Tamim Ansary is 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. 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