is a criminal. I would hate to have a bomb dropped on my apartment building to eliminate one or two shady people, whom many of us have never met or associated with even though he or they may live in close proximity to us.

Governments who do not weigh the cost of "collateral damage" are rogue. Refusal to acknowledge that people from other cultures are as important as we are is arrogance which leads to discounting the importance of respecting each and every life and doing everything we can to preserve the lives of those who are innocent, regardless of how cruel and despicable some may be who live near them.

One of the key differences in our culture is that individuals are judged based on each person's actions, not on family or tribal actions. We don't murder people because their father or sibliing or spouse is a murderer. We don't eliminate entire families because one member is dangerous. To do so is to become more dangerous than those we see as terrorists.