Open brief van een Pakistaan in de US

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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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