A pointless target

Hundreds of tons of human remains, according to the calculations of The Washington Post.\nThat's one of the elements through which the New York rescue teams are searching. That, in addition to concrete, steel, broken glass, asbestos, terrorist passports, family photos, and office furniture. \nIt's a better reason than oil. It's a better reason than commerce. It's a much better reason than ego. \nThe best professors at West Point would agree. They would explain that we have to fight back, because if we don't, we will look weak and open ourselves up to further aggression. Furthermore, we must punish. Justice must be served.\nBut America has a limited idea of what this justice will be like. We have inured ourselves to pictures of planes surging into buildings; planes that seem oddly fast, only because we hardly ever see them in relation to still objects. But this morning, I found some different pictures on the Internet.\nPictures of Afghanistan, the country we might destroy. It is rough, often covered with snow, and brown, unbelievably brown, as if spring never touched the valleys folded up in the rugged mountain terrain. \nIn the capital city, Kabul, the citizens have painted their old homes white in protest of the brown that makes no distinction between the rural and the urban landscapes. And what an urban center! While it falls between San Diego and Philadelphia in population, the pictures remind me more of the dilapidated poverty I saw when my parents, residents of Kentucky, would take me on drives through Appalachia. Yet, on some street corners, cars drive past what the Afghans must call their high-rises; six story buildings built before the 1979 Soviet occupation.\nThese are the buildings we will destroy. George W. Bush promised to make no distinction between terrorists and the states that harbor them. Kabul, the Taliban's newly acquired capital, will surely fall. And consequently, where those six-story high rises stand now, there will be holes filled with concrete, glass, asbestos, and tons of human remains. A Sri-Lanken friend of mine, accustomed to terrorism, warned me that Americans will have to prepare for civilian bloodshed. She was talking about "them:" their secretaries, janitors, and chief executives of sugar-beet companies (one of Kabul's major industries), their widows, orphans, and amputees. \nI was thinking about our new civilian casualties. If we destroy cities like Kabul and Baghdad, the hatred directed against the United States will see new levels. If this is a war against terrorism, we can rely on terrorists striking back. Perhaps five thousand people won't die all at once, but Americans in Wyoming and Illinois will have to brace themselves for the possibility of losing a hundred small groups in acts of terrorist retaliation. \nThe current administration thinks it can win a war against terrorism. But where do we send the bombs, the troops, and the tanks? To Kabul and Baghdad, because the administration's understanding of the world is old, and they believe the problems are contained within political borders? Kill the country, kill the terrorism, right? But you and I know that the hijackers in Tuesday's disaster lived in Hamburg, Germany, and Sarasota, Florida.\nBut we can bomb Kabul. We'll take out a couple of Bin Laden's henchmen, and not feel terribly guilty about the innocent people who lived in such a strange, brown country.