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Date: Mon, 17 Sep 2001 11:51:34 -0500
From: "Lane Grigsby" <LaneG@cajunusa.com>
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Subject: Thoughtful comments
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Dear Friends,
The following was sent to me by my friend Tamim Ansary.  Tamim is an
Afghani-American writer.  He is also one of the most brilliant people I
know in this life.  When he writes, I read.  When he talks, I listen.
Here is his take on Afghanistan and the whole mess we are in.



Dear friend and whoever else is on this email thread:
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