Open Letter to Americans of Good
Will
Carta abierta a los Americanos de Buena Voluntad
Por Christophe de
Ponfilly, periodista y productor cinematográfico francés, autor de la
película Massoud el Afgano.
Your nation is immense. Your nation is rich. Your nation is
powerful, and beautiful in many respects. Unless fosled by the illusions of
your dreams and myths, you cannot bear to ignore all truth of what caused
this drama of which you are now the victims. When the eleventh of September ranks among the most
disastrous days of your history, it seems strange and worrying that another
event, - the murder of Commandant Massoud, - did not attract, - with a
few very rare exceptions,- any attention by your media. At the hour of
your riposte, you risk to stir up, in the Muslim world, a burning hatred. A
few fighters, in the shadows and this very hatred, are waiting for your
mistakes to commit again and again other acts of terror.
To defeat without perishing, one has to add to strength,
intelligence, cleverness, and subtlety. Think as a man of action, act as a
man of thought, take your time and know everything. Thought shall not exclude
any piece of knowledge, even if discomforting, above all, do not oversimplify.
If your response misses the target, who is hidden since a few days ago, you
will spread the evil that some of your services, have, already sparked on
those grounds of intolerance, ignorance, fundamentalism and fanaticism
without knowing where it would lead. Then, may God help you! And all of us
with you...
Before your media exclusively concentrated on the terrible
tragedy that plunges your society into mourning, on Sunday September the 9th, in a valley of
North-Eastern Afghanistan, another attack, suicidal as well, was committed
against Ahmad Shah Massoud, historical figure of Afghanistan that you ignored
for reasons many of us still fail to understand. Do we have to explain
to you how much this man was worth, who lost his life, on his dear
Afghanistan ground, the charismatic leader of an obstinate resistance against
the Talibans?. Do we have to specify that, once he became the feared opponent
of the Arabs and Pakistanis supporting the Talibans, he suffered the same
fate as every American victim?. He was not innocent like the victims of the
attacks committed on your territory, but he was fighting for a freedom of which you know the
value, and for his culture. Free Afghan, moderate Muslim, man of peace,
fighter of the first hour, Massoud earned the right to figure on top of the
list of the victims of this terrorism without morals. His murder happened
before the suicide attacks that hurt you and this is probably no coincidence.
But why isn't there any room for him in your American eyes, in your thoughts,
in your hearts?. Do we have to tell you that Massoud was this hero of
the mountains who fought back and defeated the soviet army so deviled by you
military?. Do we have to tell you that he never ceased to warn you against
the dangers that have just victimized you?.
His murderers were not Afghans but of Arabic origins. Carrying
stolen Belgian passports, they came posing as journalists. According to a
French journalist who met them, ignoring all of their dark intentions, they
were calm, seemed educated, did not fit the illuminated stereotype at all.
Yet they were as fanatics as the hijackers who turned your planes against
your world of wealth and power. They were well chosen for a precise mission,
well thought-out, carefully planned and prepared for a long time. They were
willing to die for a cause: destroying all those who do not belong to their
universe of wahhabite Islam. The explosives were hidden in their video
camera. In their eyes was the death of Massoud, a Muslim himself
nevertheless.
This 9th of September no American network is speaking about, the
last moments of Massoud dedicated to let the world at large hear about his
fight against intolerance. So, in an office as large as a closet of the World
Trade Center, there was a devastating deflagration, recorded by no camera.
