 Tribute to the Victims of the
September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attacks
The Reality about the
Taliban and Osama bin Laden
By: Tamim Ansary
[This note from a friend was attached to the email with m this message. 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.]
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 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 rat's 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?
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