Global Beat Syndicate: Making Asia a Priority, Not a Threat

Warning: The War Against Terror Can Turn Into a Clash of Civilizations

By Tamim Ansary

Sept. 19, 2001

NEW YORK – In the angry aftermath of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, I've been hearing a lot of talk about “bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age” and whether Americans “have the belly to do what must be done.”

As Afghani who has lived in the United States for the past 35 year, 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 recent terrorist atrocities. Yes, something must be done about those monsters. But the Taliban and Ben Laden are not Afghanistan.

The Taliban are a cult of ignorant psychotics who took over Afghanistan in 1997. Bin Laden is a political criminal with a plan. The Afghan people not only had nothing to do with this atrocity; they were the first victims of its perpetrators. They would exult if someone would come in there, take out the Taliban and clear out the nest of international thugs holed up in their country.

Some ask why the Afghans don’t rise up and overthrow the Taliban. The answer is, they're starved, exhausted, hurt, incapacitated, suffering after nearly three decades of invasion and civil war. A few years ago, the United Nations estimated there are 500,000 disabled orphans in Afghanistan -- a country with no economy, no food. There are millions of widows. The soil is littered with land mines. 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. The trouble is, that's already been done. The Soviets took care of that. Make the Afghans suffer? They're already suffering. Level their houses? Done. Turn their schools into piles of rubble? Done. Eradicate their hospitals? Destroy their infrastructure? Cut them off from medicine and health care? Too late. Someone as already been there and done all that.

New bombs would only rearrange the rubble. And it’s highly unlikely that air strikes would hit the Taliban? In today's Afghanistan, only the Taliban have the means to move around. They would slip away and hide. But maybe the bombs would hit some of those disabled orphans. They don't move too fast. They don't even have wheelchairs.

So what can be done? Let me now speak with true fear and trembling. The only way to get Bin Laden is to go in there with ground troops. But it's much bigger than that. Why? Because to move any troops into Afghanistan, we would have to go through Pakistan. Would Pakistan let us do that? Not likely. So the conquest of Pakistan would have to be come 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 exactly what Bin Laden' wants. Read his speeches and statements –it's all right there. He really believes Islam would beat the West. 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.

Such a war would last for years, and millions would die -- not just Muslims but Americans too. Who has the belly for that? Bin Laden does. Anyone else?