for those who want to know more about Tamim Ansary, here is something from Holt Uncensored #265, which includes an interview with him:
from www.holtuncensored.com/members/
Holt Uncensored #265
by Pat Holt
Tuesday, September 18, 2001
NEW VOICE FROM THE INTERNET: TAMIM ANSARY
INTERVIEW WITH TAMIM ANSARY
LETTERS
-------
NEW VOICE FROM THE INTERNET: TAMIM ANSARY
If you haven't heard of Tamim Ansary, hang on - chances are Americans are going to see a lot of
this thoughtful and level-headed Afghan American writer, even if the mainstream press never
discovers him.
(ALthough that seems doubtful - by the time I caught up with him yesterday, Tamim had just
promised Bill Moyers and Charlie Rose he'd fly to New York today to discuss the terrorist assaults
on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon for PBS-TV).
So let me get out of Tamim's way and let you read the email that he wrote "out of pent-up
frustration to 20 or 25 friends," he says. "The next thing I knew the phone was ringing from
Australia," he says.
Here's the piece he wrote:
"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 he said, '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 and Washington
DC. I agree that something must be done about those monsters.
"But the Taliban and bin 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 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 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, so it'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?"
Interview with Tamim Ansary
Unlike commentary on television or in the traditional press, an essay like this on the Internet has
to earn its audience reader by reader, sometimes striking a nerve all over the world at lightning
speed. It also picks up a certain mythology along the way. I've read that Tamim Ansary is a
University of California professor, a politician, an activist. He is none of these.
"The funny thing is," Tamim says, "when people find me, many of them ask, 'Is this a hoax?' I tell
them that even if my name were John Brown, the state of Afghanistan is what it is. Bin Laden is
what he is. That's not going to change."
Tamim is an Afghan American (one parent from each country) who was born and raised in
Afghanistan until the age of 16, when he moved to Portland, Oregon. He has lived in the San
Francisco Bay Area since 1976, writing books for school publishers such as Harcourt, Brace
Jovanovich, Heinemann and Houghton Mifflin. By now he's written about 75 books, many of them
about American history.
For example, one of Tamim's series explains the history of American holidays (Memorial Day,
Thanksgiving, Veterans Day) with, as one might expect, an international point of view: "In the
Labor Day book," he says, "I tried to describe the breadth of the industrial revolution. That's
something of a challenge when you're writing for first-graders and are allowed about 25 words on
a page."
He's also written a series on Native Americans ("Subarctic Indians," "Southwest Indians,"), "Cool
Collections" ("Model Cars," "Dolls"), mysteries, science fiction, and one book on his native
country, "Afghanistan: Fighting for Freedom," (1991). This was praised by School Library Journal
as "an informative overview . . . His discussion of the lives of children and families and the role of
oral tradition reads with the immediacy of personal knowledge."
Tamim says he's "been upset by the Taliban and the terrible things happening in Afghanistan for a
long time. A couple of years ago I learned that land mines are pervasive in Afghanistan. The
United Nations offered people the chance to 'adopt' three acres of land that the UN would then
raze of mines. I felt this was a small thing to do. But the Taliban had created such a horrible
landscape that nobody paid the adoption fee. I spent the summer crying over that."
He tried to go back in 1979. "By then the Soviets pretty much controlled the place. I didn't feel I
could go in because it was too dangerous, but I wanted to get as close as I could to see if my
father could come out and meet me. I landed in Morocco and traveled through North Africa asking
everybody questions about how to get in. I wasn't a tourist or anything official - just a normal
guy traveling around in the poorest possible way.
"I would say, 'Can you help me? I'm from Afghanistan and I'm trying to rediscover my Muslim
roots," and they would say, "Oh, we can help you, but we hate Saudi Arabia. They're all so rich
and arrogant." Elsewhere it's as if the true Islam is this obscure guy with a beard in some bazaar
someplace.
"So I felt this disconnect between our government and those people over there. When the United
States government says it's gotten cooperation with Pakistan, it doesn't mean the country or the
people of Pakistan. It means the government, which today is five guys with guns."
As to the events of September 11, Tamim says, "I understand the blind rage that people feel. I
felt it, too, when I saw those planes hit the World Trade Center. But during the aftermath I kept
worrying, 'Oh, you guys! What are you thinking? You're going to start another holocaust."
Is there anything Americans can do to learn more about Afghanistan? "A book that I felt was
enlightening is 'Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia' by a Pakistani
journalist named Ahmed Rashid [Yale University Press; $14.00 paperback]. He was there; he
talked to them. His book is astonishing."
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