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I think the following is something we should ponder before bombing the
hell out of Kabul:
>From an Afghani (The following was written by an Afghani writer who
lives in the Bay Area.) September 15, 2001
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 deeply hates the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden. My
hatred comes from first hand experience. 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 already been done by the Soviets.
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 would not 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? Unfortunately, Bin Laden does. Anyone else?
In Peace, Tamim Ansary
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