Posted by DougD on September 16, 2001 at 16:42:52:
Got this as an e-mail...it's good food for thought. Well, I'm off to church, to pray for wisdom.
Doug
A View from Afghanistan
by Tamim Ansary
Dear All:
This is from Tamim Ansary, a writer and columnist in San Francisco who is a
native of Afghanistan. This gives us a good perspective on what we are up
against:
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 rat's 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 Ansaryv