[thelist] Afganistan from another perspective

[Ron Jourard]

I received the letter below from one of the lawyers' lists I belong
to.

Ron Jourard
www.defencelaw.com


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 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 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
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