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Dedication
Tamim Ansary
Sept. 14,
2001
I've been hearing a lot of talk about "bombing Afghanistan back
to
the Stone Age." Ronn Owens, on San Francisco's KGO Talk Radio,
conceded
today 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 in the United States
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 bin 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 healthcare? 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?
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