Backing the Taliban would be slap in the face to Sept. 11 victims

In his column Thursday, Ibrahim Kakwan supported Defense Secretary Robert Gates’s recent decision to open talks with the Taliban’s leadership in Afghanistan (Talking with the Taliban, 10/17/2008). While I agree that this is the correct step, Kakwan’s assertion that the United States should back a revival of the Taliban was misguided.

To support his point that the Taliban might be a better option, Kakwan noted that Hamid Karzai’s government would fail without U.S. financial and military support. This is true, but how do you think the Taliban, which in 1990 was a small group of Islamic seminary students from northern Pakistan, came to control 90 percent of Afghanistan by 2000? Pakistan’s government heavily backed the group. To imply that the Taliban would be able to maintain the slight stability it once had without heavy backing from another country is simply wrong.

Kakwan also argued that the Taliban wasn’t corrupt or involved in the drug trade. Maybe the Taliban leadership wasn’t, but Osama bin Laden, who was closely tied to Taliban leadership, certainly reaped profit from Afghanistan’s poppy production. And the Taliban wasn’t as nice as Kakwan implied. The group degraded women, banned music and movies and ruled in an oppressive, puritanical way. Almost all Muslims throughout the world reject the Taliban’s extreme form of Islam.

The United States may have made some mistakes in Afghanistan. But supporting a revival of the Taliban, which harbored the terrorists responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks and ran an oppressive, puritanical and unpopular form of Islam, would not only be a much larger mistake; it would be an insult to all the soldiers who gave their lives to depose the group and capture the men responsible for murdering thousands of innocent Americans on Sept. 11.

Adam Deutsch
LSA sophomore

During fall break, plan ahead for absentee ballots, election

Attention in-state students who will be first time voters this Election Day: The best way you can spend your fall break is making sure your vote gets counted.

Many in-state students who are registered to vote at their home address plan on voting absentee. But for first-time voters, that’s not so easy to do. In Michigan, first-time voters have to “show themselves” at some point before voting. That means that if you’re a first-time voter who didn’t register to vote in person, you can’t request an absentee ballot by mail. If you’re a first-time Michigan voter registered to vote at your home address, and if you registered to vote through a registration drive or by mail (rather than by going to the Secretary of State’s office or county clerk’s office in person), you must either request your absentee ballot in person or go home to vote on Election Day.

Many students’ plans to go home on Election Day don’t work out. If you are a first-time Michigan voter registered at home who didn’t register to vote in person, you can use your fall break to save yourself a trip home on Election Day. We suggest visiting your county clerk’s office and filling out an absentee ballot. You can also take an absentee ballot with you. Just remember that your ballot will not be counted unless your signature is on the return envelope and matches your signature on file.

For more information on voting law and voter rights, check out the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan’s student voting website: www.aclumich.org/studentvoting. Michigan laws aren’t always friendly to student voters, so don’t let your Election Day be spoiled by the realization that you can’t vote as you had planned.

Jack Temple and Renagh O'Leary
The letter writers are board members of the University’s undergraduate chapter of the ACLU.