Fw: letter by Tamim Ansary, an Afghan-American woman
" 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 has to 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 Afghanstan," 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 "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
