thanks Helena, this makes sense to me,
and it is worthwhile to pass along.
kja
>This seemed worth passing along.
>
>Helena Worthen
>
>
>
>a friend sent me her Afgahni friends note. Worth reading.
>Daniel
>
>ps, feel free to disseminate
>
>Dear Friends,
>Yesterday I heard a lot of talk about "bombing Afghanistan back to the
>Stone Age." Ronn Owens, on KGO Talk Radio 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," and he asked,
>"What else can we do? What is your suggestion?" Minutes later I heard a
>TV
>pundit discussing whether we "have the belly to do what must be done."
>And I thought about these issues 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 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 Ben 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 have 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 hae 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
>So what else 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. I think that when people speak of "having the belly to do what
>needs to be done" many of them are thinking in terms of having the belly
>to
>kill as many as needed. They are thinking about overcoming moral qualms
>about killing innocent people. But it's the belly to die not kill that's
>
>actually on the table. Americans will die in a land war to get Bin
>Laden.
>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.
>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. The
>invasion
>approach is a flirtation with global war between Islam and the West.
>And that is Bin Laden's program. That's exactly what he wants and why he
>
>did this thing. Read his speeches and statements. It's all right there.
>AT
>the moment, of course, "Islam" as such does not exist. There are Muslims
>
>and there are Muslim countries, but no such political entity as Islam.
>Bin
>Laden believes that if he can get a war started, he can constitute this
>entity and he'd be running it. 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 Muslim lands, that's a billion people with nothing left to
>lose, even better from Bin Laden's point of view. He's probably wrong
>about
>winning, in the end the west would probably overcome--whatever that
>would
>mean in such a war; but the war would last for years and millions would
>die, not just theirs but ours. Who has the belly for that? Bin Laden
>yes,
>but anyone else?
>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
________________________________________________________________________________
"We live with strangers. those we love most, with whom we share a shelter,
a table, a bed, remain mysterious. Wherever lives overlap and flow
together, there are depths of unknowing." Mary Catherine Bateson, 2000,
from Full Circles, Overlapping Lives.
Kathryn Alexander, Ph.D.
Faculty of Education,
Simon Fraser University,
Burnaby, B.C. V5A 1S6 Canada
Messages for SFU: (604) 291 - 3395 /SFU FAX (604) 291 - 3203
Personal: email: kalexand@sfu.ca
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