Anybody ever known me to spam before? I thought this was too important not
to pass along:
This comes from Tamim, a writer and columnist in San Francisco, who comes
from Afghanistan.
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I've been hearing a lot of talk about "bombing Afghanistan back to the
Stone Age." Ronn Owens, on KGO Talk Radio today, allowed that this would
mean killing innocent people, people who had nothing to do with this
atrocity, but "we're at war, we have to accept collateral damage.
What else can we do?" Minutes later I heard some TV pundit discussing
whether we "have the belly to do what must be done."
And I thought about the issues being raised especially hard because I am
from Afghanistan, and even though I've lived here for 35 years I've
never lost track of what's going on there. So I want to tell anyone who
will
listen how it all looks from where I'm standing.
I speak as one who hates the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden. There is no
doubt in my mind that these people were responsible for the atrocity in New
York. I agree that something must be done about those monsters.
But the Taliban and Ben Laden are not Afghanistan. They're not even the
government of Afghanistan. The Taliban are a cult of ignorant
psychotics who took over Afghanistan in 1997. Bin Laden is a political
criminal with a plan. When you think Taliban, think Nazis. When you think
Bin Laden, think Hitler. And when you think "the people of Afghanistan"
think "the Jews in the concentration camps."
It's not only that the Afghan people had nothing to do with this atrocity.
They were the first victims of the perpetrators. They would exult if
someone
would come in there, take out the Taliban and clear out the rats nest of
international thugs holed up in their country.
Some say, why don't the Afghans rise up and overthrow the Taliban? The
answer is, they're starved, exhausted, hurt, incapacitated, suffering.
A few years ago, the United Nations estimated that there are 500,000
disabled orphans in Afghanistan--a country with no economy, no food. There
are millions of widows. And the Taliban has been burying these widows
alive in mass graves. The soil is littered with land mines, the farms were
all destroyed by the Soviets. These are a few of the reasons why the
Afghan people have not overthrown the Taliban.
We come now to the question of bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone
Age.Trouble is, that's been done. The Soviets took care of it already.
Make the Afghans suffer? They're already suffering. Level their houses?
Done. Turn their schools into piles of rubble? Done. Eradicate their
hospitals? Done. Destroy their infrastructure? Cut them off from medicine
and health care? Too late. Someone already did all that.
New bombs would only stir the rubble of earlier bombs. Would they at
least get the Taliban? Not likely. In today's Afghanistan, only the Taliban
eat, only they have the means to move around. They'd slip away and hide.
Maybe the bombs would get some of those disabled orphans, they don't move
too fast, they don't even have wheelchairs. But flying over Kabul and
dropping bombs wouldn't really be a strike against the criminals who did
this horrific thing. Actually it would only be making common cause with the
Taliban--by raping once again the people they've been raping all this time
So what else is there? What can be done, then? Let me now speak with
true fear and trembling. The only way to get Bin Laden is to go in there
with ground troops. When people speak of "having the belly to do what needs
to be done" they're thinking in terms of having the belly to kill as many
as
needed. Having the belly to overcome any moral qualms about killing
innocent people. Let's pull our heads out of
the sand. What's actually on the table is Americans dying. And not just
because some Americans would die fighting their way through Afghanistan to
Bin Laden's hideout. It's much bigger than that folks. Because to get any
troops to Afghanistan, we'd have to go through Pakistan. Would they let us?
Not likely. The conquest of Pakistan would have to be first. Will other
Muslim nations just stand by? You see where I'm going. We're flirting with
a world war between Islam and the West.
And guess what: that's Bin Laden's program. That's exactly what he wants.
That's why he did this. Read his speeches and statements. It's all right
there. He really believes Islam would beat the west. It might seem
ridiculous, but he figures if he can polarize the world into Islam and the
West, he's got a billion soldiers. If the west wreaks a holocaust in those
lands, that's a billion people with nothing left to lose, that's even
better
from Bin Laden's point of view. He's probably wrong, in the end the West
would win, whatever that would mean, but the war would last for years and
millions would die, not just theirs but ours. Who has the belly for that?
Bin Laden does. Anyone else?
Tamim Ansary
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