- 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."
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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 polarise 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.
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- Who has the belly for that? Bin Laden does. Anyone
else?
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- Tamim Ansary
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