Letters from NYC

9/16/01  

 

 

My cousin sent me this perspective:

--

Marc Sabin

Vortex Taijiquan

(212) 677-0649

http://www.marcsabin.com/

 

 

To My Readers And Fellow World Citizens:

 

Just received received the below forwarded email from my friend Didi, a

lovely woman  (and Rabbi's wife) with much heart and soul.  It is written by

Tamim Ansary, an  Afghani-American writer.  Here is his take on Afghanistan

and what is going on.   It definitely gives us another perspective.  I don't

know that a "solution"  will constellate  anytime soon, yet the more

perspectives we can accept, the more compassionate our  intentions may be.

 

With compassion and love,

M. Adam Sheck

 

****************************************************************************

************

 

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 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 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 allright

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, not just

theirs but ours. Who has the belly for that?  Bin Laden does. Anyone else?

 

Tamim Ansary