Letter from an Afghani writer living in San Francisco

[Lisa Heft]

Dear everyone: another piece a friend sent to me that I now share with
you.  -- Lisa Heft, Berkeley, California, USA

- - - - -

An Afghani's Perspective
by Tamim Ansary,
reposted on Sat Sep 15 '01 (

by Tamim Ansary, a writer and
columnist in San Francisco, who comes from Afghanistan.

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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 Bin 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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