Sinister: Fwd: [shout] a fwd from an afghan friend

[zorba at xxx.uk]

this was forwarded to a list i am on.  it might bore some of you to 
read more about the attack on the WTC, but i think it might 
interest even more of you, judging from the amount of comments 
there have already been.  i wanted to add my words to everyone 
else's on the day, but felt tongue tied and unable.  Instead i give 
you an intelligently written, but frightening scenario that could 
result from what has happened. 

antony

> 
> 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
> 
>


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