taliban

needsome

Make what you will of this...just received it by email....
Taliban


> Hello everyone,
> The following was posted here by a co-worker on our companies internal. It
> comes from her friend, Tamim, a writer and columnist in San Francisco.
> Incidentally, Tamin is originally from Afghanistan. It is a very well
> thought out, rational and thought provoking commentary.
>
> --- In light of Tuesdays tragedy and the unthinkable idea of what is yet
> to come, I thought I should share this with as many people as possible.
> 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 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 deeply hates the Taliban and Osama Bin
> Laden. My hatred comes from first hand experience. 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 would not 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? Unfortunately, Bin Laden does. Anyone else? In Peace, Tamim Ansary
>

Trev M

I happen to believe at this point in time, that the aim is definitley to polarise the whole thing into the West V Islam, consequently its going to be long and dirty. Diplomacy will inevitably fail at this point , Bush is an imbicile, and the allies already ****ed up by blindly pledging immediate support for the US whilst being completely unaware of the details of any responsibility and any resulting actions(this will be the justification for countries acting against the US and its allies)....now we(As Europeans or Westies) have to live with the consequences of George the Imbicile and all who have acted like lap dogs in the west. As terrible as the whole thing is, the west has shown a dazzling display in terms of lack of leadership in my view....last week was a time for level headedness instead of knee jerk reactions of complete support for US retalliation(see the Italian response), now everyone is trying to back track, Blair is flying to the States on Thursday, the EU have called an emergency meeting to discuss a diplomatic initiative................too late, should have happened last week; instead everyone started mouthing off about war on the "civilised word??" so here we go, all to hell riding the ICBM all the way.

Do people realise how many people are about to die, it seems to me like the media are acting like its a game of chess or something for **** sake.

Well there's my two bits on it, I believe that the root causes should be addressed, I don't fully understand what they are myself...perhaps it is US foreign policy, perhaps its religious intolerance, or maybe its pure racism on both sides but nobody wants to admit it. I am very sure that Bush and the American media are preparing for a frenzy of attacks and American people fuelled by a grotesque media will crave for an on going bitter revenge that can only result in the loss of God knows how many innocents.

Peter Vamos

Just one little point:

The US taught these terrorists how to do this in the first place. The chickens have come home to roost.

Sinister Pete

More Food for thought:

THE PRESS UNDER SCRUTINY: ACCEPTED VS. CRITICAL COMMENTARY

Despite the spreading sense of powerlessness that has struck many Americans, there IS something we can do in response to Tuesday's catastrophe.

Considering the way journalism now works in America, we can expect something more from the mainstream media than what we got during the O.J. Simpson trial, the South Central L.A. riots, the Monica Lewinsky scandal, the death of Princess
Diana, the World Trade Center bombing and other huge stories of recent years.

As the Bush Jr. administration asks Congress for $20 billion and a blank check to go to war, instead of allowing the news media to issue reports from Washington without question, we can seek critical commentary and open debate - if not in the mainstream, then somewhere else. For example:

* When government officials announced that the United States has "got to eradicate the very idea of training camps for terrorists," it was nice to be reminded early on, thanks to independent journalist Michael Moore ("Roger and Me") at
http://www.alternet.org, that our very own CIA runs terrorism camps throughout the world and was responsible for the training of the prime suspect, Osama Bin Laden, during the war in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union (he was 22).

This kind of irony seemed lost on the mainstream media in what seemed to be an attempt, as in the Gulf War, to get on the bandwagon and support the President.

Even Christiana Amanpour skimmed over the fact that bin Laden was CIA-trained in her report on CNN. NPR did air a critical commentary about it with the BBC, but the context of the discussion was the superficiality of American journalism
and the reasons why facts like these don't get reported.

* News anchors and political "experts" kept saying Tuesday's attacks were the result of "a massive failure of U.S. intelligence." But the point they missed was that we didn't need spies to tell us what bin Laden was planning. He had
announced it several times.

In "Did We See It Coming?" Alexander Cockburn at Creators Syndicate (writing for http://www.workingforchange.com)
reveals that only three weeks ago bin Laden told the editor of the London-based al-Quds al-Arabi newspaper that he planned "very, very big attacks against American interests."

Cockburn writes,"Here is bin Laden, probably the most notorious Islamic foe of America on the planet, originally trained by the CIA, planner of other successful attacks on US installations such as the embassies in East Africa, carrying a $5 million FBI bounty on his head proclaiming the imminence of another assault, and US intelligence was impotent."

When, finally, ABC showed videos in which Osama bin Laden made similar threats, Ted Koppel and a commentator talked about bin Laden's penchant for "predicting" terrorist attacks, but never asked why the United States government didn't act on
this information.

Why didn't they? To Cockburn this kind of blindness" was typical "of almost all Tuesday's mainstream political commentary." Newscasters and the experts they called in jumped on the Osama bin Laden bandwagon and were "incapable of explaining with any depth" the other possibilities (Palestinian, Iraqi) that should have been explored early on.

* Let's say the government had reason NOT to believe Osama bin Laden's threats. That means journalists were right to believe that the United States was "taken completely by surprise," yes? No, says Ariana Huffington at
http://www.overthrowthegov.com.

Huffington reminds us that seven months ago, the U.S. Commission on National Security, headed by former senators Warren Rudman and Gary Hart, "released a prophetic report predicting this kind of terrorist assault on U.S. soil."

The report concluded "that the question was not if a terrorist attack on America could happen, but when."

