Some thoughts from an Afghani American writer

I got this from an email forward:



Dear Gary and whoever else is on this email thread:

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