This came over the listserve for the Wagner School at NYU. It seems to
me it provides us with a clearer understanding of the events of last
week and appropriate cautions as to how we should proceed. I expect it
also reflects the perspective of most individuals of middle eastern
heritage both here and abroad. Please pass this on. We need to combat
the hate that is rearing its ugly head in some places.
Linda
wagner-exchange listserve
-------------------------
A very enlightening statement -- perhaps if more people saw the
situation from this perspective it may temper some of the
bloodthirst that's been going around in light of the attack.
By Tamim Ansary, an Afghan-American woman and
writer living in the US.
*****
Dear Friends,
Yesterday I heard a lot of talk about "bombing
Afghanistan back to the Stone Age." Ronn Owens, on KGO
Talk Radio [SF] 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," and he asked, "What else can we
do? What is your suggestion?" Minutes later I heard a
TV pundit discussing whether we "have the belly to do
what must be done." And I thought about these issues
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 been going on over there. So I
want to share a few thoughts with anyone who will
listen.
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
fervently wish to see those monsters punished. But the
Taliban and Bin Laden are not Afghanistan. They're not
even the government of Afghanistan. The Taliban are a
cult of ignorant psychotics who captured Afghanistan
in 1997 and have been holding the country in bondage
ever since. Bin Laden is a political criminal with a
master 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 love
for someone to eliminate the Taliban and clear out the
rats nest of international thugs holed up in their
country. I guarantee it. Some say, if that's the case,
why don't the Afghans rise up and overthrow the
Taliban themselves? The answer is, they're starved,
exhausted, damaged, and incapacitated. A few years
ago, the United Nations estimated that there are
500,000 disabled orphans in Afghanistan--a country
with no economy, no food.
Millions of Afghans are widows of the approximately
two million men killed during the war with the
Soviets. And the Taliban has been executing these
women for being women and have buried some of their
opponents alive in mass graves. The soil of
Afghanistan is littered with land mines and almost all
the farms have been destroyed. The Afghan people have
tried to overthrow the Taliban. They haven't been able
to.
We come now to the question of bombing Afghanistan
back to the Stone Age. Trouble with that scheme is,
it's already been done. The Soviets took care of it .
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? There is no
infrastructure. Cut them off from medicine and health
care? Too late. Someone already did all that.
New bombs would only land in 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. (They have already, I hear.) 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 be making common
cause with the Taliban--by raping once again the
people they've been raping all this time.
So what else 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. I think that
when people speak of "having the belly to do what
needs to be done" many of them are thinking in terms
of having the belly to kill as many as needed. They
are thinking about overcoming moral qualms about
killing innocent people. But it's the belly to die, not
kill, that's actually on the table. Americans will die
in a land war to get Bin Laden. 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. 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. The invasion approach is a
flirtation with global war between Islam and the West.
And that is Bin Laden's program. That's exactly what
he wants and why he did this thing. Read his speeches
and statements. It's all right there. At the moment,
of course, "Islam" as such does not exist. There are
Muslims and there are Muslim countries, but no such
political entity as Islam. Bin Laden believes that if
he can get a war started, he can constitute this
entity and he'd be running it. 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 Muslim lands, that's a billion
people with nothing left to lose, even better from Bin
Laden's point of view. He's probably wrong about
winning, in the end the west would probably
overcome--whatever that would mean in such a war; but
the war would last for years and millions would die,
not just theirs but ours. Who has the belly for that?
Bin Laden yes, but anyone else?
I don't have a solution. But I do believe that
suffering and poverty are the soil in which terrorism
grows. Bin Laden and his cohorts want to bait us into
creating more such soil, so they and their kind can
flourish. We can't let him do that. That's my humble
opinion.
Tamim Ansary
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