Essay on Afganistan

[William Stephany <wps3@po.cwru.edu>]

I feel this essay I received as an email today is worth sharing on the

listserver since the topic of the WTC attack still  commands our attention.

So... here  it is.  A sobering essay forwarded by a UC Berkeley professor.

The author, Tamim Ansary, is an Afghani-American writer. This is his take on

Afghanistan and the whole mess we are in. ----



I've been hearing a lot of talk about "bombing Afghanistan back to the

Stone Age." 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 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?







Bill Stephany, Ph. D., CHP

Assistant Director, D.O.E.S.

Case Western Reserve University









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