Fwd: Fw: An Afghan American's point of view

[jolly roger]

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Some food for thought guy's.
Roger

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> Seems like an impossible situation, or at least a very bloody one.!!!
> Bob
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> Ann-Marie
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>   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 
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