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 Bin 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
