strathspey@strathspey.org:27409

Freeman/Pavey

Afghan opinion

Sept. 18, 2001, 4:15 p.m. (Message 27409)

This is a copy of a long email from an Afghan American. Those tired of,
or annoyed with, political comments on the Strathspey List should delete
it. However, I offer it with no apologies. I thought it to be extremely
interesting and thought provoking.

Cole
------------------------------

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 he perpetrators. They would love for someone to eliminate the
Taliban and clear out the rat's 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
overthrown 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