Tweeters,

My cousin Mary Lewis works with Jane Goodall. They were in New York at the
time of the tragedy this week. Jane wishes the following to be made public
to the American people; Most Americans know little of Afghanistan, its
turmoils, and tragedies.

So, I am disobeying Tweeters guidelines by sending this completely off topic
message out to our community
in hopes of raising awareness. Of course, I would welcome commentary which
corrects or clarifies the views expressed below.

Andy Stepniewski
Wapato WA
steppie at nwinfo.net
*************************************************************

Dear everyone,

I know we are all drowning in email at the moment but felt this message was
an important one.

Please DON'T acknowledge it. Much as we love you we are still in New York,
writing stuff for press, our membership and especially the hundreds of young
people in Roots & Shoots, lots of meetings and handling endless calls....
like everyone else reorganising the way ahead.

Let's all pray for some peace and sanity at this insane time. We are hoping
to meet this person whilst here.

Mary Lewis
Executive Assistant to Jane Goodall CBE

UK ADDRESS
8 Queensdale Road
London W11 4QD
Tel/fax. 020 7727 4408

USA office
The Jane Goodall Institute
P O Box 14890
Silver Spring
MD 20911

tel. 301 565 0086
fax. 301 565 3188

NB: UK based so please check whereabouts
prior to mailing!

Dear Friends and Family,

As an American, a New Yorker and an Afghan, I have struggled with many
feelings. I have wondered what I can do to educate people about the state
of affairs in Afghanistan now and over the past 20 years. The Soviets
invaded
Afghanistan in December of 1979, it is September 2001 and my father's
country has been destroyed day by day for over two decades. I am disgusted
by the
Taliban and Osama bin Laden. For my family, these have been household names
for years prior to the tragedies we witnessed on Tuesday. My father has
spent years trying to get people in our government to listen - he has sat
around our dinner table talking to his children for hours on end about what
was happening to his homeland - so many of our friends have listened as my
Dad spoke passionately about the hateful crimes the Taliban was committing
against innocent Afghans all in the name of Islam, an Islam that my family
does not know, an Islam that cannot be found in the pages of the Koran.

I beg you, as friends, to take the anger we all feel and try to learn and
spread knowledge. We all want retaliation. We want someone to pay for the
innocent people whose lives were taken away. But, please, please, please
understand that Afghans like me and my family have never supported the
Taliban. In fact, we have watched helplessly as these cowards took the
little bit of dignity the Afghans had left after the Soviet war.

I went to work the other night and watched groups of friends, bright and
educated people, stop their conversations as I approached. I have never
experienced anything like this. My Dad recently grew a beard, but after
seeing images of bearded fundamentalists on TV, we have asked him to shave
it off to quell any possibility of attacks out of ignorance. For the first
time in my life, I am afraid to tell people my ethnic background. My name
is a
liability. My coloring makes me feel scared when people look at me on the
subway. I find myself thankful that my sisters and Mom have lighter
coloring.

Please read the following letter. We all feel helpless right now. If
nothing else, please try to educate your friends. Please do not perpetuate
hate. Hatred brought down the World Trade Center. Hate is hate -- there is
no gray area.


Please forward the following letter to everyone you know. Take a moment to
paste the letter into a new email, add your own thoughts so that people
don't just skip by a subject heading that begins with FWD:.


It is very possible that we will bomb Afghanistan in the coming days. Maybe
emails like this will not stop that from happening, but let's not pretend
that we do not know that those actions will kill innocent and helpless
people who have lived under the terror of the Taliban for years. We turned
our
backs for so long. We have not written about them, or if we have, we have
not read those articles, we skipped past them. People did not know where
Afghanistan was until three days ago. How is that possible? Bin Laden was
behind the first WTC bombing, the bombing of the Cole and the embassies in
Africa -- ask yourself, how did we not pay attention? Pay attention now.
Know what is going on in our world. All we have is hope, unity and the
ability to open our eyes. Open them.

With much love,

Yasmine

Dear Friends,

The following was sent to me by my friend Tamim Ansary. Tamim is an
Afghani-American writer. He is also one of the most brilliant people I
know in this life. When he writes, I read. When he talks, I listen.
Here is his take on Afghanistan and the whole mess we are in.

-Gary T.

Dear Gary and whoever else is on this email thread:

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 hates the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden. 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 1997. 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 Taliban 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? 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 all that.


New bombs would only stir the rubble of earlier bombs. Would they at
least get the Taliban? Not likely. In today's Afghanistan, only the
Taliban 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 wouldn't 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? Bin Laden does. Anyone else?

Tamim Ansary