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A Plea from an Afghani-American



I came across this and thought its information may be of some value.

Suzanne Araas Vesely
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----- Original Message -----
From: Radhika <radhika@lisco.com>

  (forwarded)

Dear Friends,

The following was sent to me by my friend
Tamim Ansary. Tamim is an Afghani-American
writer. He is also one of the most
brilliant people I know in this life. When
he writes, I read. When he talks, I listen.
Here is his take on Afghanistan and the
whole mess we are in.

- Gary T.
..........................................

Dear Gary and whoever else is on this email
thread:

I've been hearing a lot of talk about
"bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone
Age." 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 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 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 Nazi SS. 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
rat's 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;
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

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