[Fwd: [bodhisangha] Fw: just another little view of the elephant (fwd)]

[Guest guest]

<Undisclosed-Recipient:@mail.arc.net;>

"Robert J Gould" bobgould

Mailing-List: list bodhisangha; contact bodhisangha-owner

Sat, 15 Sep 2001 19:27:55 +1000

[bodhisangha] Fw: just another little view of the elephant (fwd)

---------- Forwarded message ----------

Fri, 14 Sep 2001 17:07:07 EDT

just another little view of the elephant

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?

Tamim Ansary

 

 

Post message: bodhisangha

Subscribe: bodhisangha-

Un: bodhisangha-

List owner: bodhisangha-owner

Shortcut URL to this page:

/community/bodhisangha