This was written by Tamim Ansary, a writer
and columnist in
San Francisco, who comes from Afghanistan.
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 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. 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?
