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A Belly to do What Needs to Be Done:
How Things Look to an Afghani
By Tamim Ansari
Sept. 15, 2001
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?
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