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Strategies & Market Trends : Winter in the Great White North -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LeonardSlye who wrote (1441)	9/20/2001 12:44:57 AM
From: Rocket Red	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 8273

Dear Friends, The following was sent to me by my friend Tamim Ansary. Tamim is an Afghani-American writer. He is also one of the most brilliant people I know in this life. When he writes, I read. When he talks, I listen. Here is his take on Afghanistan and the whole mess we are in. * Gary T. Dear Gary and whoever else is on this email thread: 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 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, and 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 .

To: LeonardSlye who wrote (1441)	9/20/2001 1:05:05 AM
From: ralfph	Respond to of 8273

Ah Leonard we luvs you man. Your post take some of us to a different level. There are seven levels of conscience. Hitler and BinLaden would be at number one. Jesus Christ. Ghandi and very few others at seven. You can fiddle around with the rest I gotta run. regards Ralfph

To: LeonardSlye who wrote (1441)	9/20/2001 10:35:14 AM
From: Stew	Respond to of 8273

The Taliban, Saddam Hussein and all other dictatorial extremists need to be eliminated and steps taken by the international community to make sure radicals never gain control of a nation's government again. Then the general population can be won over by the kind of aid that rebuilt Japan and Germany. Unfortunately some innocent people are going to have to die, from the looks of it. I hope the west isn't bamboozled by the latest ploy by the Taliban of, get this, "asking bin Laden to leave." Give me a break! P.S. Here's a bone for Bullet.<gg>

To: LeonardSlye who wrote (1441)	9/20/2001 1:42:54 PM
From: marcos	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 8273

'Imagine there's no heaven, It's easy if you try, No hell below us, Above us only sky, Imagine all the people living for today... Imagine there's no countries, It isn’t hard to do, Nothing to kill or die for, No religion too, Imagine all the people living life in peace... Imagine no possessions, I wonder if you can, No need for greed or hunger, A brotherhood of man, imagine all the people Sharing all the world... You may say Im a dreamer, but I'm not the only one, I hope some day you'll join us, And the world will live as one. ' ... yeah ... first words that came to mind when i heard about the WTC ... thought when i got to the computer about starting a thread entitled 'Imagine' with nothing in the header but the text of the song ... there was a non-denominational memorial service broadcast on friday, this was the first hymn they sang, the most fitting and the one they sang with the most heart ... lots of bandaid treat-the-symptoms temporary solutions are necessary in the near term of course, but the problems will be with us until they are addressed at their roots ... which is totally impractical, we all know the philosophy of Imagine is unworkable at this stage of the species .... but still, for some of us, for a moment while we're hearing or singing the words, it's as real as we can get Speaking of roots - ca.news.yahoo.com 'Rodhocetus, a whale that lived 47 million years ago is depicted based on new Eocene fossils from Pakistan. The ankle bones indicate a close relationship of early whales to hoofed land mammals such as hippopotami and pigs. Forefeet retain hooves on the central digits, but hind feet with slender webbed toes indicate that Rodhocetus was predominantly aquatic. Photo by Reuters (Reuters)'

To: LeonardSlye who wrote (1441)	9/20/2001 3:55:07 PM
From: gg cox	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 8273

"But still, we are they." Yes Lenny...sigh.. First paragraph from an article in Sept 17/01 Time page 35 Titled "The shame of Belfast"(young students running a gauntlet of abuse, insults and spit, to go to school) "A sign inside the front door of Holy Cross primary school in North Belfast reads, <<If we'd been born where they were born and taught what they were taught,we would believe what they believe.>>" Would we believe what they believe?..I guess we probably would..because "....... we are they." Thanks..well we can still "Imagine"<<ggg>>