crucial

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I find this extremely important. Out of this horror, the American people need to learn
many things. But they still have such a small world view, they understand so little
about what happened. Most of the country really believes Bush that we were attacked
because they don't like our way of life, our freedom, our prosperity.
- felix.crucial

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.

> -Gary T.

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 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. 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

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Afghanistan: The Making of U.S. Policy (1973-1990)
(National Security Archive)

http://nsarchive.chadwyck.com/afessayx.htm

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filmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf writing about Afghanistan
June 20, 2001

http://www.iranian.com/Opinion/2001/June/Afghan/index.html

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4259230,00.html

                                                      If George Bush manages to subdue Afghanistan, he will have succeeded where<br />                                                          many illustrious names have failed. Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, the<br />                                                          British, and finally the mighty Soviet Union all sent their armies into<br />                                                          Afghanistan, only to mount an inevitable retreat.

                                                      The problem, put simply, is geography: the landlocked country is dominated<br />                                                          by the rugged Hindu Kush mountains that sweep from the west to the east.<br />                                                          The range finally peters out near the northwestern city of Herat, and sinks<br />                                                          into the desert.

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