Tamim Ansary
title: A Sobering Essay
A sobering essay forwarded by a UC Berkeley professor:

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 people
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 email 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 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 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?