Thank you, Sarah, for sending me this. I will share it with as many folks
as I can.

Kim


>> Dear Friends,
>> The following was sent to me by my friend Tamim Ansary. Tamim is an
>> Afghani-American writer. He is also one of the most brilliant people I
>> know in this life. When he writes, I read. When he talks, I listen.
>> Here is his take on Afghanistan and the whole mess we are in.
>> -Gary T.
>>
>>
>> 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 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?
>>
>> Tamim Ansary
Kim Edward Renz
University of Tennessee at Chattanooga
Fine Arts Center, Department 1351
615 McCallie Avenue
Chattanooga, Tennessee 37403
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