A pilot in Afghanistan has been making a splash distributing soccer balls to children. It’s a great idea—my dad is living proof that being an American into soccer is a sure-fire way to make instant friends abroad—but I also hope he doesn’t get caught up in the budding scandal over the idea of kicking a verse of the Koran with one’s foot. It is an honest mistake, to be sure, but maybe the Army could step up its human terrain system so these kinds of mistakes don’t undercut local support over relatively trivial matters.
Just a thought.
This post was written by...
Joshua Foust – author of 1771 posts on Registan.net.
Joshua Foust is a Fellow at the American Security Project and the author of Afghanistan Journal: Selections from Registan.net. His research focuses primarily on Central and South Asia. Joshua is a correspondent for The Atlantic and a columnist for PBS Need to Know. Joshua appears regularly on the BBC World News, Aljazeera, and international public radio. Joshua is also a regular contributor to Foreign Policy’s AfPak Channel, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Reuters, and the Christian Science Monitor.
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This is quite interesting. The controversy of the flags on the soccer balls reminded me of the controversies involving our own flag placed in inappropriate places back in the 60′s. Basically some wold get pissed off that others were putting American flag patches on the butts of their jeans. Now you see American flags on all sorts of clothes. Goes to show how reading another culture requires constant updating.
Thanks for the link to the HTS paper. Only 1 in Afghanistan and 4 in Iraq. We need more, especially in France. THough we aren’t militarially involved there it would help to know what in the world they are thinking.