This is a rational and thought provoking commentary. It comes from Tamim, a
writer and columnist in San Francisco, who comes from Afghanistan. This is very
interesting and chilling…
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 Anser