---------------------- multipart/alternative attachment > Some food for thought guy's. Roger > > > > Seems like an impossible situation, or at least a very bloody one.!!! > Bob > > > > > > > > Ann-Marie > > 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 > > > > > -------------------------------------------------------------------------- > ---- > > ========================================================================== > ==== ---------------------- multipart/alternative attachment An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: https://www.moypiano.com/ptg/pianotech.php/attachments/86/56/c1/9b/attachment.htm ---------------------- multipart/alternative attachment--
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