Subject: Afghanistan
>Date: Thu, 20 Sep 2001 15:52:24
>
>Hey there,
>
>I was reading about a lot of this stuff on the cnn page. They have a pretty
>good info site about bin Laden history and Afghan history. They have a link
>to the government site about Afghanistan, and if we bomb it, we're not
>bombing much, just a bunch of starving people and some goats.
>
>Anyway, hopefully we can link up with Afghanistan's Northern Alliance - the
>Taliban's opposition - to oust the Taliban. They have already pledged
>15,000 troops to help us. I've read up on the Taliban too. They're the ones
>who have stripped women of their rights to hold jobs, academic titles, go
>to school or drive cars. Women who do not follow their rules are killed.
>Nice. The Taliban has been denounced by Muslims all over the world for
>their inhumane treatment of women.
>
>We need to not be Huckleberries about this. They've been training
>terrorists for years. We need to learn to fight in terms of
>counterterrorism, not just some Joe Wisconsin marching in there with a gun.
>Hopefully we can do this the smart way.
>
>Be informed.
>
>Subject: Afghanistan
>
>
>What follows seems an important piece of information that we should all
>include in what we think we know about what's going on. This commentary
>is said to come from Tamim, 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?
>
>Tamim Ansary"