Afghanistan Native Against Taliban and Bin Laden Cautions
West
Afghanistan already bombed to the stone age by the
Soviets. Warns of Quagmire and massive escalation of conflict.
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here for original posting of this message at DaveNet
***Mir Tamim Ansary on Afghanistan
I've been hearing a lot of talk about "bombing Afghanistan back to
the Stone Age." Ronn Owens [2], 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 [does not like in the least] 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?
--Mir Tamim Ansary
Tamim Ansary is an Afghani-American writer.
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