A letter from Pakistan.

September 15, 2001

Dear Matthew,

I wonder whether to thank you for considering me to write about the "possible U.S. attack on Afghanistan and maybe additional countries" or to be offended by the entirety of the probability.

I wonder whether to feel elevated or distressed.

I ponder whether I should feel honored or dismayed.

You asked me what it's like to be in a Muslim nation when the bombs are falling nearby? I will rephrase: What is it like to be a Muslim when the bombs are falling on a Muslim nation?

I can easily claim to be an ardent and staunch Muslim who has no fear of death, but I choose not to, as I perhaps do not fear my death but certainly fear the death of hundreds of people who have nothing to do with any of the injustices committed against anyone anywhere in the world. They are the people who have been at the forefront of injustice. They suffer from appalling conditions of poverty and hunger yet choose to be content and nonviolent.

You asked me what it's like to be in a Muslim nation when the bombs are falling nearby?

I do not doubt your intentions, but under the current circumstances your query struck me like a brutal threat. As if you were trying to tell me that it is now our turn to face the music. Such is the gravity of the situation here. Such is the level of hatred we somehow see targeted towards us, the Muslims.

I wish I could tell you that I feel horrified; I wish I could tell you that I feel terrified and petrified. I wish.

All I can tell you is that I only feel convinced. I feel convinced that if we, as humans, continue to refuse to recognize the appalling consequences of oppression, fundamentalism, and social control, we will be faced with an irreversible destruction scenario before we know it.

I can always try and emulate Mr. John Pilger (journalist and author of Hidden Agendas, New Press, 1998) and remind the United States of being the root cause of innumerable ongoing injustices in the world.

I can always refer to Lebanon and Palestine.

I can always debate the CIA's involvement in Afghanistan.

I can go into the depths of the genocide against Iraqi children.

Or I could simply quote from Mr. Pilger's response to the bombing: "Far from being the terrorists of the world, the Islamic peoples have been its victims, principally the victims of U.S. fundamentalism, whose power, in all its forms--military, strategic, and economic--is the greatest source of terrorism on Earth.... People are neither still nor stupid. They see their independence compromised, their resources and land and the lives of their children taken away, and their accusing fingers increasingly point north: to the great enclaves of plunder and privilege. Inevitably, terror breeds terror and more fanaticism. But how patient the oppressed have been. Their distant voices of rage are now heard; the daily horrors in faraway brutalized places have at last come home."

As a civilian of a "Third World" nation, I can feel disgruntled. I can display my discontent and disbelief at the overnight pumping of $200 billion into the financial markets whilst most of the world fights for debt relief.

But I choose not to because it is not about settling the score. It is not about who can kill more with greater sophistication and coordination.

I choose not to because I fear that it will only take us toward a bloody war that will have no winner.

In solving social problems, we must not think of the shortest way; rather, we must think of the best way to our collective objective--creating a just world.

But the question we all have to ask is what do we want to do?

Do we want to continue to support, and be proud of, retaliations? Then I am afraid there will be no limit to human destruction. If we are after superficial solutions, they have been done a myriad of times, and each time, disillusioned, we have returned to our starting point.

Will we ever realize that human lives, mostly innocent, are being scarified over a fight which is not even theirs?

The onus is on the United States and the people of the United States to reflect and emerge as a real peace-loving nation.

Thousands of people are dead, thousands are in a state of mourning, thousands are fearing death.

It is not the time to terrorize most of the world by saying "either you are with us or you are against us." It is time to think of ways of reaching real global peace, not global demise.

Mashhood Rizvi

Mashhood Rizvi is Editor-in-Chief of EDucate!, a magazine based in Karachi, Pakistan, that is committed to social and educational reform.