Aghanistan, as Seen from Greensboro

Via NY Transfer News * All the News That Doesn't Fit

Now, tell me again, what exactly are we doing in Afghanistan?

by Ed Whitfield

Greensboro, NC
October 18, 2001

Does anyone seriously believe that the Afghans who are being starved
and bombed were conspirators with the people who attacked the US
financial and military symbols and killed Americans September 11?
Does anyone believe that killing a few hundred or a few thousand or
even a few million of them will actually make America safer? Why
don't we recognize our blood-lust? Osama bin Laden's network is
perfectly capable of operating from Florida and Germany and Saudi
Arabia and a host of other countries that we have absolutely no
intention of bombing back into the stone age. Why are we Americans so
willing commit these atrocities in Afghanistan in the name of justice
for the violence done to us. It ought to be clear that we are not
dealing with the perpetrators of the crime. Our causing them injury
would be more an accident of war than the destruction of the Red
Cross food warehouse. They have probably long since found safe havens
and left the masses to withstand the fury of America's war machine.
What we are doing is acting in a criminal manner ourselves proving to
all who did not already know that we are just as capable as al Qaeda
of striking out at innocents in the name of a just cause.

In fact, when you get right down to it, the similarities between
George W and Osama bin's way of thinking are pretty striking. Both,
it seems, think that issuing non-negotiable demands and unleashing
murder and mayhem when those demands are not met is an appropriate
course of action. I have had to remind some of my hawkish friends and
relatives on several occasions that the reason that I think George W
is wrong is because I think al Qaeda is wrong. If I were to support
Bush's methods, I would have a need to support bin Laden's because
both are responding to what they see as injustice. But while most
Americans are clear that destroying the lives that were taken in the
World Trade Center, the Pentagon and in that rural field in
Pensylvania is not the appropriate response to US policies in Iraq,
Israel and Saudi Arabia, they have a difficult time seeing that
destroying the lives of innocents in Afghanistan, who first heard
about Sept 11 events after we knew about it here, is just as brutal
and in many ways even more irrational.

Al Qaeda might make the claim that Americans in general had a role in
selecting and continuing to stand behind the political leadership
that instituted those policies in the middle east that they so abhor.
We would have a hard time claiming that the average Afghan ever had
any involvement in empowering al Qaeda. Al Qaeda might go further and
claim that many Americans actually benifit from a luxurious lifestyle
due to the American economic and military policies around the world.
It could be reasonably said that these policies are part of a system
that must be maintained if Americans are to continue to enjoy the
wasteful, unsustainable, commercial way of life that we so enjoy. It
would be difficult for us to make the case, on the other hand, that
the policies of al Qaeda and bin Laden or any of his ilk cause any
trickle down benefits to citizens of Afghanistan.

So, it ought to be clear that our response to their response makes
even less sense than their senseless response to us. What I can't
understand is why something as simple to understand as that is so
obscured by the emotional responses that tend to justify what we are
doing now. I have to keep asking, at what point should a German
citizen have said to himself, "This Nazi stuff seems like it is
wrong."

I have to look around at so many people I know and ask "If they had
been in Germany, wouldn't they have been and remained loyal Nazis?"
We have got to keep this question on people's minds. We have to make
them stop and think rather than mindlessly continue to support the
atrocities we are committing every day. We have a responsibility to
say: "What we are doing is wrong. This has got to stop."


Whitfield is a Black Community Activist and Education Activist. See
his websites at:
http://home.earthlink.net/~elwhit and
http://www.belovedcommunitycenter.org

 
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