Klarinet Archive - Posting 000608.txt from 2001/09

From: David Renaud <studiorenaud@-----.com>
Subj: [kl] Victims of Talaban/interesting thoughts
Date: Tue, 18 Sep 2001 09:09:09 -0400

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.
-
..............
....................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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