Saturday, 15 September 2001 : "To be read in full by everyone."This is to be read in full by everyone. It contains much background information on how Afghanistan became what it is today and what more bombing would or would not achieve.Mir Tamim Ansary on Afghanistan [DaveNet] ...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. Some say, why don't the Afghans rise up and overthrow the Taliban? The answer is, they're starved, exhausted, hurt, incapacitated, suffering. ... There are millions of widows. And the Taliban has been burying these widows alive in mass graves. 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. ... New bombs would only stir the rubble of earlier bombs. ...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. ... 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? |  | Links, exploration and synthesis from Steve Bogart  photo by my wife If you want to be e-mailed when there's new stuff here, say "add me." Archives by week
Older Archives: 2001 (Aug-present) 2001 (Jan-Aug) 2000 | 1999 | 1998 Medley/AllTooCozy Entropy Genehack rc3.org GirlHacker LarkFarm Search log since Aug. 2001: Ye olde Amazon wish list  How's my HTML? How's my CSS? |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Home - Log - Services - Writing - Media - Links - About