Dear Fellow Americans,
From what I have been able to learn, we stand a better chance of
supporting anti-Taliban forces in northern Afghanistan than a direct
invasion or massive nuclear options. I support the President of the
United States.
The overthrow of the Taliban government by a coalition of forces is the
best way to proceed. Then we also destroy Bin Laden's base of operations
there.
It will take YEARS to search out the terrorist cells and organization
around the world. Have patience, Remember that Freedom is not free, it
is bought and paid for in blood, sweat and tears.
I would also like to encourage all of us to support OUR fellow Citizens
of the United States that are of Islamic or Arabic heritage. They have
the unique ability to aid the United States.
They can help teach us the face of the extremist enemy.
They can help us by looking for terrorists infiltrating America.
They can stand by their fellow Americans shoulder to shoulder in what we
need to do as a country.
Support the Constitution and the Bill of Rights of the United States!
Remember the Twin Towers!
John R. Carpenter
La Mesa, CA
From:
"Jack Frosty" <j_frosty(a)hotmail.com>
Wed 9:47 PM
Subject:
Bombing Afghanistan ?
I have to agree with this ,we also should learn from the Russian
experience over there. Un like what we learned from the french in
Vietnam.
John L. Carpenter
NH
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, 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