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"We thought we were honour bound without question to defend our families, our nations, and our faith from United States occupation of our countries and economic, political, and cultural intervention in our lives." said a translator on behalf of Nedal nib Amaso, a tall freshly shaven man with passports from Switzerland, Germany, Holland, Britain, and Canada, and who said he had escaped with his wives and several of his children after US bombardment of the longest standing of the Taliban strongholds, Kunduz.
"We and our forefathers had long resented the West for its relentless oppression of our people in the centuries since the fall of the benevolent and enlightened Islamic empire." nib Amaso's translator added, as Amaso spoke. "We were driven to act by a burning sense of injustice ignited by the British and fanned by the intolerable Americans' greed and thoughtlessness. In the light of the deprivations and slights visited on us by the West no act of revenge seemed too extreme."
But after reading the United States-written pamphlet Amaso, his family and his compatriots had apparantly been impressed by the arguments put by senior Bush Administration figures and quoted in material dropped over Afghanistan in recent weeks.
"The pamphlet explained to us in our own dialects that the war in which we were fighting was a war between good and evil, and that in fact we were currently fighting on behalf of the forces of evil, and not, as we had believed, fighting to defend the country in which we lived and a political system in which we believed but was not recognised by our aggressors, against an attack from another nation.
As we read on it was increasingly clear from what we understood from the lucid statements made by US leaders which comprised the narrow pamphlets that Islam itself was not in any way intended as the target of the United States attacks, and that rather we should understand those attacks were designed to restore infinite justice and enduring freedom to the world, while paving the way for a new western-style Government in Kabul."
Amaso professed, through his interpreter, to have become to be an enthusiastic supporter of British and US efforts to improve the plight of Afghanistan's impoverished people through the bombardment of the countries major cities and infrastructure before moving on to equally justifiable campaigns in other parts of the middle-east. The former Taliban fighter added that he had come to particularly admire the president of the United States, George W Bush, who commanded the respect of millions around the world by virtue of his powerful intellect and insightful, compassionate nature.
"One of the pamphlets had a picture of the president on it's cover" said Amaso, smiling. "When we looked at it we saw he was a moderate, brilliant, rational statesman, who genuinely appeared to love freedom while never rising above striving to further understand it."
