Wow. This one is news to me. Given the urination-video, given the mishandled destruction of Qur'ans at Bagram, given Staff Sergeant Bale's killing of 17 civilians and given the myriad other failures of NATO's hearts-and-minds campaign in Afghanistan, I suppose however that I ought not to be surprised by this. The three-inch patch is produced by Mil-Spec Monkey, on whose web-page the patch is displayed under the "Morale" sub-header. This patch is but one example of a larger niche-product group of "Infidel" apparel and gear marketed by Mil-Spec Monkey and others.
Matthex Cox at Military.com, Troops Still Embrace 'Infidel' Label (16 March 2012)
Clayton Montgomery, owner of a well-known online vendor called Mil-Spec Monkey and designer of some infidel patches, said his most popular item has been his “Pork-Eating Crusader” patch, which includes a translation into Arabic.
“Everybody sort of hates occupying forces anyway, so it’s kind of embracing that,” he told Military.com “If you are going to hate us anyway, we might as well pretend to be the great white devil.”
Continued Montgomery: “Originally, when we made the patch, we thought it would be this small thing, the equivalent of an ‘I’m with stupid’ T-shirt. We didn’t think we would sell many, but the demand was there,” Montgomery said, describing how his company has sold about 10,000 of the patches.
To be sure, I doubt the even the majority of those ~10,000 patches have been sold to active US or NATO forces. Yet even one worn visibly on the gear of an active NATO soldier speaks to the near-hopelessness of the long and seemingly unending failure of the mission there.
Hearts and minds? This helps...