I received this today. I think it makes interesting reading. ........................................................................

An Afghan-American speaks

You can't bomb us back into the Stone Age. We're already there. But you

can

start a new world war, and that's exactly what Osama bin Laden wants.

---

By Tamim Ansary

Sept. 14, 2001: I've been hearing a lot of talk about "bombing

Afghanistan back to the Stone Age." Ronn Owens, on San Francisco's KGO Talk Radio,

conceded today 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 in the United States 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 bin 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 healthcare? 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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