[nukkad] FW: Different perspective - source unknown - long mail

["Sathiaseelan, Shyamala" <>]

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  Tamim, a writer and columnist in San Francisco, who comes
from Afghanistan. This is very, very interesting and a little
chilling....
  * * * *
  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?

Mir Tamim Ansary.
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It's hard to make a comeback when you haven't been anywhere.
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Shyamala Sathiaseelan,
EDS Ireland Ltd, Treasury Building, 
Lr. Grand Canal St., Dublin 2.
Ph:+353 1 7039235.
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