[Peace] [illinoisgreens] Afghan perspective (fwd)

[Jim Buell]

Another cross-post well worth pondering and sharing.

Jim

----
In the wake of the Sept. 11 tragedy, I invite you to consider:
A personal plea - http://www.students.uiuc.edu/~jbuell/911/
A bracing dose of sanity - http://www.commondreams.org
----

---------- Forwarded message ----------
To: illinoisgreens at yahoogroups.com
Subject: [illinoisgreens] Afghan perspective

Based on my personal experience as a UN peacekeeper in a country
almost as poor as Afghanistan, Cambodia, and my "book" knowledge of
Afghanistan, this letter rang true with me.

Carl

> This letter was forwarded to me. It's from an
> Afghanistani man who lives here in the U.S.

Dear Friends, 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 has 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. 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



----------------------
To Post a message, send it to:   illinoisgreens at eGroups.com
TO SUBSCRIBE to the illinoisgreens at egroups.com list send a message to illinoisgreens-subscribe at egroups.com
To Unsubscribe, send a blank message to: illinoisgreens-unsubscribe at eGroups.com

Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/