[Imc] Bombing Afghanistan?

[Wendy Edwards]

Here's an essay by an Afghan-American:

Dear Friends,

Yesterday I heard a lot of talk about "bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone
Age." Ronn Owens, on KGO Talk Radio 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," and he asked, "What else can
we do? What is your suggestion?" Minutes later I heard a TV pundit
discussing whether we "have the belly to do what must be done."

And I thought about these issues 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 been going on over there. So I want to share a few thoughts
with anyone who will listen.

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 fervently wish to see those monsters punished.

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
captured Afghanistan in 1997 and have been holding the country in bondage
ever since. Bin Laden is a political criminal with a master 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 love
for someone to eliminate the Taliban and clear out the rats nest of
international thugs holed up in their country. I guarantee it.

Some say, if that's the case, why don't the Afghans rise up and overthrow
the Taliban themselves? The answer is, they're starved, exhausted, damaged,
and incapacitated. A few years ago, the United Nations estimated that there
are 500,000 disabled orphans in Afghanistan--a country with no economy, no
food. Millions of Afghans are widows of the approximately two million men
killed during the war with the Soviets. And the Taliban has been executing
these women for being women and have buried some of their opponents alive in
mass graves. The soil of Afghanistan is littered with land mines and almost
all the farms have been destroyed . The Afghan people have tried to
overthrow the Taliban. They haven't been able to.

We come now to the question of bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age.
Trouble with that scheme is, it's already been done. The Soviets took care
of it . 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? There is no infrastructure.
Cut them off from medicine and health care? Too late. Someone already did
all that.

New bombs would only land in 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.
(They have already, I hear.) 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 be making
common cause with the Taliban--by raping once again the people they've been
raping all this time.

So what else 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. I think that when people speak of "having the belly to do what needs
to be done" many of them are thinking in terms of having the belly to kill
as many as needed. They are thinking about overcoming moral qualms about
killing innocent people. But it's the belly to die not kill that's actually
on the table. Americans will die in a land war to get Bin Laden. 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. Will other Muslim
nations just stand by?

You see where I'm going. The invasion approach is a flirtation with global
war between Islam and the West. And that is Bin Laden's program. That's
exactly what he wants and why he did this thing. Read his speeches and
statements. It's all right there.

AT the moment, of course, "Islam" as such does not exist. There are Muslims
and there are Muslim countries, but no such political entity as Islam. Bin
Laden believes that if he can get a war started, he can constitute this
entity and he'd be running it. 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 Muslim lands, that's a billion people with nothing left to
lose, even better from Bin Laden's point of view. He's probably wrong about
winning, in the end the west would probably overcome--whatever that would
mean in such a war; but the war would last for years and millions would die,
not just theirs but ours. Who has the belly for that? Bin Laden yes, but
anyone else?

I don't have a solution. But I do believe that suffering and poverty are the
soil in which terrorism grows. Bin Laden and his cohorts want to bait us
into creating more such soil, so they and their kind can flourish. We can't
let him do that. That's my humble opinion.

Tamim Ansary