This was posted on another forum by someone I talk to.....any thoughts on this post?
"This was sent to me from a friend and is supposedly written by an American that is from Afghanistan."
> 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? Don. 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
>
>
April
"Love never dies." Voivodul Vlad Draculea (from Bram Stoker's Dracula-1992)