Yesterday night I went to a birthday party held in a tall building in Chelsea. After dinner we all went to the roof from where we could see a fantastic view of the Empire State Building. Obviously all the conversations converged on last week’s tragics events, on what each of us was doing on Tuesday morning, on the hundred stories of people who saved their life for details that could be seen as totally irrelevant in a normal situation, etc. There was also lots of talk about the future. Fortunately, everyone in that party, and so far everyone I’ve met and discussed with about the current situation in the past days, think that the idea of going for a full scale war is totally wrong. This is something you can also see on faces of the hundreds of people that every night cover Union Square with a web of candles and pacifist flyers. However, there’s something that’s still missing from all the spoken and written words geared to heal the tragedy of our current lives. As the journalist Andrew Buncombe rightly points out “in the media, on the streets, in workplaces across the country and among politicians there is plenty of graphic talk about how these attacks were so casually inflicted, but there is very little discussion of why” (Better to be silent than out of step when Bush bangs the drum published by The Independent, London).
I just read The New Yorker’s “Talk of the Town”, my favorite section, and I have to say that I’m a bit disappointed. Only Susan Sontag and Hendrik Hertzerberg (his article has mysteriously been removed form the online version) seem to have a more clear idea of the reasons behind’s last week’s horrible attack. But so far the only lucid analysis of the situation (which in my opinion should be the first step in trying to find a real solution against terrorist attacks) come from overseas. Today a friend mentioned another article published by The Independent in London “Bush is walking into a trap” which for gives a better perspective on what are the real problems that we’re facing now.

American people are reacting to the blind policy of the US government and the self-imposed censure of the US media. You can visit FreeSpech.org to see the different activities that the civil society is planning to put their word out on the streets.

I received this message today. It’s the opinion of an Afghani who spent the last 35 years of his life living in the US. Worth reading it!

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 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