JUSTIN E. HOYT’s
E-MAIL #2
from an
In
Subj: Fwd: More Talk about The Attack
Date: 9/17/01
8:48:17 PM Eastern Daylight Time
From: jyhadet@hotmail.com
(JE Hoyt)
To: joshuahoyt@kpmg.com,
jason.hoyt@merant.com, Jeh49341@aol.com, Jim34887@aol.com,
*****please forward to anyone you know, it's a good
testament!!!
From: "Chris Jackson"
<cjackson@mail.slc.edu>
To: "Samantha Kubik"
<skubik@up.edu>, "JE Hoyt" <jyhadet@hotmail.com>,
"Jason Gaines"
<gaines_jason@yahoo.com>,
"James Peterson"
<jgp513@hotmail.com>
Subject: More Talk
Date: Mon, 17 Sep 2001 16:40:19 -0400
The point of view of an Afghan who lives in this
country...
*************************************************************************
Yesterday I
heard a lot of talk about "bombing Afghanistan back to the
Stone Age." Ronn Owens, on KGO Talk Radio 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," and he asked,
"What else can we do?
What is your
suggestion?" Minutes later I heard a TV pundit discussing
whether we "have the belly
to do what must be done." And I thought about
these issues 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 been going on
over there. So I want to share a
few thoughts with anyone who will listen.
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 fervently wish to see those monsters punished. 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
captured Afghanistan in
1997 and have been holding the country in bondage ever
since. Bin Laden is
a political criminal with a
master 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 love for someone to eliminate
the Taliban and clear out the
rats nest of international thugs holed up in
their country. I guarantee it.
Some say, if that's the case, why don't the
Afghans rise up and overthrow the Taliban themselves? The
answer is, they're
starved, exhausted, damaged, and
incapacitated. A few years ago, the United
Nations estimated that there are 500,000 disabled orphans
in Afghanistan--a
country with no economy, no
food. Millions of Afghans are widows of the
approximately two million men
killed during the war with the Soviets. And
the Taliban has been executing
these women for being women and have buried
some of their opponents alive in
mass graves. The soil of Afghanistan is
littered with land mines and
almost all the farms have been destroyed. The
Afghan people have tried to overthrow the Taliban. They
haven't been able to.
We come now to the question of bombing Afghanistan back
to the Stone Age.
Trouble with that scheme is,
it's already been done. The Soviets took care
of it . 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? There is no infrastructure.
Cut them off from medicine and health care? Too late. Someone already did
all that. New bombs would only
land in 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. (They have already, I hear.) 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 be making common cause with the Taliban--
by raping once again the people
they've been raping all this time So what
else 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.
I think that when
people speak of "having the belly to do what needs to
be done" many of them are
thinking in terms of having the belly to kill
as many as needed. They are
thinking about overcoming moral qualms about
killing innocent people. But
it's the belly to die not kill that's actually
on the table. Americans will die
in a land war to get Bin Laden. 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. 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.
The invasion approach
is a flirtation with global war
between Islam and the West. And that is Bin
Laden's program. That's exactly
what he wants and why he did this thing.
Read his speeches and statements. It's all right there.
At the moment,
of course, "Islam" as
such does not exist. There are Muslims and there are
Muslim countries, but no such political
entity as Islam. Bin Laden believes
that if he can get a war
started, he can constitute this entity and he'd be
running it. 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
Muslim lands, that's a billion people with nothing left
to lose, even
better from Bin Laden's point of view. He's probably wrong about winning,
in the end the west would
probably overcome--whatever that would mean in
such a war; but the war would
last for years and millions would die, not
just theirs but ours.
Who has the
belly for that? Bin Laden yes, but anyone else? I
don't have
a solution. But I do believe
that suffering and poverty are the soil in which
terrorism grows. Bin Laden and
his cohorts want to bait us into creating more
such soil, so they and their
kind can flourish. We can't let him do that.
That's my humble opinion.
Tamim Ansary