Here's a letter from an Afghan native who is now a published author living in the US
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.”
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 2,000,000 million men killed during the
war with the Soviets. The soil of Afghanistan is littered with
land mines and almost all the farms have been destroyed.
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. New bombs would only land in the rubble of earlier
bombs. Flying over Kabul and dropping bombs wouldn’t
really be a strike against the criminals who did this horrific
thing.
I don’t have a solution. But I do believe that suffering
and poverty are the soil in which terrorism grows. Bin
Laden and his cohorts want to bait us into creating more
such soil, so they and their kind can flourish. We can’t let
him do that.
— Tamim Ansary
link: msnbc.com |
