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Guest Commentary October 19, 2001
Afghan Relief and Reconstruction
The Honorable Joseph Biden
It is very simple in the Muslim world right now. When America bombs, America is blamed for anything else that happens. And not just blamed for what we have done, but we are blamed for what we have not done. It is not fair, but it is the fact. As the world's only superpower, we receive a lot of misdirected blame under the best of circumstances. The nuances and subtleties of geopolitics don't get translated to the language of the street. And once the bombs start to fall, any vestige of nuance is blown away with whatever they hit.
We cannot allow what happened in Iraq to happen in Afghanistan . Osama bin Laden and the Taliban leader, Mullah Omar, have been trying to cast the current conflict in terms of religion and have been calling our efforts a crusade against Islam.
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You mention the word "crusade" in the Middle East and it has a very different context than when we use it here. It is not accidental that the word is used by bin Laden. It conjures up several hundred years of painful history.
This is not a crusade. It is not a war against Muslims. And we cannot permit bin Laden and the Taliban to portray it as such. So how do we prevent it from happening this time? ...
What we need to do is back up our words with our wallets. In my view, we must do this ahead of time.
We say we have no beef with the Afghan people, and we do not. But one out of four Afghans -- perhaps 7 million people -- are surviving on little more than grass and locusts. We say our fight is only against the terrorists, along with their sponsors, and it is. But the people of Afghanistan have been subjected to constant warfare for the past two decades. They are looking for help, and they are looking at us.
We did not cause the terrible drought that brought so many Afghans to the brink of starvation, and we did not cause the Soviet invasion or the civil war that followed. We were interested in Afghanistan, but only when it suited our own interests. We paid attention during the 1980s, but then came down with a case of attention deficit disorder. As soon as the last Russian troops pulled out in 1989, our commitment seemed to retreat along with them. And I was here, so I share this responsibility.
The years of bloody chaos that followed were what gave rise to the Taliban. If we had not lost interest a decade ago, perhaps Afghanistan would not have turned into the swamp of terrorism and brutality that it has become.
I say this not to cast stones, because I was here. We do not need to ask who "lost" Afghanistan . There is more than enough blame to go around. It is not a matter of political party or ideological outlook. Nobody -- Republican, Democrat, liberal, conservative -- stepped up to the plate when it counted because we did not take it as seriously as it turned out to be.
It is time we all stepped up to the plate.
Joseph Biden, a Democrat, is a U.S. Senator from Delaware. The above commentary has been adapted from a statement Sen. Biden delivered on the floor of the Senate, October 3, 2001. To contact him, Click Here.
The above column has been distributed by PoliticsOL.com.
