Speak for yourself. Open carry is legal here in Alabama, and $200 tax stamps will let you buy all of the full-autos that you care to carry.
Posted on 04/27/2003 1:31:09 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
KABUL, Afghanistan - Should you ever find yourself surrounded by AK-47-toting men in a Tajik Afghan village, try this:
"Lotfan ban payen salah khotra. Agahi qar mishom."
Roughly translated from Dari, it means, "Please put down your rifles. They are making me nervous."
Say it with a smile, and you are guaranteed to get a big laugh from the men in the village.
They never put down their rifles, mind you, but they laugh.
It's a start.
In a perverse way, Osama bin Laden's escape from Afghanistan in 2001 might be the best thing to happen to this nation in some time.
For while it isn't certain that U.S. troops would have packed up their tanks and left immediately after killing or capturing bin Laden, the fact that he apparently got away means that U.S. soldiers must remain here.
That has brought peace and some semblance of stability to a nation that has been at war for 23 years - first with the Soviets, then with each other.
Sure, there are still daily rocket attacks, bombs and small-arms firefights. But Afghans I met during my three weeks here were unanimous in their opinion that these are truly the salad days - at least for the areas around Kabul and many of the eastern provinces.
Yet there is so far to go.
Tajiks, Pashtuns, Uzbeks, Hazaras and others still rarely see each other except on opposite sides of a battlefield. A 250-mile trip from Tajik-controlled Bagram to Pashtun-controlled Kandahar typically takes 18 hours over dirt roads pockmarked with craters caused by rain, flash floods and years of mortar fire. In some spots, 10 mph is considered zipping along dangerously. So no one ever makes the trip.
Lt. Gen. Dan K. McNeill, commander of the 11,500 coalition troops here, told me that when he arrived in Afghanistan almost a year ago, President Hamid Karzai told him that building roads was the government's first mission.
"I didn't understand it at first . . . I thought to myself, "Man, you need an army, and you're talking about a road,' " McNeill said. "After I had been here about a month I realized that people typically fight and shoot one another because they are separated regionally and they don't understand one another.
"And if you reconnect them, they realize that their differences are not between themselves, but with those who are external to Afghanistan."
The U.S. troops under McNeill's command are at least as different from the ethnic groups in Afghanistan as the various tribes are from each other.
But I have seen the power of a smile, and a connection.
Soldiers whom I accompanied into villages in heavily armed Humvees were quick to hop out laughing. Despite the language barriers, they talked about weapons with the Afghan men. Each day, they had tea in countless homes, hoping that the next time they visited, they wouldn't need to carry their M-16s or M-4s.
"I think we get more accomplished here by going house to house and having tea than we do with any big information campaigns," said Maj. Phil Rosso, who runs the Army's psychological operations teams here. "That's the way the people are."
On my flight into Kabul, I was terrified. I sat quietly - bathed in sweat - on a plane filled with expatriates returning home from India and Pakistan after years of exile. Arriving in Afghanistan, I wanted only to find a driver arranged for me and get straight to Bagram Air Base and the 82nd Airborne Division.
On my flight out Sunday evening, I was a different person.
The folks at Ariana Afghan Airlines placed me and another American into a row of seats squeezed between two normally spaced rows.
In a seat next to me was a very angry twentysomething man who I think was Pashtun. He spoke not a word of English, and my Pashto is pretty much nonexistent, so I can't say for certain. But I didn't need to know his language to know that he didn't want me there.
He glared. He elbowed me in the ribs at every opportunity. He kicked at my bag beneath the seat in front of me.
It was obvious, I'm sure, that I was an American, and I suspected that accounted for his hostility. But rather than fight back, I tried the same thing I had seen soldiers do in the villages of Afghanistan.
When the food came, he ate as though he had been wandering the desert for a month. So I smiled and gave him mine. He accepted without looking up.
When the plane bounced around in turbulence, I could see he was afraid. So I smiled and used hand gestures to explain that everything was okay. He softened a little.
Then the attendants brought the forms necessary for entering India. I offered my pen, and he made a gesture indicating that he couldn't use it. Like most Afghans, he is illiterate.
I helped him with whatever I could despite the language barrier. The rest of his form was done by a friend of his seated somewhere else on the airplane.
When he was finished, he reached beneath his robe and pulled out an apple. He gave it to me. It was delicious.
Now I'm not so naive to believe that a smile cures all. The mass graves east of Kabul, like the ones that preceded them in history in Germany or Cambodia, attest to regimes so bloodthirsty that it would be an insult to suggest that an ethnic victim could have avoided their fate through kindness.
And after just three weeks, I won't profess to be an expert on Afghanistan.
But if we learn nothing else from the events of Sept. 11, I hope we now know that we ignore places like Afghanistan at our peril.
The world has shrunk. A bearded man on an Afghan mountainside can plan an attack on America and actually find enough angry, suicidal people to pull it off.
To keep it from happening again, the United States must take all the security precautions at home, advance against terrorists through pre-emptive strikes - and stay in places like Afghanistan to help.
All of the aid workers in the world won't get it done without a lot of money, and people, from the United States.
The children here must be lifted up and saved just like the Halo Trust handles Afghanistan's land mines - one at a time.
A friend here quoted an Afghan warlord as saying that his people "have the heart of a butcher"; they have slaughtered rivals without remorse in order to survive.
Yet the people in Afghanistan have now taken the first steps on a 100,000-mile journey to the 21st century. If that journey is to continue, they must move beyond the means of war to the means of peace.
And we must go with them.
Want to help?
You may contribute to relief efforts through almost any global charity. But here are a couple of ways to directly help children in Afghanistan:
To donate clothing or school supplies:
Adopt a Village Program
U.S. Army Civil Affairs
Bagram Air Base
APO, AE 09355
(Indicate contents on outside of box)
To send money for clothing or school supplies:
America's Fund for Afghan Children
c/o The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Ave. NW
Washington, DC 20509-1600
(Make checks payable to America's Fund for Afghan Children)
Times staff writer Chuck Murphy spent three weeks with U.S. troops in Afghanistan. For more reports and photos, his journal is available on www.sptimes.com/reports
Interesting that the UN is mentioned nowhere in the article, including the relief effort.
It takes the U.S. military to patch up the division caused by LIBERAL "do-good" (taking their cut off the top) groups.
Speak for yourself. Open carry is legal here in Alabama, and $200 tax stamps will let you buy all of the full-autos that you care to carry.
I'll bet the Afghans don't need no steenking tax stamps. And neither should we.
Well, a lot of that "conquering" was done by Afghan troops (Northern coalition for example) enabled by US airpower and special forces. A joint effort if you will, and it's there country.
That said, we should be able to walk around with such rifles too, it's in our Constitution after all.
We can, and I do.
Now granted, your *state* might ban it, but mine does not (thus, this is not a federal issue but rather you might have a problem with your own local or state government).
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