Most of this is accurate, but it leaves out several salient points -
While the Afganis are indeed poor and starving, there are quite a few
Moslem nations that are very wealthy, like Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and
the United Arab Emerates.
If the Moslems want the Taliban and Bin Laden gone, why don't they at
least make some sort of protest against them? Stop funding them? All
we hear is "we didn't do it, don't bomb us".
Instead, when the US announced that it intended to do this dirty job
for them, 3,000 men in Pakistan (another moslem country) chanted "We
will destroy all of America. We will die for Taliban. We will die for
Islam. We will die for Osama."
I've head from many Moslems that they don't support terrorists. Fine.
But you let them live in your backyard, and you feed them with oil
money. You hide them. You deny their crimes against the Quran. You
refuse to denounce them.
Like the Nazi collaborators, if you don't resist them you're as guilty
as they are.
America does not want war with Islam, We don't want war with anybody.
War is a waste of good men and good money.
But we also can't wait for Bin Laden or his buddies to get their hands
on a nuclear or biological weapon or to kill a few thousand more
Americans (American Moslems died at WTC, too)
It's time the Islamic community worldwide denounced the idea of "holy
martyrdom" or those men in Pakistan might just get their wish, to die
for Islam and Osama.
Dan
PS - the US military is aware that bombing in Afganistan is a waste of
time and resources. That doesn't mean they intend to give up, just
change tactics to something more appropriate. And Pakistan has already
agreed to assist us, against the wishes of some of it's citizens.
On Wed, 19 Sep 2001 02:21:23 -0400, you wrote:
>Subject: This letter, by Tamim Ansary, an Afghan living in the US
> Date: Tue, 18 Sep 2001 22:34:38 EDT
>
>The person who sent this to me said: I received this from a friend yesterday.
>I cannot vouch for its veracity,
>but the person I obtained it from is very astute and has kept up with the
>conflict prior to this tradgic event.
>======================================
>
>This letter, by Tamim Ansary, an Afghan living in the US, Please read it and
>get it out to as many people as you can. thank you.
>
> Dear Friends,
>
> Yesterday I heard a lot of talk about "bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone
>Age." Ronn Owens, on KGO Talk Radio 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,"and he asked, "What else can we do?
>What is your suggestion?" Minutes later I heard a TV pundit discussing whether
>we "have the belly to do what must be done." And I thought about these issues
>specially hard because I am from Afghanistan, and even though I've lived here
>for 35 years I've never lost track of what's been going on over there. So I want
>to share a few thoughts with anyone who will listen.
>
> 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
>fervently wish to see those monsters punished.
>
> 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 captured Afghanistan in 1997 and have been holding the
>country in bondage ever since. Bin Laden is a
>political criminal with a master 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 love for someone to eliminate the Taliban and
>clear out the rats nest of international thugs holed up in their country. I
>guarantee it.
>
> Some say, if that's the case, why don't the Afghans rise up and overthrow the
>Taliban themselves? The answer is, they're starved, exhausted, damaged, and
>incapacitated. A few years ago, the United Nations estimated that there are
>500,000 disabled orphans in Afghanistan--a country with no economy, no food.
>
> Millions of Afghans are widows of the approximately two million men killed
>during the war with the Soviets. And the Taliban has been executing these women
>for being women and have buried some of their opponents alive in mass graves.
>The soil of
>Afghanistan is littered with land mines and almost all the farms have been
>destroyed. The Afghan people have tried to verthrow
>the Taliban. They haven't been able to.
>
> We come now to the question of bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age.
>Trouble with that scheme is, it's already been
>done. The Soviets took care of it. 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? There is no infrastructure. Cut
>them off from medicine and health care? Too late. Someone already did all that.
>
> New bombs would only land in 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. (They have already, I
>hear.) 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 be making common cause with the Taliban--by raping once
>again the people they've been raping all this time.
>
> So what else 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. I think that
>when people speak of "having the belly to do what needs to be done" many of them
>are thinking in terms of having the belly to kill as many as needed. They are
>thinking about overcoming moral qualms about killing innocent people. But it's
>the belly to die not kill that's actually on the table. Americans will die in a
>land war to get Bin Laden. 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. 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. The
>invasion approach is a flirtation with global war between Islam and the West.
>
> And that is Bin Laden's program. That's exactly what he wants and why he did
>this thing. Read his speeches and statements.
>It's all right there. At the moment, of course, "Islam" as such does not exist.
>There are Muslims and there are Muslim countries,
>but no such political entity as Islam. Bin Laden believes that if he can get a
>war started, he can constitute this entit and he'd be
>running it. 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 holocaust in
>Muslim lands, that's a billion people with nothing
>left to lose, even better from Bin Laden's point of view. He's probably wrong
>about winning, in the end the west would probably overcome--whatever that would
>mean in such a war; but the war would last for years and millions would die, not
>just theirs but ours. Who has the belly for that? Bin Laden yes, but anyone
>else?
>
> I don't have a solution. But I do believe that suffering and poverty are the
>soil in which terrorism grows. Bin Laden and his cohorts want to bait us into
>creating more such soil, so they and their kind can flourish. We can't let him
>do that. That's my humble opinion.
>
> Tamim Ansary
>
>*********************
>
>He might be right,
>-J
>
>
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Oct 08 2001 - 10:59:00 PDT