Got this in my email today


> 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.
>
> 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 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 Ben 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
>
>
>
>