Just as we say it’s lonely at the top but that’s where you get the privileges, we also say it’s dangerous living on the edge but that’s where you get the best view.
American authorities, including the Justice Department, believe that by converting to Islam and later opting to join the Taleban, John Walker lived just there — on the edge between what they consider treason and aiding a "terrorist organization" — and for that he must pay a price, which may turn out to be a terrible, terrible one indeed. A conviction for treason brings a death sentence, and the latter charge carries a maximum sentence of life in prison. In either case, John Walker faces bleak times ahead.
The odyssey of this young man is well-known by now.
From all accounts, Walker had figured out what he wanted to do with his life at age 16, when he was attending a school for gifted children in the affluent neighborhood of San Anselno, in Marin County, across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco. Not for him was the typical teenage culture of experimenting with drugs, underage drinking, and rebellion against parental authority for the sake of rebellion.
Walker, even at that tender age, chose to go on a spiritual quest which ultimately culminated in his finding Islam, a faith he began to immerse himself in his home state, long before he finally ended up in Yemen and then Pakistan to study the Qur’an and the original language it was written in.
Last May, for reasons known only to Walker ("Maybe somebody motivated him to do this, because he was a sweet and sincere person. He was not a Jihadi. He was not that kind," The New York Times quoted one of his spiritual mentors in Pakistan as saying), he up and left his madrasa in the west Pakistani town of Hussaini Kattan to join the Taleban in Afghanistan where, six months later, he was taken prisoner after the fall of Mazar-e-Sharif to Northern Alliance forces on Nov. 9.
What has the nation fixated on the story is that they see in it the fateful encounter in northern Afghanistan of John Walker and another American, John Spann, the latter being the first casualty in that forbidding country. Spann, a CIA agent, was killed in a chaotic prison uprising moments after he finished trying to interrogate Walker who, in the melee that followed, managed, though wounded, to escape to a prison basement and hide there for seven days before he was captured again.
The fixation on the story then appears to stem from the unthinkable confrontation between two fellow-Americans, one fighting for his country and the other, as many have come to see it, against it.
Hello! Let’s backtrack a bit here.
True, Spann died fighting for his country and he was, appropriately enough, buried with full honors in Arlington National Cemetery. But the 20-year-old Walker was not in Afghanistan, by any stretch of the imagination, to fight against America. In May this year, when he traveled east to join the Taleban, the United States was not at war with the Afghan regime in power then. Before and even after Sept. 11, the US was far from being involved in inter-Afghan hostilities. As late as October, in fact, Secretary of State Colin Powell said that "moderate Taleban leaders" could be part of a new Afghan government.
John Walker may have been misguided, he may have been immature, and he may have been naive when he joined the Taleban in May to protect what he could have considered, in his juvenile mind, an Islamic utopia; but he was not a traitor.
When Walker joined the Taleban at the time he did, he did not see the US as an evident enemy. He had no inkling or control over later events that saw his country going to war in Afghanistan. He was, as they say, just a kid.
To those staunch zealots who want to see this young man executed or, at best, imprisoned for life, one can only respond by asking what happened to their sense of compassion or, simply, their common sense.
Here’s a boy who was searching for spiritual guidance which he found in Islam, eschewing, along the way, his peers’ notorious teenage excesses. Was that wrong? Clearly not, if for no reason other than the fact that his right to freedom of worship is guaranteed in the constitution. (The Founding Fathers saw to that because, one suspects, they anticipated those staunch zealots’ inordinate patriotism.)
And here’s also a young man whose misfortune was that he happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, that is, when decisions were made, at high levels in Washington, that were beyond his knowledge. Was Walker’s presence in Mazar-e-Sharif wrong? It was. He made a mistake, but, heavens above, this 20-year-old is no Kim Philby, Andrich Ames or Robert Hanssen, men who consciously betrayed their countries.
As the circle of vengeance closes in on Walker (evident in editorials, op-ed pieces, letters-to-the-editor) and later as he is brought in before a military tribunal and stripped of his American citizenship, as seems likely, or before a civilian court with guarantees of fairness and due process, as some compassionate souls are calling for, I wonder: Does there lie, behind this nauseated disbelief at what Walker had done, an archetypal resentment of Islam, a sense of incredulity, born out of American hauteur, that a young, clean-cut, all-American kid from an affluent family, graduate of a school for gifted students, would, horror of horrors, convert to Islam? For does not Islam remain, in the American imagination, a faith whose spiritual cosmology American commentators (despite their public remonstrations to the contrary) refuse to see as a liberating life-force, but choose instead to see as "militant," "repressive" and, well, you know all the other serviceable words.
That is, I wonder if it boils down to, hey, punish the bum for destabilizing our comfortable paradigm.
So wonder with me on this one, if you will.
