We have already suffered 20 years of war.

• Author: Ahmadi, Belquis
• Position: War on terrorism, United States - Brief Article

I fled my home in Afghanistan five years ago. I always wondered what it was like to live in peace. To us in Afghanistan, peace had lost its meaning. It was just a word. After I came to the United States, I began to understand it. But that didn't happen right away. At first, I found it hard to convince myself that every plane I heard wasn't dropping bombs and that every door slammed wasn't a rocket exploding.

The peace I learned to appreciate vanished on September 11. When I saw the horrible events of that day on my television, I started to cry uncontrollably. Watching the tragedy over and over again brought back the memories of war that I had been trying very hard to forget. My heart was filled with thoughts of the victims and what their families faced.

Then my thoughts went back to Afghanistan. The fear of Russian soldiers, of the mujahedeen attacks on Kabul, of the bombs in schools, bus stations, universities, and government buildings. The fear of jet fighters and the memory of how, every time we saw a plane in the sky, we rushed to hide. I remembered the day when I saw the hundreds of people killed and injured by a shell that hit a bus stop in Kabul.

As a nurse, I saw every type of havoc that war can wreak on the human body: injuries caused by gun shots, bombs, shells, and mines, as well as the injuries caused by people torturing other people with electric shock, brutal beatings, and amputations. Finally, I thought of the destruction of my country, and the thousands who lost everything in the war: the widows, the orphans, the disabled, and the beggars.

Then came the Taliban. In its first announcement in Kabul, it ordered women to stay home, not to work outside their houses, to wear the burqa--a head-to-toe cover with meshed holes to see through. Girls were forbidden to go to school. Men were ordered to grow beards. When the Taliban announced that it was forbidden to watch television and demanded that we destroy our TVs, my family buried not only our TV in our yard, but also our magazines, books, family photos, and music cassettes. After the Taliban ordered people to paint their windows so that women could not be seen from outside, one of my friends was beaten to death because his fourteen-year-old daughter was seen from the street while she was cleaning the windows of her apartment. So, you see, the Afghan people have suffered more than I can describe and certainly more than you can imagine.

Since 1994, the Taliban has practiced its...