I've been hearing a lot of talk about "bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age."
Ron 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 deeply hates the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden. My hatred
comes from first hand experience. 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
would not 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?
Unfortunately, Bin Laden does. Anyone else?
In Peace,
Tamim Ansary