A friend forwarded this to me and I felt compelled, amid all the flag-waving and chest-thumping, to pass it on.

I don't believe that Americans really understand the hornet's nest we'll be stirring up if we wage a full-scale war against bin Laden and his acolytes. It's a quagmire anyway you look at it.


This is a good summation of what is going on from an Afghani (now living in
SF) point of view:

Tamim is an Afghani-American writer living in the Bay Area.

"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 is 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 Ben 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 i s 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. 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 these
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?"

Tamim Ansary