I'm forwarding this, but with no guarantee of authenticity of author.
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Dear Friends,
Yesterday I heard a lot of talk about "bombing Afghanistan back to
the Stone Age." Ronn Owens, on KGO Talk Radio 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 Ben 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
overthrown 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 b y? 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
------------------------------------- No spam, please
Tom A. Trottier (after 2001 Oct 14)
415-400 Slater St. 758 Albert St,
Ottawa ON Canada Ottawa ON Canada
K1R 7S7 K1R 7V8
N45.417819 W75.70308 N45.411993 W75.714613
-- Questions answered, Answers questioned --
http://abacurial.com <Tom@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
+1 613 291-1168 fax:594-5412 ICQ:57647974
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