>

> The following was originally forwarded from a friend of

> Tamim Ansary, an Afghani-American writer. Here is his

> take on Afghanistan and the whole mess we are in.

> _______________________________________________________

> 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

> 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

>

>