by Tamim Ansary

       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. 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

Link to Salon.com -- where this article appears