I’ve been hearing a lot of talk about “bombing Afghanistan back to the
Stone Age.” Talk-radio hosts and callers allow that this will mean killing
innocent people, people who had nothing to do with this atrocity, but, they
say, “We’re at war; we have to accept collateral damage. What else can we do?”
I heard some TV pundit discussing whether we “have the belly to do what must
be done.”
And I thought hard about the issues being raised, especially 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 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.
Because to get any troops to Afghanistan, we’d have to go through Pakistan.
Would they let us? Not likely. 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.
Who has the belly for that? Bin Laden does. Anyone else?
Tamin Ansary writes for AlterNet, where this article first
appeared.
