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This is the first email I've ever seen on the internet that I would
advocate should be distributed as a chain letter. It confirms and
summarizes a lot of what was available in bits and pieces in the media over
the past few decades. Hopefully, this information will be widely
distributed before the growing tide of knuckle draggers go charging off
into the sunrise chanting "Kill all Afghans!" Bottom line: Most
Afghans are the first and hardest hit victims of the Taliban.
9/15/2001 03:47 PM, neo wrote:
>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?
>
>----------------------------------------------------------------------------
>----
>
>
>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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