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"