Re: an afghani-american's view

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: I agree whole-heartedly with you Paula. Are you familiar with the book Ishmael? It really irrevocably changed my mind on many things. There is an illustration in that book of a man who builds a flying machine and pushes it off a cliff. As he plummets to the ground he works frantically to keep it flapping. About 15 feet from the ground he says, "Well, so far so good." : At the heart of my views on many things is a belief that the West has been doomed for years. This culture has pushed carrying capacity beyond concievable limits... and the tragedy is that it will only crash harder. I don't know if recent events are actually fulfilling anything, Christian or otherwise. People always get this way when a major crisis arrises. But it is definitely an opportunity to examine what we thought was flying so well. : Rest assured though, that regardless of what happens it is not the end of life... perhaps life as we know it, but not life. The world needs those who can see things from different perspectives. The world needs people who protest in the streets. And the world needs people who are willing to follow others into death for what they believe. But the world also needs those who refuse to play the games. Where we each fit is between us and God. : There truly will be no winners. Hopefully out of the ashes something better will be born. But not likely. We'll probably follow the same dynastic cycle of over-growth and crash that the world has seen in every society. The only societies I can think of that don't follow this pattern are the indigienous ones who stay close to their roots and to the essentials. For these people the world tumults around them and even mass destruction cannot eliminate them from the earth all together. : And then this could all blow by and nothing could come of it at all, and all of our ramblings and fears would be useless. As Candide said of all Dr. Pangloss's philosophizing, "Well said, but we must cultivate our garden." : In the end, all that really matters is that we have food, shelter, and spiritual peace. : : I don't think there are words to properly honor what this man has written. We saw some of this on the news last night and it's tragic. The truth in this matter is so heavy it's suffocating. There will be no winners. This is the real stuff. The Hopis prophesized years ago that the West would end up on their bellies trying to survive. Here we are and here we go. God bless the world. : : : : : as of this writing this is available at: : : : <a href="http://davenet.userland.com/2001/09/14/tamimAnsaryOnAfghanistan">http://davenet.userland.com/2001/09/14/tamimAnsaryOnAfghanistan</a> : : : thoughts from an Afghani-American... : : : 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, and 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

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