Dear Colleagues,
I am copying a letter below from an "Afghani" that was
posted on a discussion board I saw. It is a good
example that illustrates the need to make a
distinction between the actions and desires of country
leaders and those who live there (normal citizens of
the country). In other words the people are not the
government and vice versa. Therefore, they should not
be treated the same i.e., ethnic stereotyping and
racial profiling. It is a good letter to read to your
students which I will be doing with mine.
Regards,
Payam Heidary, M.A.
E-mail - [EMAIL PROTECTED]
-----------------------------
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 rat's 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 already been killed.
__________________________________________________
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