[rohrpost] Fwd: PTTV

[Holger Kube_Ventura]

>From: dhalleck 
>Reply-To: pttv@lists.tao.ca 
>To: pttv@lists.tao.ca 
>Subject: [pttv]
>Date: Fri, 14 Sep 2001 14:05:54 -0400 

>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 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 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 
>overthrow 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 hae 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 
>entity 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 
> 
>a 
>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 
> 
> 
> 
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