What follows was written as email by a columnist and author of
children's books, Tamim Ansary, a native of Afghanistan who is
living in San Francisco.  His predictions about Pakistan already
may have been overtaken by events.  Nevertheless, what he has
to say is both informative and chilling.
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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 con-
centration 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 rat's 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, inca-
pacitated, suffering.  A few years ago, the United Nations esti-
mated 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.  Be-
cause to get any troops to Afghanistan, we'd have to go
through Pakistan.  Would they let us?  Not likely.  The con-
quest of Pakistan would have to be first.  Will other Muslim
nations just stand by?  You see where I'm going.  We're flirt-
ing 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 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