posted 09-20-2001 11:57 PM         

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, 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?

posted 09-23-2001 11:31 PM         

quote:

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I could not agree with that statement more. He left one thing out. The second we attack them in any form, we risk having 1000 people rise to defend their dead "cousin" for each person killed for the above reasons, AND, they WILL attack us more to provoke us into doing massive bombing retaliation, just so they can have the war they want. Are we ready to loose entire city's over this?

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I think more is to come.

But go live your life normal. This is the only one you have. so enjoy, Tell people around you that you love them spend all the money that you can and get the USA BACK!