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Smoke rises from the village of Esferghich, Afghanistan, 50 kilometers (31 miles) from Kabul on Saturday, Nov. 3, 2001. U.S. planes began attacking targets along the Kabul front before dawn Saturday and continued into the day. Opposition forces said the Americans struck Taliban tanks and a Taliban hilltop headquarters. (AP Photo/Marco Di Lauro) - Nov 03 3:31 PM ET |
This "war on terrorism" has turned into a war against the Afghan government, which until recently was receiving millions of dollars in U.S. aid. If we were truly serious about going after governments whose countries are the breeding grounds and paymasters for terrorists, why aren't we bombing Saudi Arabia (the center of radical Wahabbism) and Egypt? The terrorists who struck this country were Saudi and Egyptian nationals, not Afghans or Talibans.
This war on terrorism is a fraud. We're not hunting terrorists; we're engaged in nation-building. In other words, we're once again meddling in the domestic affairs of another country and making plenty of enemies in the process.
Our imperial leaders in Washington will never learn. They insist on sticking this nation's collective hand into every hornets' nest from Tel Aviv to Kabul, and then they wonder why we get stung. If the U.S. government is serious about fighting terrorism, it should start by putting an end to its arrogant, bullying foreign policy -- an in-your-face, high-handed attitude that breeds anti-American hatred around the world. We've given a lot of people in the Middle East and now central Asia plenty of reasons to hate our guts. And as we've seen, some of those angry people are driven to suicidal acts of revenge.
If we're serious about getting Osama bin Laden, let's issue letters of Marque (Letters of Reprisal) and post a $1 billion reward for his capture -- dead or alive. Short of committing hundreds of thousands of troops to a ground war, we're not going to flush him and his lieutenants out of their mountain lairs in Afghanistan. Even if we manage to defeat the Taliban (a highly unlikely scenario), we'll merely succeed in replacing one gang of misfits with an even more brutal gang of Northern Alliance thugs and cutthroats who terrorized the populace during its reign of anarchy. The Taliban actually brought stability to the region.
I don't want our young servicemen to die in a nation-building scheme that will pave the way for some bloated multinational petroleum company (Onoco) to run a pipeline across Aghanistan to a port in Karachi, Pakistan. There's more to this "war" than meets the eye.