The following is purported to be a direct quote from a posting by an

Afghani-American writer to a popular newsgroup. I personally have

no doubt as to the authenticity of what’s said.

Dear Gary and whoever else is on this email thread:

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 Bin 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 Nazi SS. 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 rat's 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; 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?

~ Tamim Ansary