Much of Washington ignored the report, but that's no excuse for the fact that the media missed the significance of its findings, says Huffington. "The sad fact is that the media should have known what the real danger was - and should have
told us."

That function - the drudgery of sorting through the many to find the newsworthy few - is the job of the American press, she says. "Forewarned is forearmed. And there is no doubt that we all would have been better prepared if the media had
focused 10% of the energy and resources it spent obsessing about Gary Condit on talking about the findings of the National Security Commission."

* Perhaps the worst indictment was leveled at one of the nation's newspapers of record, however, this time by Nina Burleigh at http://www.tompaine.com.


"The morning after the worst terrorist attack in history," she writes, "the nation's great editorial page editors have offered up
the wisdom of a group of middle-aged white men whose claim to fame is that they lost the Vietnam war.

"And on a day when every television and newspaper hack around the country was proclaiming 'a new era' in national defense needs, the Washington Post...solicited the wisdom of a pair of Nixon Administration chicken hawks. The New York
Times gave readers the advice of its resident ex-Nixon speech writer.

"It is not impossible to find smart people in this country with new ideas about terrorism and how to go about fighting it. One
of them is Jessica Stern of the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, formerly with the Clinton Administration National Security Agency. Stern spent the last several years interviewing the men and boys in Pakistan whose most fervent dream is
to die the sort of death the hijackers died yesterday. Stern and others like her have taken the time to learn a little Urdu and face the enemy on enemy ground, to find out how he thinks and perhaps learn ways to foil diabolical plans."

The traditional press has opened up somewhat to other points of view since then, but as Burleigh concludes, "for the Post and Times to trot out these failed policy makers on this terrible day-after is evidence of profound reliance on outworn thinking to address dangerous new territory."

* George W. Bush's idea of stopping the "evil" by "hunting down" a defined and located enemy through immediate and aggressive military strikes was seldom if ever challenged in the press.
But Elija Wald at http://www.tompaine.com is one of many outside the mainstream to react in horror: "If we want a safer world in this situation, we cannot achieve it militarily," he writes. "For decades, the United States has acted as if, as the
world's most powerful nation, it could safely explore violent solutions to international issues, while itself remaining inviolate."

Indeed the real experts, the ones who live in the Middle East and, like William O. Beeman, have monitored developments in Afghanistan from nearby countries (in his case Tajikistan), are rarely if ever brought forward in the American press.

Beeman is one of many who cautions us to listen to, and try to understand, Osama bin Laden, before we make him the target of war. Writing for the Pacific News Service (available at http://www.pacificnews.org), Beeman says that bin Laden has been "mischaracterized as an anti-American terrorist. He should rather be thought of as someone who would do
anything to protect Islam."

Beeman lays out a brief history in which bin Laden is seen less as the "madman" Bush has labeled him and more as "a true ideologue" who since the Gulf War has considered it his mission to stop the United states from "occupying the lands of Islam
in the holiest of places." Says Beeman: "Bin Laden will not cease his opposition until the United States leaves the region."

How I wish Beeman had been on TV to issue this statement: "Above all, Americans need to remember that the rest of the world has an absolute right to self-determination that is as defensible as our own. A despicable act of terror such as that
committed in New York and Washington is a measure of the revulsion that others feel at U.S. actions that seemingly limit those rights. If we perpetuate a cycle of hate and revenge, this conflict will escalate into a war that our great-grandchildren will be fighting."

* We did learn from the press that Bush wants "sweeping powers of war" from Congress because he considers this conflict as a matter of "the good guys against the bad guys." He wants to move quickly so that Americans will not forget their
outrage, their hatred and their need for revenge toward Osama bin Laden.

It probably would be unAmerican for the traditional press to invite spiritual leaders to comment on this way of thinking, but why not? Why don't we encourage every point of view possible when we teeter on the brink of World War III?

Tony Miksak, owner of the Gallery Bookshop in Mendocino, California, is also a commentator for KZYX FM, and this week quoted the Dalai Lama - "though anger brings us more energy, that energy is essentially a blind one. There is no guarantee
that the anger and energy will not become destructive to our own interests."

* Watching news coverage of the attacks and aftermath since Tuesday, I keep wondering, what's holding the press back? Why DON'T these editors and producers bring in people who question, criticize, argue, contradict or damn the approved
point of view?

Perhaps Huffington is right: American media, she says, is "shying away from issues of vital importance out of fear of scaring viewers away. Better to bury their heads in the sand."

Thank heaven, then, for the press that does get through. In the websites mentioned here - TomPaine.com, WorkingforChange.com, OverthrowTheGov.com, AlterNet.org, PacificNews.org and in others - spirited discussion is
offered from all angles, leaving it up to readers to decide for themselves.

Aspro

Fantastic post, Needsome. Well done. The more people that see the reality and the truth in posts like that, the better. Because at the end of the day whether it's Afghan civilians or American soldiers it's ordinary people being sent to the slaughter to protect the interests of the rich and powerful. Yes, it's about international terrorism but more importantly it's about OIL and Americas continued control of Middle East reserves. For Afghanistan substitute Iraq. For Bin Laden substitute Saddam Hussein. See what I'm getting at? For a better insight to media wars, propaganda and the role of the major powers in our ****ed up world, everyone should read "Hidden Agendas" by John Pilger - probably the best and one of the few truth seeking journalists in the world. The book is brilliant. Talk about digging up the dirt. All the stuff you won't see on Sky News, RTE, BBC, UTV etc. etc.

Nellys Belly

You will be glad to hear that our government are trying to let the US know that a knee jeck reaction is not the way to go
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