[Think] (reprint) An Afghan-American speaks [9.14]

[Fen Labalme]

the article below is also at: http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2001/09/14/afghanistan/index.html

You can't bomb us back into the Stone Age. We're already there. But you can
start a new world war, and that's exactly what Osama bin Laden wants.

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By Tamim Ansary

Sept. 14, 2001 | I've been hearing a lot of talk about "bombing Afghanistan
back to the Stone Age." Ronn Owens, on San Francisco's KGO Talk Radio,
conceded today 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 in the United States 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 healthcare? 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?