There as well were dreadful shredded bodies: those of the two criminals, of
Massoud, of a guard and of one of his close counselors, Massoud Ralili, a
lucid man and friend from the time of the fights against the soviets. The link between this suicide
attack and those perpetrated, three days later, in New-York City and
Washington DC, is obvious. Ignoring it reverts to silencing part of
the causes that led to the present situation. On the 11th of September, your
media quickly designated as number one suspect of the attacks against your
nation Ossama Bin Laden, terrorist from Saudi Arabia, friend of the Talibans,
already accused in 1998 of the deadly attacks on your embassies in Nairodi
(Kenya) and Dar-es-Salaam (Tanzania, a enemy who decidedly, possesses a
bloody power, embodying the Devil himself. It is true that he is a
billionaire and as you know money well placed can buy everything one
wants: skills, human complicity, even lives and, doubtlessly, with the proper
price: death ... I can not believe that you think that he alone is against
you. Ossama Bin Laden is an
icon. During the last years, journalists found him in the city of Kandahar.
Your intelligence services could have executed him. Why didn't they do it?
Behind this devilish icon exists a reality of hatred complicity involving
many other Arab fanatics, a few criminal Talibans and many Pakistani military
men directly compromised in the fall, craziness and destruction of a free and
independent Afghanistan.
Your Nation just suffered attacks thought unbelievable on its own
territory. It doesn't know how to react, feels groggy, crossed with tensions,
with sadness, and with vengeful feelings. I wonder however if the virtual
world you are flirting with more and more often isn't backfiring on you, so
great are the boldness and the harm of the aggression. While you networks
broadcast report upon report, repeating the most spectacular explosion
sequences, the most moving testimonies, comments of all kind can be heard.
Never were mentioned Massoud nor the fight of Afghans seeking peace and
freedom. Why? Why are there so few people among you that dare to remember
that your intelligence services played with the fire that burnt you? Why
didn't you lend an ear to those who spoke to you about Afghanistan with
accuracy? By believing self-invulnerability one eventually gets weaker.
Learning from his mistakes, that's what Massoud was accomplishing. It's up to
you not to fail drawing upon experience.
From Paris, such a tiny dot on the map of the world where your
are so powerful, I dare join those who remind you that your intelligence
services, whom you hope will put light on the terrorist networks, seem in so
many respects suspect. Their implication in the Machiavellian games of
Afghanistan's past today has consequences that should not disappear under the
eraser of forgetfulness. Please don't see in this accusation another
manifestation of anti-Americanism among countless others. It's nothing like
that. I sincerely love America and what hurts you makes me sad. But loving
Afghanistan as well, I have, personally, a field experience and some
fragments of truths that prevent me from holding my tongue.
From knowing and following Massoud throughout his fights, - first
against the Soviets, then against the Talibans and their supporters- I konw
that his heart was the determination of just Man. Why has America ignored him
so much, just as she hasn't hear his warnings concerning the dangers his
enemies cast over the world? Cruel, sad, and dramatic acknowledgment: your dead
are here, as a result of your own blindness.
When Massoud should objectively have become your ally in the
fight against Muslim terrorism, he just succumbed from his wounds; murdered
by the very people your services helped and who hate you, and us, so much.
But Massoud's men live, and you have to help them.
I love America but I don't
understand your so frequent ignorance of the world beyond your borders. Your networks that advertise their special news programs like
blockbusters' trailers are frightening. Don't they risk imprisoning you in a
fictitions reality? Generous, brave, standing together, your
population, aching from its open wound, is ready to go to war, forgetting
Vietnam that had so many victims and resolved nothing, the Gulf that masked
the reality of the true tragedies, Somalia that solved nothing, surgical
strikes that made stains and murders... Going to war is maybe not the most efficient solution to
fight an enemy that will always escape you if you do not know him as much as
he has known you. The poor Afghans are living in war for more than 20
years, they do not have to pay for a handful of madmen that your shadowy men
fed with weapons and dollars. Facts must be looked at straight, and that
statement repeated so as not to be forgetten: for years, your CIA supported
the most fundamentalist Afghans, giving birth to monsters now uncontrollable.
Large numbers of people
foreign to Afghanistan (Algerians, Arabs from the Emirates, Palestinians,
Saudi Arabs, Sudaneses...) came to train for guerilla warfare for years.
