Sam I Am

This was passed to me by Rear Admiral Jim Austin, my skipper on ENTERPRISE.
It is worth reading and considering;

Dear Friends,
The following was sent to me by my friend Tamim Ansary. Tamim is an
Afghani-American writer. He is also one of the most brilliant people I know
in this life. When he writes, I read. When he talks, I listen. Here 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." 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 NewYork.
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,
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