Posted by Elaine on September 20, 2001 at 07:38:14:
The following letter is more than a perspective, it's a reality that needs to be recognized & understood.
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Another perspective
Tamim Ansary
(Afghan-American writer)
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 Nazi SS. 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 rat's 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; 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?