Food for thought for the Militarists
Written by an Afghani in the U.S.
I've been hearing a lot of talk about "bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone
Age." Ron 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 in
the US 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 deeply hates the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden. My hatred comes from first
hand experience. 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 would not 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? Unfortunately, Bin Laden does. Anyone else?
In Peace,
Tamim Ansary