Burning the burner -- Afghans barbecue a Terry doll.

Burning the burner -- Afghans barbecue a Terry doll.

At the end of last month, there had been 1985 coalition soldiers killed in Afghanistan since the invasion in 2001 -- bombed and shot and booby-trapped by hard-nosed Taliban and Al Qaeda militants intent of inflicting as much death and destruction as possible.

So it is a bit hard to comprehend the US military’s warning last week that the plan by Florida pastor Terry Jones to burn a pile of Korans would “put US soldiers lives at risk”. That seems to suggest that the insurgents until now have only been idling along in second gear. How could the Afghan killing fields be made any worse?

These books may represent religious beliefs but they are still just books. 

According to Afghan parliamentary candidate Mohammed Mokhtar the result of a Koran bonfire would have been that “wherever Americans are seen, they will be killed” – but that seems pretty close to the situation already in Taliban territory.

Faced with that familiar “fury in the Arab world”, Pastor Jones hired a security guard and armed himself with a revolver and, in the end, the burning was "postponed".  Jones was called “loopy” by Australian commentators, “outrageous” by the Vatican, a “disgrace” by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and (ironically) he was burnt in effigy by Muslims in Kabul.

Jones will never make a diplomat but, if you examine his somewhat hokey protestations, you may have to concede that there are a few grains of truth. For example: Jones said he wanted to “send a clear message to the radical element of Islam that we are not interested in their sharia law and we do not tolerate their threats, their (use of) fear, their radicalness”. He said the Koran torching was aimed at “remembering those who were brutally murdered on September 11”

Take out the Koran bonfire and most Westerners would agree with a lot of that. Western civilisation has no room for the brutal misogynist stone-age sharia law, the West condemns the use of fear by radicals to intimidate and subdue – and the civilised world will remember the appalling slaughter of September 11 with horror for many decades to come.

Then there was Alex Stewart, the atheist lawyer in Brisbane with his YouTube slapstick (he smoked pages from the Bible and Koran) who contributed one useful thought bubble -- these books may represent religious beliefs but they are still just books. Pages printed with ink. "It's your beliefs that matter," he said.

Pastor Jones may be "loopy" but he did draw a distinction between the “radical” elements of Islam and the rest, highlighting again the confusing split between “good” and “bad” in the Muslim world. President Obama, now apparently warming again to the idea of a mosque near Ground Zero, says the US is a country that welcomes freedom of religion, including Islam and that the violence by radicals is not about religion. The terrorists who flew planes in to the Twin Towers were not representing Islam, he says.

Obama (and his speechwriters) are bending over backwards to sound tolerant but that just demonstrates how unbalanced the war with radical Islam is. Where one side celebrates life and mourns death, the other sees life as a short stop-over and death as a fast-track to paradise. Where one side is equipped with massive firepower but has one hand tied behind the back with democratic principles and legal constraints, the other side is a rag-tag guerrilla force fighting with limited armoury but without any rulebook at all.

Is that sort of war winnable?