Re: Politically Correct Response

[<DGill11331@aol.com>]

A copy of an E-mail sent to me from a friend who I guess is a friend of "Gary T.  
DGill

> Dear Friends,
>
> The following was sent to me by my friend Tamim Ansary. Tamim is an
> Afghani-American writer. He is also one of the most brilliant people I know
> in this life. When he writes, I read. When he talks, I listen. Here is his
> take on Afghanistan and the whole mess we are in.
> -Gary T.
> ----------------
>
> Dear Gary and whoever else is on this email thread:
>
> 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