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Enron Mail |
This article was written by Tamim Ansary, an Afghani-American writer. Here is his take on Afghanistan and the mess we are in. Please read it to the end. The last paragraphs are the most important. I've been hearing a lot of talk about "bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age." Ronn Owens, on KGO Talk Radio today, conceded 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 or not "we have the belly to do what must be done." I have thought especially hard about the issues being raised 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 also the first victims of the perpetrators. They would rejoice if someone would come in, 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, and the farms were all destroyed by the Soviets. This is why the people of Afghan 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. The Soviets took care of that 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. The Russians already did all that. New bombs would only stir the rubble of earlier bombs. Would the bombs at least get the Taliban? Not likely. In today's Afghanistan, only the Taliban eat, only they have the means to move around. They would 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. Flying over Kabul and dropping bombs wouldn't 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? 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 people as needed ... having the belly to overcome the moral qualms of 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 IS BIN LADEN'S PROGRAM!. THAT'S EXACTLY WHAT HE WANTS! THAT IS 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 vs. the West, then he has a billion soldiers. If the west wreaks a holocaust on those lands, then that's a billion people with nothing left to lose ... and that's even better from Bin Laden's point of view. He's probably wrong. In the end the west would probably 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?
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