FW: Afghanistan by an Afghan

[Guest guest]

Forwarded from a friend of a friend!

 

Michael Greenman,

 

Saturday, September 15, 2001 9:01 PM

FW: Afghanistan by an Afghan

 

 

Friday, September 14, 2001 8:00 PM

From Lanell Anderson, Sierra Club activist in Texas.

Some thoughts on Afghanistan by an American-Afghanistan man

 

" 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:

 

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. 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 "