Forgiveness

Re: [spiers] Forgiveness

Another perspective from another discussion group...

Letter by Tamim Ansary, an Afghan-American woman
> 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 Bin 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 have 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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