Subject: Afghanistan (fwd)
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 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 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
Agreed. I'll warrant that that is the last thing Osama expects, because of our well-publicised reluctance to commit any kind of ground forces to the attack on Serbia. But then his people didn't anticipate the fact that American civilians would have the courage to crash their own plane in order to prevent a terrorist strike.
I do not agree with the author's implicit contention that we must go through Pakistan. Why not do a joint operation with the Russians? Afterwards, let them govern it as a protectorate -- just our way of apologising for aiding the Mujahadeen in the first place.
Thanks so much for that post. While much was worth quoting, I chose the above, just as a reminder for potential ground troops.
Another reason is that when bin laden calls upon the afghans for new members, they are willing to take up arms to shoot women who are desperately trying to take their children to the hospital, because it is uncomely for a woman to be seen in public.
If the afghans were more than vapid, putrid, cowardly pieces of human debris, they would take bin ladin's arms, and then use them to blow his fucking head off.
Take your pathetic whining to him, Tamim, you pathetic hypocrite. Enough of my countrymen have died. It's time for his supporters to start dying.
And make no mistake about it -- any afghan who does nothing but cower before that vile monster -- or worse, accepts his arms and willingly serves in his army of rag-headed brownshirts -- is one of his staunchest supporters.
Go preach to the mullahs. You make me sick.
No, Tamim. We're not "flirting" with one, we're fighting one. Take it up with your boss bin ladin, he's the one that started it.
Our job is to finish it.