Any article that starts with “retired male supermodel” and touches on peace and religion is bound to draw some kind of attention.  From the Wall Street Journal, no less:

Retired male supermodel Cameron Alborzian sat down with Maj. Gen. Phil Jones at the U.S.-led coalition headquarters in Kabul this past summer to discuss a novel way to persuade Afghan insurgents to lay down arms.

Apparently Alborzian, who was once associated with Madonna’s music videos, has bent the ear of American and British Generals in Afghanistan with his suggestion that everyone should just meditate together, and everything would be ok: 

“The achievement would be: American soldiers meditate, Taliban meditate and, in jails, they meditate together,” Mr. Alborzian said. “One is on one side of the bar, the other is on the other side of the bar. You are both in jail — and you can find the peace in it together.”

Besides General Jones, Alborzian apparently also got to speak with Vice Adm. Robert Harward, currently the deputy commander at CENTCOM.  Admiral Harward is a Navy SEAL, recently returned from Afghanistan, and a practitioner of yoga.  It seems Admiral Harward even teamed up with the former male model:

And it has opened doors at Afghan prisons, where the two have taught guards at detention centers to do basic, nonreligious Ayurvedic yoga poses. The pair say they have secretly taught a former Taliban commander how to meditate and soothe his militant mind.

The article also says Harward mentioned the “peace-through-yoga” concept to then-commanding General David Petraeus.

In an area of the world where some critics deride the US association with Christianity, it’s interesting to see an uncriticized promotion of yoga.  While much of the “sensitivity” over Christianity is hypothetical, the response to the yoga promotion was empirically demonstrated by the local Afghans:

Ms. [Amandine] Roche sought to teach meditation to 40 restless Afghan teenage boys at a French-run high school…

One of the kids warned his classmates that Ms. Roche was trying to introduce alien Hindu rites, undermining Afghanistan’s Islamic faith.

“We have seen Indians in movies,” he said during the 45-minute workshop. “They do the same thing when they worship in front of their idols.”

In fact, US Soldiers deployed to India did practice yoga with their Indian hosts, and the Army has incorporated yoga in several areas.  The students had their own version of focusing on inner peace:

“This is useless for us,” [a student said]. “There are several other things for us to do that give us peace and quiet, like when we pray and recite the Holy Quran on a daily basis.”