An Afghan Perspective

[Guest guest]

Another Perspective

Submitted by Madhava Gosh das

for Tamim Ansary

 

I am concerned about some of the racist anti-Arab, and especially

anti-Afganhani mood that is sweeping the less-informed sections of

American society. Please print this so those in active preaching

interaction with the general people may have some background

information.

 

This commentary comes from Tamim, a writer and columnist in San

Francisco, who comes from Afghanistan. This is very, very interesting

and a little chilling....

 

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