Wim Wenders and the
words of Tamim Ansary
I read an article in a German newspaper
written by a writer and columnist from San Francisco, Tamim
Ansary, a native of Afghanistan, but living in the US for a
long time already. I was very impressed by what he had to say.
While I tried to get the English original
from the newspaper, in order to send it to all my friends
in America, some of them e-mailed me the text simultaneously…
They felt, like me, that as many people as possible should read
this. As I agree with them, and as some of you might not be
familiar with it, I hereby publish it on my web-site, too. This
article should be "public domain", anyway, in the
best sense of the word.
Please distribute this if you will...
Remarks below are from Tamim Ansary, a writer and columnist
in San Francisco, a native of Afghanistan. It's both interesting
and chilling....
________________________________________________________
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 rat's 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
--------------
Wim
Wenders
LIVE/LIFE
We all
saw it on TV.
Most of us saw it live.
None of us will ever forget it.
Some of us wish we hadn't seen it.
Did we want to see it?
Weren't we rather forced to see it?
Wasn't it like witnessing your worst nightmare,
only you knew there was no waking up from it?
Wasn't it like seeing a movie, only it wasn't.
Weren't we all under the terrible impression
that special effects had climbed out of their fictional boxes
and had taken over reality?
There was no James Bond, no Rambo or whoever
to protect us from the Evil.
The Evil was there.
No video game.
And the world was watching.
"Day
two"
"Day three"
"Day four"…
We still
keep counting,
as if time had started on that 11th of September.
In a way, it has.
A certain age has started that day.
History will tell us, what age.
The age of revenge, the age of hate, the age of the Apocalypse?
Or an age that was paid for
with the lives of six or seven thousand innocent people
who would have preferred
to die for a better cause,
if they had been given the choice:
The age of peace.
Through this tragedy and this sacrifice,
that age has come closer, indeed,
and doors have opened
for a more united humanity.
I do not
know what the future will bring,
not more than any of you,
but I know some of the consequences
this day will have for my own life.
I will cherish even more
every moment with my loved ones,
every friendship, every act of solidarity.
I will try to stand up against any form of violence,
wherever I encounter it.
And I will certainly walk out of any movie that keeps glorifying
it.
If there
is going to be a war in Afghanistan,
I will not watch it.
Let CNN cover it live.
Life is too precious.
I'd rather listen to seemingly endless peace talks in Palestine,
or anywhere else in the world.
If the fight against terrorism isn't also a fight against poverty,
injustice and inequality,
it will fail.
