Interesting Perspective!

[Barry Owen]

I've seen a lot of interesting ideas coming through this list and thank
everyone for sharing. The following came to me through a network of Military
Veterans Listserve . . . I found it to be very informative and thought
provoking.

Be well all,

b


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



Simply living the FourFold Way in Open Space . . .

Barry Owen
The Owen Group
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