I guess this will probably be deleted from the board, but I wanted to post it anyway as I think it is very thought provoking.

I don't want to start a whole thread on this subject, but would like it if people could take a few minutes to read and think about this.

I was someone who thought that "hitting hard" was the answer. Having read this it makes me wonder whether that is the way forward....


********

Dear ***** 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 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?

******

Thank you if you have read this far.....

 

This has been posted previously. It was represented as being a letter from a personal friend; either someone is posting it all over the web, or it is a fake.

We have already pointed out that the last couple of paragraphs about Pakistan are wrong and have argued over whether the concentration camp reference is accurate or insulting.

 

Previously posted. Thread closed