LA Times (via the CS Monitor warblog): Pakistan’s Jihad Fervor Replaced by Resentment

“They went to Afghanistan to fight Americans, and they ended up fighting their fellow Muslims,” said Sher Zameen, whose uncle, a farmer with six children, left for Afghanistan without a gun. He hoped he’d get one when he arrived, Zameen said. Now he is missing.

“The romanticization of jihad was the gift of small minds to Pakistan,” newspaper columnist Muhammad Ali Siddiqi said last week. “Lacking any real understanding of the intricacies of a modern war, these parties presented to the raw minds of Pakistani boys a jihad that was fun. . . . Now, they are holed up in the barren vastness of Kandahar, waiting for death, while those who urged them to jihad and turned them into cannon fodder have confined their own part in jihad to issuing press statements and observing black days.”

“We had an idea that some foreign troops, some American troops and British troops, were in Afghanistan. We wanted to capture some American troops–it would be a great honor for us to capture a U.S. Army man. But when we entered the area, we never saw any foreigners. They were all Muslims. They were all Afghans. And nobody told us about the airstrikes, this carpet bombing.”