Ég rakst á grein núna rétt áðan sem mér finnst gefa mér nýtt
innsæi í þetta mál með hvort að eigi að ráðast inn í
afghanistan. Ég tek mér það bessaleyfi að paste'a þetta bara
beint inn hingað frekar en að linka þar sem að síðan sem ég
fann þetta á er þess eðlis að greinin verður ekki til staðar á
morgun.

Af hönnunarvefnum Newstoday.com;

Probably the most interesting thing I've read since Tuesday:

I've been hearing a lot of talk about “ Blowing 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 “'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 deeply hates the Taliban and Osama Bin
Laden. My hatred comes from first hand experience. 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 “ people of Afghanistan” think “
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 “ 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 would not 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 “ 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? Unfortunately, Bin Laden does.
Anyone else?

In Peace,

Tamim Ansa