A country already destroyed

THERE'S an e-mail doing the rounds written by Afghani-American writer Tamim Ansary. For anyone convinced by the 'bomb Afghanistan back to the stone age' rhetoric, it makes sobering reading.

"That's been done," Ansary writes. "The Soviets took care of it already. Make 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 that."

A bombing campaign, says Ansary, wouldn't threaten Taliban leaders. They would simply slip away and hide. Bombs, he says, would merely "stir the rubble of earlier bombs" - and the US and its allies would "only be making common cause with the Taliban, by raping once again the people they've been raping all this time".

It's a cry from the heart for the West, united in righteous and understandable anger, to pause for thought before taking the next fateful step. And it's one that deserves to be listened to.

Ansary isn't alone in holding such views.

Haleh Afshar, York University's Iranian-born professor of politics, agrees that bombing the hell out of Afghanistan would serve no purpose - other than to make the lives of the already desperate more desperate still, and to play into the hands of Osama bin Laden and his Taliban allies by destabilising the entire region.

"There is nothing the allies can do to Afghanistan that the Taliban haven't done already," she says.

"They have disenfranchised women completely, they have destroyed all the schools. They killed more than 5,000 people in one city because they were Shia Muslims, a 'different kind' of Muslim.

"The deforestation is abominable and the result is drought that's been going on for three years. There are three million Afghans starving already. There has been civil war there for more than a decade and conditions are absolutely dire. We don't have any news here of what's going on inside Afghanistan, we don't see people dying on camera. But they are dying. The situation is critical."

Professor Afshar has every sympathy for the thousands of bereaved families in the US and elsewhere. She understands the need for action. But to punish the Afghan people for the sins of their masters would be wrong, she says - as well as being futile and counterproductive.

The Taliban, she says, have no legitimacy. They gained power by force, and they rule by terror. But they are also wholly dependent on bin Laden and his millions to stay in power. Taliban leaders probably don't know where bin Laden is, she adds - and even if they did, would not be able to hand him over.

So what is to be done?

Since the atrocity in New York, there have been encouraging signs of a warming of relations between the US and Iran, on Afghanistan's eastern border, says Prof Afshar. To simply bomb Afghanistan would endanger that, as well as destabilising Pakistan, where many of the Taliban leaders were trained.

The Taliban are neither liked nor trusted by neighbouring Islamic states, she adds. But if allied forces bombed Afghanistan there could be a backlash, with other Muslim nations wanting to come to the defence of their Muslim brothers, "just as Britain has rightly come to the defence of its American brothers".

That would mean a real risk of alienating Saudi Arabia, Iran and Palestine, says Prof Afshar. "You could have a domino effect across the whole of the Middle East. You would strengthen people like Saddam Hussein and bin Laden himself, and produce a great many more bin Ladens."

Nevertheless, there is effective action which can be taken by Western governments, explains Prof Afshar. The solution lies in isolating bin Laden and his supporters by building an alliance of Western and Muslim nations against him.

To think of the crisis gripping the world as a conflict between West and Islam is to fail to understand the nature of Islam, says Prof Afshar.

In Islam, there are no intermediaries between God and ordinary people. The God of Islam, she says, speaks directly to the people. No one person can claim to speak with the voice of God any more than any other person. And hence no Muslim, she says, is duty bound to 'obey' a call to holy war, since it is up to them to interpret the will of God themselves.

So bin Laden cannot claim to speak for all - or even many - Muslims. He and his supporters, says Prof Afshar, are fanatics: but they are also, almost without exception, "rich, middle class young men funded by their dads". They have nothing in common with the millions of dispossessed Afghans in whose name they claim to speak.

The possibility exists for Western countries to forge alliances with other Muslim nations - if they are seen to be acting justly. In the attack on New York and Washington, Prof Afshar points out, it wasn't only Americans who were killed. "It is important to bear in mind that 1,000 of the 6,000 people to have died were Muslim. It is the world that is aggrieved, not just America."

Instead of bombing Afghanistan, she says, the US and its allies should be supporting the country's Muslim northern rebels in their fight against the Taliban. That way, there would be less risk of the intervention being perceived as an invasion of a Muslim state.

In many ways, she agrees, the rag-tag collection of warlords who make up the uneasy rebel alliance in Afghanistan are little better than the Taliban themselves.

But it needn't simply be a case of helping the destitute Afghans swap one set of repressive masters for another. Talks could be held with Afghans in exile - and even exiled Afghan King Zahir - about forming an effective government.

And in the event of victory, a new 'Marshall Plan" could be put in place to rebuild the shattered nation, explains Prof Afshar.

That may be a way of resolving the crisis in Afghanistan. But if terrorism itself is to be defeated it will not be enough.

The only way to do that, is to attempt to address the root cause of many of the problems in the Middle East - the Arab/Israeli conflict in Palestine, she says.

At some stage the West is going to have to grasp the nettle and adopt a less one-sided policy in the Middle East.

A more even-handed attitude towards Palestinians and Israelis is crucial.

But she believes the key to brokering peace could lie in designating Jerusalem a 'holy city' - an independent city-state, along the lines of the Vatican, which was open to Arab, Israeli and Christian alike.

She believes that could drain much of the poison from the region - and leave bin Laden a rebel without a cause.

"Bin Laden is only as strong as his supporters," she says.

"By addressing the root cause, you could pull the rug from under his feet."

Then the rich young men who have made a career out of murder and hate really would have nowhere left to go.

Updated: 12:24 Wednesday, September 26, 2001