Senator D'Amato comments on the Middle East - What is at Stake?

It was an easy story to miss. The New York Times ran a short two-column Associated Press dispatch before the new year in the back of its Sunday edition. It noted, in a very modest headline: Taliban Kills 2 Sisters for the Crime of Teaching.

You had the feeling that was how The New York Times must have reported continuing harassment of Jews in Hitler s Germany during the mid 1930s. They would offer a slightly arched journalistic eyebrow by placing a small story, buried in the back of the paper, as if noting this was nothing more than those rude Germans being difficult again.

The far more current report on the murders of these two courageous sisters told the reader that Taliban militants broke into their walled house in Afghanistan and shot and killed the teachers and three other family members " their mother, grandmother and a 20-year-old male relative. AP says the sisters had been warned to quit teaching or end up facing the penalty.

It is instructive to note that The New York Times used the same short story to report that NATO was seeking to determine if British troops had fired at civilians after a suicide-bomb attack on their convoy.

Let s be clear about what the murders of these two women teachers told us, regardless of how The New York Times sought to obscure its message. We are in mortal combat with an ideology that not only used four airliners as instruments of death but declared war on every principle this nation values. Tolerance, diversity, equality and brotherhood are mocked and marked for destruction by the Taliban.

Let us also understand that they will engage in a relentless assault on everything we hold dear for as along as they have the weapons and the resources to do so. Further, they believe they will win this campaign, depending on our classic American insistence on a beginning, middle and speedy end to war.

Interestingly, Sen. Hillary Clinton recently traveled to Afghanistan to visit American troops, demonstrate solidarity with the government and call for additional coalition forces to confront a resurgent Taliban threat. I suspect she does so because she sees, as I do, the sustained and enormous threat to this nation from an ideology so evil that it would command its forces to murder women whose sole crime was to teach. A cabal so monstrous they would crash hijacked airliners into our cities while contemplating other acts of terror.

While the debate swirls every day over why we are in Iraq, the coming Iranian nuclear threat, the precarious access to Middle East oil and more, it is the Taliban that remains a clear and present danger. It is no secret that Clinton and I may disagree on some issues, but as Americans we share a common understanding of just what is at stake in Afghanistan. There are forces there that seek to murder us and anyone else who does not embrace their perverse and subverted form of religion. You may call yourself a Blue State liberal or a Rock Ribbed Republican, but either way, they mean to kill us. You may be a New England college professor, a Chicago bookstore clerk, a Louisiana clergyman or a Long Island homemaker, but they mean to kill us. You may have protested the president s last speech in Washington or you may have swept the New Year s confetti from Times Square. But they mean to kill us.

As stark as these words are, they reflect the simple truth that we are engaged in a war that will last for years, and we will need to develop a national stamina for the long-distance pursuit of evil " or, they will kill us and our families.

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