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 were 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?