| Fri, Sep 14, 2001; by Dave
Winer.
Rick Smolan 
Rick Smolan is
an old friend from the 80s. He sent me an email
this afternoon. "Dave, the following was sent to
me by a friend of Mir
Tamim Ansary. Tamim is an Afghani-American
writer. He is one of the most brilliant people I
know. Here is his take on Afghanistan and the
whole mess we are in. I know your email reaches a
lot of people and I think the following is really
worth forwarding."
Mir Tamim Ansary on
Afghanistan
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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