Þetta skrifaði <b>Tamim Ansary</b>

<i>( copy/paste )</i>
Written by an Afghani in the U.S.
I've been hearing a lot of talk about “bombing Afghanistan
back to the Stone Age.” Ron 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 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 “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 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 “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?
Unfortunately, Bin Laden does. Anyone else?
In Peace,

Tamim Ansary