"Why we should not bomb Afghanistan"
by Tamim Ansary
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