Afghani writer compares Taliban to nazi regime >

> Subject: War
>
> The following was posted by Tamim Ansary, an Afghani-American writer, to
an
> internet group I belong to. He
> has given permission for it to be circulated. I feel that he outlines the
> problems only too well. Such a scary future
> ...
>>>>
>
> 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?
>
> ??