The Belly to do what needs to be done
BY TAMIM ANSARY
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 New
York. I agree that something must be done about those monsters.
But the Taliban and
Bin 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 landmines, 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. 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. Osama 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 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?
(Courtesy: znet.org; The above article was also published in The
Indian Express)