I have received many emails after the tragic events of 11 September, several of which are included within. The most important to me is the one from Chris Scott expressing the feelings of his group in England. Thank you Scotty.
From Dave Wagner
Hello all:
We must NEVER make the same terrible mistake we did after Pearl Harbor, when our hatred turned against any and all Japanese, including those who were American citizens. As a youngster at the time, I remember living next door to a Swedish lady who was married to a Japanese/American man. One day the authorities came and took him away. I never saw him again.
Yesterday, I took the time to look up the E-mail address of the Islamic Center, here in Sacramento, and sent them a letter of support. I will not stand idly be and see our Muslim brothers, American citizens, denegrated in anyway.
May Allah protect the innocent.
God Bless America, now read below ...
Friends,
This is from a writer and columnist in San Francisco. Incidentally, she is originally from Afghanistan. It is a very well thought out, rational and thought provoking commentary.
In light of Tuesdays tragedy and the unthinkable idea of what is yet to come, I thought I should share this with as many people as possible.
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 deeply hates the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden. My hatred comes from first hand experience. 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 1990. 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 Tahban 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? Theyre 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 Tahban? Not likely. In today's Afghanistan, only the Tahban 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 would not 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? Unfortunately, Bin Laden does. Anyone else?
In Peace,
Tamirn Ansary
Christopher L Scott
Dear Bill,
Would you pass on to all our American friends, the condolences of the Wyvern Military Dining Club, the Swindon Irregulars and Miniature Wargames Magazine for the tragic events of September 11th.
When real acts of war happen, it serves to emphasise that our tabletop exercises in the military strategies of byegone ages bear no resemblance to reality; and, OK, we Brits decry your burger'n coke invasion, disapprove of your films letting Mel Gibson cry 'Freedom' everywhere and we poke fun at US servicemen's 'fruit salad,' but that's what brothers do until they are asked to stand shoulder to shoulder with each other in adversity, when we both know the other will be there.
Your fellow gamers 'across the pond' feel for you and would like you to know that you have our support and our prayers.
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