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September 16,
2001
An Afghan-American's
Perspective
War On Afghanistan?
By Tamim Ansary
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 polarise 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?
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