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Hi Everybody,
I've
been reading up on things and just wanted to tell you that the Taliban is a
fanatic group that was one of several that fought it out for control of
Afghanistan after the Russians pulled out. The Russians support a group known as
the Northern Alliance. The Taliban now controls the capital, Kabul, and the
southern two-thirds of the country, and calls itself the new legitimate
government of Afghanistan. They have probably killed the remaining people from
the old government.Bin Laden is hiding out in the southernmost part of the
country, and is a protected guest of the Taliban, along with many other
terrorists. These terrorists helped the Taliban sieze power there, and the
Taliban may need them to keep their hold on the country.The Northern Alliance
has asked us for help in overthrowing the Taliban and promised to give us Bin
Laden if we do. The problem with that is that they are far away in the north and
outnumbered three-to-one. The Northern Alliance leader was assasinated by the
Taliban just days before the terrorists struck here. They attacked the Taliban
that same night. Most of the ordinary people have no love for the Taliban and
less for the international terrorists they welcome.
I
support an attack on the terrorists, and on the Taliban if they choose to side
with them. I do not support an indiscriminate attack in which large numbers of
innocent civilians would be killed. If we did that how exactly would we be any
different from the terrorists? Who did it first isn't enough. We are clearly in
the right to go after the terrorists and those who aid and protect them. Because
of this the world agrees that these animals must be stamped out. Let's stay on
the side of Right. Let's make it a clear case of Good vs. Evil.
In
wartime our freedoms are restricted, and should be. Remember the old WWII
saying "Loose Lips Sink Ships"? They cannot be allowed to hamper the war
effort, or cause further casualties to our armed forces. Their right to
survive outweighs our right to say whatever we feel like saying. The first sign
of this came when the NSA called CNN to tell them to stop talking about the
president's whereabouts when there was still a threat.
There is
a story going around now, and I don't know if it is true, that the film of the
Palestinians celebrating after the attack on the WTC was a hoax. Specifically
that it was stock footage from 1991 of them celebrating something else that
someone "mistakenly" used. Word was that somebody thought it looked familiar and
started checking on where it came from. Arafat's reaction seems to show that the
Palestinians are clearly saying they are not supporting those people.
............Bill Meyer
Problem with the write up below is that Afghanistan
refuses to turn over Bin Laden and others of the Taliban responsible for the
attacks. The terrorist acts committed against the United States on 9/11 exceed
the magnitude of the Pearl Harbor bombing by the Japanese. For that war time
act, we dropped the atomic bomb on the Japanese island of Hiroshima.
Many will no doubt die in the ensuing war, but
what thought process would make the Afghan leaders believe that they,
harboring the Taliban and Bin Laden, will not suffer similar retaliation from
the US Armed Forces and other countries horrified by the possibility that they
might some day see a similar attack upon themselves? France nearly suffered an
attack on Paris just 3 short years ago.
Note
how quickly the Palestinian government was to renounce the attacks on the
US. Although the Palestinian Nation may loathe the US, they know
what is ahead for those responsible.
Lori
Johnson
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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