Entries this day: Afghanistan_POV Fear

Afghanistan POV

19 September 2001

I got this email from one of my email lists

I emailed it to the president and vice president.

I've been hearing a lot of talk about "bombing
Afghanistan back to the Stone Age."  Ron 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 deeply hates the Taliban and Osama
Bin Laden.  My hatred comes from first hand
experience.  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 would not 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?  Unfortunately, Bin
Laden does.  Anyone else?

                In Peace,

                Tamim Ansary

Fear

4:13pm Wednesday 19 September 2001

I have a fear that we're going to start shooting a bunch of missles at a bunch of islams, and then 'a terrorist' will release some anthrax or some other biological germ agent in a couple of big cities in the US.

That would suck.

There is a vaccine for anthrax, but according to some websites, it's only 20% effective if given in large doses once symptoms appear. According to other websites, the only company that makes the vaccine was sanctioned for non-quality work.