wfn.org | Afghanistan invasion would play into Osama bin Laden's hands,

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Note #6848 from PCUSA NEWS to PRESBYNEWS:

Afghani-American writer warns
17-September-2001
01330

Afghanistan invasion would play into Osama bin Laden's hands,
Afghani-American writer warns

Terrorist mastermind seeks a West versus the Muslim world war

by Tamim Ansary

Editor's note: This is the first reflection on the Sept. 11 tragedy by an
Afghani-American writer that we've seen. His perspective is utterly unique.
It was sent to the Presbyterian News Service by the Rev. John Kleinheksel,
associate pastor of First Presbyterian Church of Red Bank, N.J. - Jerry L.
Van Marter

SAN FRANCISCO - I've been hearing a lot of talk about "bombing Afghanistan
back to the Stone Age."  Ronn Owens, on KGO Talk Radio here 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."

	I thought about the issues being raised especially hard because I am from
Afghanistan, and even though I've lived in the United States 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 and 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?

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