A Letter from an Afghani-American attorney


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Posted by Kree on September 17, 2001 at 19:33:12:

Date: Thu, 13 Sep 2001 10:14:27 -0700

Dear Friends, Yesterday I heard a lot of talk about "bombing
Afghanistan back to the Stone Age." Ronn Owens, on KGO Talk Radio
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," and he asked, "What else can we do? What
is your suggestion?" Minutes later I heard a TV pundit discussing
whether we "have the belly to do what must be done."

And I thought about these issues 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 been going on over there. So I want to share a
few thoughts with anyone who will listen.

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 fervently wish to see those monsters punished.

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 captured Afghanistan in 1997 and have been holding the
country in bondage ever since. Bin Laden is a political criminal with
a master 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 love for
someone to eliminate the Taliban and clear out the rats nest of
international thugs holed up in their country. I guarantee it.

Some say, if that's the case, why don't the Afghans rise up and
overthrow the Taliban themselves? The answer is, they're starved,
exhausted, damaged, and incapacitated. A few years ago, the United
Nations estimated that there are 500,000 disabled orphans in
Afghanistan--a country with no economy, no food. Millions of Afghans
are widows of the approximately two million men killed during the war
with the Soviets. And the Taliban has been executing these women for
being women and have buried some of their opponents alive in mass
graves. The soil of Afghanistan is littered with land mines and
almost all the farms have been destroyed . The Afghan people have
tried to overthrow the Taliban. They haven't been able to.

We come now to the question of bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone
Age. Trouble with that scheme is, it's already been done. The Soviets
took care of it . 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?
There is no infrastructure. Cut them off from medicine and health
care? Too late. Someone already did all that.

New bombs would only land in 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. (They have already, I hear.) 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 be making common cause with the
Taliban--by raping once again the people they've been raping all this
time

So what else 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. I think that when people speak of "having the belly to
do what needs to be done" many of them are thinking in terms of
having the belly to kill as many as needed. They are thinking about
overcoming moral qualms about killing innocent people. But it's the
belly to die not kill that's actually on the table. Americans will
die in a land war to get Bin Laden. 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. The
invasion approach is a flirtation with global war between Islam and
the West.

And that is Bin Laden's program. That's exactly what he wants and why
he did this thing. Read his speeches and statements. It's all right
there. AT the moment, of course, "Islam" as such does not exist.
There are Muslims and there are Muslim countries, but no such
political entity as Islam. Bin Laden believes that if he can get a
war started, he can constitute this entity and he'd be running it. 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 Muslim
lands, that's a billion people with nothing left to lose, even better
from Bin Laden's point of view. He's probably wrong about winning, in
the end the west would probably overcome--whatever that would mean in
such a war; but the war would last for years and millions would die,
not just theirs but ours. Who has the belly for that? Bin Laden yes,
but anyone else?

I don't have a solution. But I do believe that suffering and poverty
are the soil in which terrorism grows. Bin Laden and his cohorts want
to bait us into creating more such soil, so they and their kind can
flourish. We can't let him do that. That's my humble opinion.

Tamim Ansary

 


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