I found the following message in another forum - and I personally consider it as very impressive:
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A sobering essay forwarded by a UC Berkeley professor:
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.
-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
