email28.xml

email28.xml

born-digital

email

unknown

yes

2002-02-27

XXX,

I'm having a lot of trouble agreeing with anything on this subject. If the
US doesn't respond, I think we can expect subsequent terrorist attacks here.
If the US does respond, I think we can expect subsequent terrorist attacks
here. We must get on with our lives, but I'm pretty damn frightened by
what's going on.

Part of me wants to just take off for the mid-west for awhile and rent a
cabin in the middle of nowhere. All of our friends would, of course, be
welcome to seek refuge with us. :-)

Here's an article written by an Afghani-American writer. I think you'll
find it interesting, if you don't agree with its contents. Personally, I
find it terrifying, because most of what he says seems to be grounded in
some very painful facts.

Much love,

Kev

-----------------------------

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?

September 22

Is peace smart?