Stop The Hatred !!!!

[Guest guest]

This 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 Bin 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 ito 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

ateast 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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

\\\ ///

0 0

oooo | 0000

---------------------------

Divyachapan S Padur Email :divyachapan

Graduate Research Assistant Phone : (513) 556 - 7451®

Applied Systems Research Lab. (513) 556 - 0669(O)

University of Cincinnati.

---------------------------

 

 

_______________

Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp