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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