[Reader-list] more on tuesday

Mon Sep 17 09:37:42 IST 2001

I am forwarding a letter from an American man who was born in Afghanistan and an article from The Guardian, printed last week.....sobering

>>Dear Colleagues,

As we reflect upon the tragic events of this week and an appropriate 
"response," I thought you might like to see this letter from my college 
roommate, Tamim Ansary, who grew up in Afghanistan.  I think he offers an 
interesting perspective on Bin Laden, the Taliban, and Afghanistan.

Toivo Kallas
Department of Biology & Microbiology

Date: Thu, 13 Sep 2001 10:14:27 -0700

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

-- 

Mark Marnocha   PhD   Clinical Psychologist
Fox Valley Family Practice  -  229 S. Morrison    Appleton   WI  54911
920-738-8434      920-730-1592 

___________________________________________________________________

Americans cannot ignore what their government does abroad

Special report: Terrorism in the US

Seumas Milne
Thursday September 13, 2001
The Guardian

Nearly two days after the horrific suicide attacks on civilian workers in New York and Washington, it has become painfully clear that most Americans simply don't get it. From the president to passersby on the streets, the message seems to be the same: this is an inexplicable assault on freedom and  democracy, which must be answered with overwhelming force - just as soon as someone can  construct a credible  account of who was actually responsible. Shock, rage and grief there has been aplenty. But any glimmer of recognition of why people might have been driven to carry out such atrocities,  sacrificing their own lives in the process - or why the United States is hated with such bitterness, not only in Arab and Muslim countries, but across the  developing world - seems almost entirely absent. Perhaps it is too much to hope  that, as rescue workers struggle to pull firefighters from the rubble, any but a small minority might make the connection between what has been visited upon  them and what their government has visited upon large parts of the world.

But make that connection they must, if such tragedies are not to be repeated, potentially with even more  devastating consequences. US political leaders are doing their people no favours by reinforcing popular  ignorance with self-referential rhetoric. And the echoing chorus of Tony Blair, whose determination to bind Britain ever closer to US foreign policy ratchets up the threat to our own cities, will only fuel anti-western sentiment. So will calls for the defence of "civilisation", with its overtones of Samuel  Huntington's poisonous theories of post-cold war confrontation between the west and Islam, heightening perceptions of racism and hypocrisy. 

As Mahatma Gandhi famously remarked when asked his opinion of western civilisation, it would be a good  idea. Since George Bush's father inaugurated his new world order a decade ago, the US, supported by its British  ally, bestrides the world like a colossus. Unconstrained by any superpower  rival or system of global governance, the US giant has rewritten the global  financial and trading system in its own interest; ripped up a string of treaties it finds inconvenient; sent troops to every corner of the globe; bombed Afghanistan, Sudan, Yugoslavia and Iraq without troubling the United Nations; maintained a string of murderous embargos against recalcitrant regimes; and recklessly thrown its weight behind Israel's 34-year illegal military occupation of the 
West Bank and Gaza as the Palestinian intifada rages.

If, as yesterday's Wall Street Journal insisted, the east coast carnage  was the fruit of the Clinton  administration's Munich-like appeasement of the Palestinians, the mind boggles as to what US Republicans imagine to be a Churchillian response.

It is this record of unabashed national egotism and arrogance that drives anti-Americanism among swaths of the world's population, for whom there is little democracy in the current distribution of global wealth and 
power. If it turns out that Tuesday's attacks were the work of Osama bin Laden's supporters, the sense that the Americans are once again reaping a dragons' teeth  harvest they themselves sowed will be overwhelming.

It was the Americans, after all, who poured resources into the 1980s war against the Soviet-backed regime in Kabul, at a time when girls could go to school and women to work. Bin Laden and his mojahedin were armed and trained by the CIA and MI6, as Afghanistan was turned into a wasteland and its communist leader Najibullah left hanging from a Kabul lamp post with his genitals stuffed in his mouth. 

But by then Bin Laden had turned against his American sponsors, while US-sponsored Pakistani intelligence had spawned the grotesque Taliban now protecting him. To punish its wayward Afghan offspring, the US subsequently forced through a sanctions regime which has helped push 4m to the brink of starvation, according to the latest UN figures, while Afghan refugees fan out across the world.                         

All this must doubtless seem remote to Americans desperately searching the debris of what is expected to be the largest-ever massacre on US soil - as must the killings of yet more Palestinians in the West Bank  yesterday, or even the 2m estimated to have died in Congo's wars since the overthrow of the US-backed
Mobutu regime. "What could some political thing have to do with blowing up office buildings during working hours?" one bewildered New Yorker asked yesterday.

Already, the Bush administration is assembling an international coalition for an Israeli-style war against terrorism, as if such counter-productive acts of outrage had an existence separate from the social conditions out of which they arise. But for every "terror network" that is rooted out, another will emerge -
until the injustices and inequalities that produce them are addressed. 

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