forward: Tamim Ansary: peace

[Claudia Westermann]

from garnet.abrams <garnet.abrams at on.aibn.com>

This commentary is from Tamim, a writer and columnist in San Francisco,
who comes from Afghanistan. Please do circulate.

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?

Tamim Ansary