Sounds like there won't be any problem getting
them to cooperate with us when we go in after
him and then with their allowing us to rebuild
schools, hospitals,give them food,etc.....
that's the way it usually works. Also thousands
of Americans as well as people from around the
globe have already died in NYC - we won't be going
in alone. Yes in defending freedom a nation has
to be willing to pay the ultimate price.
Mike
---------- Original Message ----------------------------------
From: "Chris Casey " <CHRISCA@callawaygolf.com>
Reply-To: "Chris Casey " <CHRISCA@callawaygolf.com>
Date: Mon, 17 Sep 2001 11:20:10 -0700
>This commentary comes from Tamim, 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. 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
>
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