The Taliban is the Westboro Baptist Church With Better Guns

Religious fundamentalists the world over have a great deal in common. Some are better at hiding it than others.

GHŌR, Afghanistan (May 28, 2012) — Former Taliban fighters line up to handover their Rifles to the Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan during a reintegration ceremony at the provincial governor’s compound. The re-integrees formally announced their agreement to join the Afghanistan Peace and Reintegration Program during the ceremony. (Department of Defense photograph by Lt. j. g. Joe Painter/RELEASED)

“Our ignorance of the Islamic State is in some ways understandable: It is a hermit kingdom; few have gone there and returned,” wrote Grahame Wood for the Atlantic way back in 2015 in a piece called “What ISIS Really Wants”.

At the time, the world’s worst terrorists seemed to be concentrated within the newly christened “ISIS”.

Around then ISIS was also, unfortunately for them as it turned out, attempting to run a terrorist operation and their own country out of the same location- which any first-year strategy student could have predicted would never work.

Perpetuating acts of terrorism against your neighbors- whereupon you kill innocent civilians while calling it a military strike- invites them to do only one thing to you- if they can find you. Which is why terrorist groups typically operate in secret and spread out, as Osama Bin Laden did- or are shielded by civilians, as in the case of Hamas.

Unlike Bin Laden, ISIS broadcast themselves constantly to the world- online magazines, websites, Twitter. As Wood and others have pointed out, “the Islamic State’s countless other propaganda videos and encyclicals are online, and the caliphate’s supporters have toiled mightily to make their project knowable.”

“We can gather that their state rejects peace as a matter of principle; that it hungers for genocide; that its religious views make it constitutionally incapable of certain types of change, even if that change might ensure its survival; and that it considers itself a harbinger of — and headline player in — the imminent end of the world,” warned Wood.

“Muslims can reject the Islamic State; nearly all do,” Wood reminded Atlantic readers. “But pretending that it isn’t actually a religious, millenarian group, with theology that must be understood to be combatted, has already led the United States to underestimate it and back foolish schemes to counter it.”

Wood is right: Islamists like ISIS and the Taliban aren’t to be conflated with all Muslims anymore than the Westboro Baptist Church should be conflated with all Christians. Westboro Baptist…