Visit our website: HTTP://WWW.STOPNATO.ORG.UK
---------------------------------------------
However there is indeed one thing the US can do to Afghanistan that has not been done
yet: Plaster thr country with DU.
Sandeep
-----Original Message-----
From: Nancy Hey [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: 18 September 2001 00:57
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Do we "have the belly to do what must be done?"
[WWW.STOPNATO.ORG.UK]
Visit our website: HTTP://WWW.STOPNATO.ORG.UK
---------------------------------------------
> Do we "have the belly to do what must be done?"
> Mon, 17 Sep 2001 00:54:56 EDT
>
> >From the Baltimore Greens list:
>
> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (George Skepton)
> Read this commentary from Tamim Ansary, a writer and columnist in San
> Francisco, who comes from Afghanistan.
>
> --------------------------------------------------------
> 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 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 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. ThatâEUR(tm)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, not just theirs but ours. Who has the
> belly for that?
>
> Bin Laden does. Anyone else?
>
> Tamim Ansary
>
> _______________________________
-------------------------------------------------
This Discussion List is the follow-up for the old stopnato @listbot.com that has been
shut down
-------------------------------------------------
This Discussion List is the follow-up for the old stopnato @listbot.com that has been
shut down
==^================================================================
EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84x2u.a9spWA
Or send an email To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
This email was sent to: archive@jab.org
T O P I C A -- Register now to manage your mail!
http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/register
==^================================================================
