www.salon.com/news/feature/2001/09/14/afghanistan/index.html -> dir.salon.com/news/feature/2001/09/14/afghanistan/index.html
But you can start a new world war, and that's exactly what Osama bin Laden wants. 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. The Taliban are a cult of ignorant psychotics who took over Afghanistan in 1997. 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. 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. In today's Afghanistan, only the Taliban eat, only they have the means to move around. Maybe the bombs would get some of those disabled orphans; 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. 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. And not just because some Americans would die fighting their way through Afghanistan to Bin Laden's hideout. Because to get any troops to Afghanistan, we'd have to go through Pakistan. We're flirting with a world war between Islam and 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; 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. Sound Off Send us a 44 Letter to the Editor Related Links 45 Complete Salon coverage of the terrorist attacks: shim 46 salon | 47 search | 48 premium | 49 tabletalk | 50 the WELL | 51 about salon | 52 report error | 53 about the directory shim Reproduction of material from any Salon pages without written permission is strictly prohibited Copyright 2003 Salon Media Group, Inc.
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