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A chilling take on US, Afghanistan, and bin Laden
Dear Friends,
The following was sent to me by my friend Tamim Ansary. Tamim is an
Afghani-American writer. He is also one of the most brilliant men that I
know in this life. When he writes, I read. When he talks, I listen. Here is
his take on Afghanistan and the whole mess we are in. -Gary T.
Dear Gary and whoever else is on this e-mail 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?
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KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) - The cost of handing over Osama bin Laden could be
high for Afghanistan's hard-line Taliban rulers. But the price of protecting
the key suspect in terror attacks on the United States could be even greater
with rumbles in Washington of retaliatory air strikes.
Either way, it's a virtual no-win situation for the rigidly Islamic militia
that rules most of this destitute country, already ravaged by more than two
decades of war.
Not long ago, the Taliban's reclusive leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, said
that to surrender bin Laden to the United States would betray Islam -
impossible for a movement whose very existence is rooted in its image with
Islamic purists.
In a statement read Friday by Taliban officials in Pakistan, Omar said
investigators were trying to link bin Laden to the attacks "unjustifiably
and without any reason."
Abdul Salam Zaeef, the Afghan ambassador to Pakistan, told reporters that
handing over bin Laden would be a "long process," and U.S. authorities would
have to provide evidence against him.
"So far the Americans have not contacted us on providing any evidence. Our
position is very clear," he said. "We have condemned the attacks."
Giving up bin Laden could be military suicide for the Taliban, who still
have several front lines north of Kabul, where thousands of their Arab
allies and Islamic guerrillas from countries such as Uzbekistan, Pakistan
and the breakaway republic of Chechnya are battling an anti-Taliban
alliance. If the Taliban gives in to demands for bin Laden's surrender, the
foreign militants might abandon their fight.
With many Afghans disillusioned by the relentless combat, the local pool of
warriors has run low, increasing the Taliban's dependence on foreign
fighters - euphemistically called "guests."
There may be as many as 6,000 foreign militants, according to one
international observer who was among those evacuated from Kabul on Thursday.
"They keep them for the fighting. They are coming and going all the time," a
high-ranking Taliban official said on condition of anonymity. "It gives them
more influence right now."
Growing international criticism of the Taliban, including the latest round
of economic sanctions that took effect in January, brought more militants
into Afghanistan. Store owners, foreign workers and residents have all
reported their increasing numbers on the streets of Kabul.
They are coming from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Algeria and Yemen. Their numbers
and money have increased their influence within the Taliban leadership, say
Western observers.
That influence is believed to be behind some of the Taliban's more
outrageous decisions, some of which have contradicted earlier edicts by
Omar, their leader and top Islamic cleric.
The most obvious was the destruction in March of the world's tallest
standing statues of Buddha. The destruction of the sandstone monuments,
carved into a mountainside in the 3rd and 5th centuries, outraged the
international community. But it also contradicted Omar's earlier promise to
protect them.
In the Wahabi sect of Islam - practiced only in Saudi Arabia - statues are
banned as idolatrous. That was the same reason the Taliban gave for dropping
their promise to protect them.
In the last year, new and more stringent rules for international aid groups
have been enforced. Three have been closed for allegedly preaching
Christianity, and eight foreign employees, including two Americans, are
being tried on charges of proselytizing. Dozens of other relief workers have
been expelled.
Coinciding with this confrontation has been a proliferation of Muslim aid
groups with links to hard-line Islamists in neighboring Pakistan.
They have built dozens of new mosques, including a large one at Taliban
headquarters in Kandahar, where they are also financing the reconstruction
of a military hospital. They also have opened about 50 bakeries in Kabul to
provide food aid.
If the Taliban surrendered bin Laden to the United States, the foreign
militants and assistance from like-minded Islamists could evaporate, further
isolating war-ruined Afghanistan.
But continuing to protect bin Laden could prompt a military attack by
U.S.-led forces determined to punish the suspected terrorist mastermind for
the deadly attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in
Washington.
For the Taliban, one complicating factor is that Afghan citizens and
nationalists within the government resent the growing influence of foreign
Arabs, such as bin Laden. They don't believe protecting the Saudi dissident
is worth a punishing retaliatory assault.
"People are fed up with the `guests.' All our life has been burned by war
and now we will get only more," said Mohammed Haroon, a shopkeeper in Kabul,
a city that was devastated by factional fighting even before the Taliban
took control in 1996.
Nationalists who want foreign guerrillas like bin Laden to go home are
increasingly frustrated, but most remain too frightened to speak openly.
"The Islamic warriors are powerful, and if we say or do anything, we will be
put in jail. These Arabs are not on the side of our nation. They are here
for their own aim," said the Taliban official. "I am afraid for our future."
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