Afghanistan needs our help! A country that is prosperous and free like the United States breeds only the occasional madman such as Timothy McVeigh. A country that is war-torn, devastated and abandoned by the rest of the world, as Afghanistan is, serves as a haven for thousands of such madmen. The group known as the Taliban is an organized force of such criminal madmen that is holding the general population of Afghanistan hostage to their extremist/terrorist ideals. The general population needs to be liberated from these terrorists, not punished for crimes they had no control over. They need support and help from the rest of the world to free themselves from their evil overlords and rebuild what used to be a free and proud nation that helped the United States defeat the Soviet Union when it was a rivaling super power. These people have suffered enough. For twenty-three years they have been at the center of a war-zone. First repelling the advancing Soviet army and then embroiled in civil war where the more moderate forces (the Northern Alliance) have been fighting a losing battle on their own against the Taliban, a terrorist regime with the financial backing of Pakistan. This hard-line group, the Taliban, has systematically removed every basic human right from the population of Afghanistan. Women, many of whom are the sole bread-winner of the family since their husbands have been killed in battle, are no longer allowed to work to support their families who are now starving. Basic medical interventions are denied to women. Girls are now educated in secret as it is a crime punishable by death to teach girls even basic reading and writing skills. Any woman who shows even the top of a shoe from under her suffocating head/body covering is beaten, sometimes to death. Men and boys who fight for the freedom that every human being deserves are tortured and killed. This is the population that is being vilified as harboring terrorists when in fact they are being terrorized themselves by an armed minority. They have already suffered more than most of us can imagine. Please lend support to the people of Afghanistan to free themselves from their criminal dictators and then rebuild their country. To mount a general attack on Afghanistan would punish the whole population not just those that are responsible for the heinous act against the United States. At the same time, simply removing a few terrorists such as Usama Bin Ladin and not neutralizing the Taliban would let life in Afghanistan continue unchanged and would perpetuate the crimes being committed daily against an innocent population. Please focus your anger on the entire terrorist Taliban regime so that the problem of international terrorism can be addressed once and for all.