Subject: This letter, by Tamim Ansary, an Afghan living in the US
Date: Tue, 18 Sep 2001 22:34:38 EDT
The person who sent this to me said: I received this from a friend yesterday.
I cannot vouch for its veracity,
but the person I obtained it from is very astute and has kept up with the
conflict prior to this tradgic event.
======================================
This letter, by Tamim Ansary, an Afghan living in the US, Please read it and
get it out to as many people as you can. thank you.
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
specially 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 verthrow
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 entit 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 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
*********************
He might be right,
-J
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