Millions of Afghan Muslims stand solidly behind the U.S. military campaign to help rid their country of the terrorists and their Taliban hosts. My ancestors who moved from Ghazni and Kandhar in Afghanistan to settle in what is now Pakistan would have done the same to wrest their homeland from Taliban mercenaries and their terrorist allies led by Osama Bin Laden. Both had become a menace to the world. While Osama splattered the globe with the blood of his victims, Taliban turned Afghanistan into a concentration camp. During their five-year reign of terror, 1 million Afghans were sentenced to a slow death from selective starvation. An additional 4 million of them languished as refugees in the slums of Pakistan and Iran, as they found their home country unsafe for their return.

Talibans twisted theological beliefs further worsened the human condition in Afghanistan. For instance, Mulla Omar, who leads Taliban thugs, bizarrely interpreted the Afghan drought of the past three years as “God’s wrath” to drain Afghanistan of “debauchery.” Having divined this godly truth, he ordered all native and foreign aid workers to cease their relief activities, lest they interfere with the “punitive will of God.”

Later, he unleashed his militia to seize the U.N. relief supplies, only to sell them later on the black market. Hungry Afghans, after failing to find even a meal of locusts and grass, turned to “stealing” the food from Taliban-controlled storage facilities. They had their hands and feet amputated for this “sin.” Women, guilty of “stealing” were no exception to amputation, either. In fact, they had to endure a double whammy. On the one hand, they had to earn a living to feed their children, on the other, they had to face charges of “debauchery” for doing so.

As ordained by Mulla Omar, Afghan women cannot work in public but, ironically enough, they can “beg” in public. This perverse “concession” for cadging was based on Mulla Omar’s decreed wisdom (Fatwa) that “working women” could “entice” men, but “beggar women” wouldn’t.ÿ

Because of this enforced sexual morality, Afghan women cannot leave their homes without having been shrouded in a coffin-like head-to-heel “Burqas” (veils) and accompanied by male relations. Yet, they were seldom safe from the Taliban’s misogynistic rage, who had executed “adulterous” women while still draped in Burqas. Such executions became so frequent that Taliban had to commandeer a soccer stadium in Kabul to convert it into a “Merg Maidan” (killing field). Later, they unabashedly asked Western donors for more funds to build more “Merg Maidan.”

In communism, we were told the tales of “bread and circus” to keep people fed and entertained so as to deflect their attention from the affairs of the state. In Mulla Omar’s Afghanistan, bread was scarce, but it was substituted with an oversupply of public executions to keep Afghans “cleansed and regaled” at once. Ironically, all these acts of misogyny and misanthropy were draped in the banner of Islam.

Both Osama and Taliban distorted Islam to justify their xenophobic and sexist ideologies. Their blanket denunciations of the West and women have no place in Islam. Which is why, only one (Pakistan) of the 56 Muslim nations recognizes their thuggish “government” that traffics in drugs, runs guns and exports terror for money in places like China, India, Indonesia, Iran, Malaysia, Pakistan, Philippines and Russia.

To demonize their enemy, their terrorist guest – Osama – went so far as to claim that all Americans – including 6 million American Muslims – are his legitimate targets. In practice, both had conducted an “intra-faith cleansing” by shedding the blood of millions of innocent Afghan, Tajik, Uzbek, Turkeman, Pakistani, Egyptian and Iranian Muslims, who reject their theology of Wahabism. Yet the terrorists had the gall to wrap themselves in the faith and call the U.S. war on terror as a “war on Islam.” On the contrary, the U.S. in the past has saved Muslims from the fanatic forces of fascist nationalism in the Balkans (Bosnia and Kosovo). This time around, its war on terror will liberate 25 million Afghans who have been enslaved to the diabolical will of the Taliban.

The sick, starving, and suffering Afghans deserve compassion and their tyrant rulers, justice. This is exactly what the U.S. military campaign will deliver, “justice with compassion.”