[Silva, LB (Leandro)]

It's really sad.....

I've receive some articles from friends who IMHO could explain these "sad"
events....

http://www.independent.co.uk/story.jsp?story=94254

and another one....

http://www.independent.co.uk/story.jsp?story=94438

and a forwared message....

Cheers and peace,

Leandro

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forwarded message:

I received this message from a cousin who is an American patriot through and
through having flown a helicopter on several tours in Vietnam. He received
this letter from a friend. I found it to be real interesting. I am sending
this to just a few of you for your information. The attachment is safe to
open. Bill Whitt
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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 NewYork. 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



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