Re: People of Afghanistan

From: CurtAdams@aol.com
Date: Sat Sep 15 2001 - 17:27:44 MDT


In a message dated 9/15/01 3:50:21 PM Pacific Daylight Time,
altamiratexas@earthlink.net writes:

> My thoughts and hopes are with these courageous women who maintain their
> human dignity even in the midst of horribly unjust "law," and famine
> resulting from drought and years of war. Killing people like these women and
> their children and the men who continue to resist the Taliban, rather than
> seeking out and selectively killing members of the Taliban would be as
> abominable as the recent terrorist attacks.

Arguably even more so, as we have more options, and
would likely kill far more people . In this
war our enemy is an ideology,
not a people or even a government. I believe we will
benefit most if we frame our actions in terms of what
will most weaken this fundamentalist brand of Islam.
Stripping the Taliban of control of Afghanistan would
be beneficial but harming the people who live there
just validates their claim that the US is evil. The
choice of war hinges on whether we can keep inevitable
civilian Muslim casualties low enough to still see
a net gain from improving the local governement/theocrats.

PS sorry about the HTML, folks. Does anybody know
how to turn this off in AOL 6.0 or must I switch providers?



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