Choosing the most Muslims among them and seeing them as the most efficient
opponents of the Soviets, was a limited and wicked bet. The Westerners who
knew the ground, most of them French, did what they could to make your
specialists understand that. In vain! The one who fought the Russians
the most efficiently was Massoud, not those who received the American
support! Again in 1992, Massoud wasthe one who managed to take Kabul from the
hands of the communist Afghans, three years after the retreat of the Soviet
troops. Alas for the Afghan people, in 1992, nobody came to disarm a
population who knew only to wage war or suffer it. Massoud did not take the
power, he gone it to a President who humiliated the Patchuns today Talibans.
Five weeks after the arrival of Massoud's men in the Afghan capital,
Gulbudine Hekmathyar, power thirsty, jealous of Massoud, prepared to do
anything and supported by your CIA, ordere to bomb the town bombed.
How could your intelligence services make such a mistake? How and why did they choose to
listen to the Pakistanis, whose obsession had always been to stand up to
India and to secure their strategical position by controlling Afghanistan?
Didn't they see, your specialists who don't lack intelligence, didn't they perceive
in their skillful objective analysis that there would be, some day, a danger
wouldn¹t? The interest for you Americans, for us Westerners, have been to
support Massoud who kept asking for help, who wanted elections, who wanted to
disarm the population, who, in fact, was talking of peace after his mistakes
in Kabul? No, you ignored this man. You even helped, in a second phase, the
Talibans that the Pakistanis presented as the only ones able to eventually
bring peace back in Afghanistan. One of your oil companies, allied with another from Saudi Arabia
(Unocal and Delta) even started to believe in the possibility to build a gas
pipeline to carry, through Afghanistan, gas from Turkmenistan to the harbors
of Pakistan. The dollars received by the Talibans were then used to
buy out Mujahideen commanders to make them give back their weapons, agreed,
but also to wage war against Massoud and the Northern Alliance. The fact that
fanatic Arabs surrounded these Talibans and Pakistani counselors, never,
obviously, disturbed you intelligence services.
That the extreme madness of the Talibans existed and didn't balk
at showing off its radical measures to the face of the world didn't,
apparently, make you feel like examining the material that would shape the
future. Strange contempt for human reality. Your services used people as
pawns on a chessboard. They bought out those that could be bought, the
law-less. But human pastry isn't always as shapeable as one could believe.
The reasons why men live aren't the same for everybody. Your services sparked
a fire of which you're now the victims. Right now, the situation is serious:
when your intelligence services have to designate the guilty, don't choose
the Talion Law to destroy those you understood so little and you are still
caricaturing in your media. Be
careful, I beg you: the Afghan population, in all the richness of its ethnic
groups and cultures, must not pay for the crimes it has been suffering
for so long. Its resistance must be supported. In Afghanistan, the
criminal leaders are few, your services may know them better than us since
they have been interlocutors for a long time. Ossama Bin Laden, guilty or
scapegoat left to hide and will rejoice to see your multiple mistakes, to
better light the fire of revolt against our Western world. But he is far from
being alone you know that. Because Afghanistan isn't the only place in the
world where the fighters of hatred are preparing.
By murdering Massoud, your
enemies made even less clear the Afghan reality. For pity's sake, never
forget how happy you were to see the Afghan peasants face, with courage and
dignity, the Soviet army. Your President Reagan called them the fighters of
freedom. A democracy like yours needs lucidity to keep on being a reality. You must seek in yourselves the reasons for the hatred of which
you're now the victims... We need too as well since our politicians didn't
manage to help Massoud either when he came, a few months ago, to ask Paris
and Strasbourg home of the European Parliament, to put pressure on
Pakistan. May God help you from your reprisals. Don't bring fire in a
bloodless garden where your representatives gave birth to scrubs, be precise,
wise and generous. So things go for Nations who wish to remain great and rich
and powerful and beautiful and fair... And use those who know.
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