>Date: Fri, 14 Sep 2001 23:30:16 GMT
>From: dave at scripting.com (DaveNet email)
>Subject: Mir Tamim Ansary on Afghanistan
>
>DaveNet essay, "Mir Tamim Ansary on Afghanistan", released on 9/14/2001;
>4:28:07 PM Pacific.
>---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>***Rick Smolan
>
>Rick Smolan is an old friend from the 80s. He sent me an email this
>afternoon. "Dave, the following was sent to me by a friend of Mir Tamim
>Ansary [1]. Tamim is an Afghani-American writer. He is one of the most
>brilliant people I know. Here is his take on Afghanistan and the whole
>mess we are in. I know your email reaches a lot of people and I think the
>following is really worth forwarding."
>
>***Mir Tamim Ansary on Afghanistan
>
>I've been hearing a lot of talk about "bombing Afghanistan back to the
>Stone Age." Ronn Owens [2], 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?
>
>Mir Tamim Ansary
>
>[1]
>http://shop.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/results.asp?WRD=Mir+Tamim+Ansary&userid=19JCN7T4LY
>[2] http://www.ronn.com/
>
>---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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