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Jim, this is
scary. How many others has the USA trained and armed. And how many
of them will be coming after us?
IGLH
Sam I Am
In a message dated
09/14/2001 7:28:28 AM Eastern Daylight Time, * writes:
Once upon a
time, not long ago, in the reign of the great Ronald of Reagan, the USA's CIA
trained and armed a group of people in Afghanistan called the Mujahadeem, now
known as the Taliban, to fight against the Soviet army. One of those who
was trained and armed by the CIA was one Osama Bin Laden who, having fought as
one of the Mujahadeem on behalf of the the Taliban has been afforded safe
haven by them. With arms supplied by the USA, they seized control of
Afghanistan. It is worth it, I believe to read the following commentary.
Sam
[This commentary comes from Tamim Ansary, 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 Ansar
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