solid perspective on current situation.
-----Original Message-----
From: Emmert, Caroline 
Sent: Tuesday, September 18, 2001 12:37 PM
To: Platter, Phillip
Subject: FW: Afghani - American perspective


 
-----Original Message-----
From: Michael Allen Harrison [mailto:mah@teleport.com]
Sent: Tuesday, September 18, 2001 10:13 AM
To: Mail List #1; mail list 2; Mail list 3; Mail list #4; Oregonian; Portland Tribune; KKJZ Smooth Jazz And fabulous people!
Subject: Afghani - American perspective


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

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 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 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, 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





  _____  


Terrorist Attacks on U.S. - How can you help? 
Donate cash, emergency relief information in Yahoo! News <http://rd.yahoo.com/mail_us/tag/?http://dailynews.yahoo.com/fc/US/Emergency_Information/> .