Letters from Afghani Writers in the US
Letters from Afghani Writers in the US
These were forwarded to me via e-mail
Profound truth from two Afghani writers
Dear Ones,
It is time we started listening to the voices of the
other Afghani Peoples
and put these events into perspective before we commit
to an all out war in
the Middle East. These two are the first of, what
I hope is more to come,
powerful messages about the true conditions and diversity
of these people.
I'm reading and learning...
Blessings, Love and Light, Bill Kohlmeyer
From two Afghan writers…
Dear Friends and Family,
As an American, a New Yorker and an Afghan, I have
struggled with many
feelings. I have wondered what I can do to educate
people about the state
of affairs in Afghanistan now and over the past 20
years. The Soviets
invaded Afghanistan in December of 1979, it is September
2001 and my
father's country has been destroyed day by day for
over two decades. I am
disgusted by the Taliban and Osama bin Laden.
For my family, these have
been household names for years prior to the tragedies
we witnessed on
Tuesday. My father has spent years trying to
get people in our government
to listen - he has sat around our dinner table talking
to his children for
hours on end about what was happening to his homeland
- so many of our
friends have listened as my Dad spoke passionately
about the hateful crimes
the Taliban was committing
against innocent Afghans all in the name of Islam,
an Islam that my family
does not know, an Islam that cannot be found in the
pages of the Koran. I
beg you, as friends, to take the anger we all feel
and try to learn and
spread knowledge. We all want retaliation.
We want someone to pay for the
innocent people whose lives were taken away.
But, please, please, please
understand that Afghans like me and my family have
never supported the
Taliban. In fact, we have watched helplessly
as these cowards took the
little bit of dignity the Afghans had left after the
Soviet war.
I went to work the other night and watched friends,
bright and
educated people, stop their conversations as I approached.
I have never
experienced anything like this. My Dad recently
grew a beard, but after
seeing images of bearded fundamentalists on TV, we
have asked him to shave
it off to quell any possibility of attacks out of
ignorance. For the first
time in my life, I am afraid to tell people my ethnic
background. My name
is a
liability. My coloring makes me feel scared
when people look at me on the
subway. I find myself thankful that my sisters
and Mom have lighter
coloring. Please read the following letter.
We all feel helpless right now.
If nothing else, please try to educate your
friends. Please do not
perpetuate hate. Hatred brought down the World
Trade Center. Hate is hate
– there is no gray area. Please forward the following
letter to everyone you
know. Take a moment to paste the letter into
a new email, add your own
thoughts so that people don't just skip by a subject
heading that begins
with FWD:.
It is very possible that we will bomb Afghanistan in
the coming days. Maybe
emails like this will not stop that from happening,
but let's not pretend
that we do not know that those actions will kill innocent
and helpless
people who have lived under the terror of the Taliban
for years. We turned
our backs for so long. We have not written about
them, or if we have, we
have not read those articles, we skipped past them.
People did not know
where
Afghanistan was until three days ago. How is
that possible? Bin Laden was
behind the first WTC bombing, the bombing of the Cole
and the embassies in
Africa -- ask yourself, how did we not pay attention?
Pay attention now.
Know what is going on in our world. All we have
is hope, unity and the
ability to open our eyes. Open them.
With much love, Yasmine
Dear Friends,
The following was sent to me by my friend Tamim Ansary.
Tamim is an
Afghani-American writer. He is also one of the
most brilliant people I know
in this life. When he writes, I read.
When he talks, I listen. Here is his
take on Afghanistan and the whole mess we are in.
-Gary T.
Dear Gary and whoever else is on this email thread:
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
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 s! ome 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
LOVE IS THE ONLY REALITY
ALL ELSE IS AN ILLUSION
MITAKUYE OYASIN
In the beginning is the One and
the One is infinite.
All that is comes from the One.
Therefore what is there that
is not the One?
Photography, poetry, web site design and background by D.Clarke
I believe I got the waving flag from http://www.iband.com