Interesting Perspective

Interesting Perspective
by Tamim Ansary / Native to Afghanistan--now live in U.S.

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
> >overthrow 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 by? 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

Author	Charles E. Brown
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