Afghani Perspective

Dear Friends and Family,

As an American, a New Yorker and an Afghan, I have struggled with many feelings. I have wondered what I can do to educate people about the state of affairs in Afghanistan now and over the past 20 years. The Soviets invaded Afghanistan in December of 1979, it is September 2001 and my father's country has been destroyed day by day for over two decades.

I am disgusted by the Taliban and Osama bin Laden. For my family, these have been household names for years prior to the tragedies we witnessed on Tuesday. My father has spent years trying to get people in our government to listen - he has sat around our dinner table talking to his children for hours on end about what was happening to his homeland - so many of our friends have listened as my Dad spoke passionately about the hateful crimes the Taliban was committing against innocent Afghans all in the name of Islam, an Islam that my family does not know, an Islam that cannot be found in the pages of the Koran. I beg you, as friends, to take the anger we all feel and try to learn and spread knowledge.

We all want retaliation. We want someone to pay for the innocent people whose lives were taken away. But, please, please, please understand that Afghans like me and my family have never supported the Taliban. In fact, we have watched helplessly as these cowards took the little bit of dignity the Afghans had left after the Soviet war. I went to work the other night and watched groups of friends, bright and educated people, stop their conversations as I approached. I have never experienced anything like this. My Dad recently grew a beard, but after seeing images of bearded fundamentalists on TV, we have asked him to shave it off to quell any possibility of attacks out of ignorance. For the first time in my life, I am afraid to tell people my ethnic background. My name is a liability. My coloring makes me feel scared when people look at me on the subway. I find myself thankful that my sisters and Mom have lighter coloring.

Please read the following letter. We all feel helpless right now. If nothing else, please try to educate your friends. Please do not perpetuate hate. Hatred brought down the World Trade Center. Hate is hate-there is no gray area.

Please forward the following letter to everyone you know. Take a moment to paste the letter into a new email, add your own thoughts so that people don't just skip by a subject heading that begins with FWD:.

It is very possible that we will bomb Afghanistan in the coming days. Maybe emails like this will not stop that from happening, but let's not pretend that we do not know that those actions will kill innocent and helpless people who have lived under the terror of the Taliban for years. We turned our backs for so long. We have not written about them, or if we have, we have not read those articles, we skipped past them. People did not know where Afghanistan was until three days ago. How is that possible? Bin Laden was behind the first WTC bombing, the bombing of the Cole and the embassies in Africa-ask yourself, how did we not pay attention? Pay attention now. Know what is going on in our world. All we have is hope, unity and the ability to open our eyes. Open them.

With much love,

Yasmine

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.

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 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