----- Original Message -----  
From: Mike Callicrate  
To: News   
Sent: Monday, September 17, 2001 7:58 AM
Subject: Editorial: The Afghan people had nothing to do with this  atrocity.
The following commentary (forwarded by Yates Hafner) is by 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 Ansary