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