Taking our Liberties                        by Anthony Lewis

Attacks on India strain US ties          by Vickram Chandra

Why can't India have a war on Terrorism?  Anne Applebaum

Is the US Training Terrorists?          by J Green & C Kromm

Journalist beaten by Refugees          by Robert Fisk

The Algebra of Infinite Justice         by Arundhati Roy

Against Rationalization                    by Christopher Hitchens

Yes, This Is About Islam                  by Salman Rushdie

Taking Our Liberties

By ANTHONY LEWIS

BOSTON — The war against terrorism will go on indefinitely, President Bush has warned, seeking the enemy around the world. Already American forces are committed to the Philippines, Georgia and Yemen. Iraq may be next. Heavy fighting continues in Afghanistan.

War without end is likely to have — indeed is already having — profound consequences for the American constitutional system. It tends to produce the very thing that the framers of the Constitution most feared: concentrated, unaccountable political power.

The framers sought in three ways to prevent that concentration. They divided power in the federal government, so that one branch could check another if it grew too mighty. They made government accountable to the people, who, in James Madison's words, had "the censorial power . . . over the government." And, in the first 10 amendments to the Constitution, they guaranteed specific rights like freedom of speech and due process of law.

All three of those constitutional bulwarks against concentrated power are now threatened.

War inevitably produces an exaltation of presidential power. The president is commander in chief of the armed forces — a distinctive feature of the American system — and in wartime people tend to fall in behind the commander. The horror of what happened on Sept. 11 intensifies that instinct. President Bush's high level of public support is not surprising.

The danger lies in political use of that wartime popularity. Last week the Senate majority leader, Tom Daschle, offered a first mild question about President Bush's plans to carry the war around the world. He was rebuked by the Republican leader, Trent Lott.

"How dare Senator Daschle criticize President Bush while we are fighting our war on terrorism?" Senator Lott asked. His crude attack showed how hard it will be to maintain the Constitution's premise of accountable government, subject to questioning and criticism, during a war without visible end.

Secrecy is a second threat to the constitutional premise. The Bush administration is the most secretive Washington has seen in years — and intensely so in the Afghanistan war. The press has been kept at a distance much of the time. In these conditions, how can Congress and the public perform their constitutional function of holding the government accountable?

The record since Sept. 11 raises grave civil-liberties questions. Most attention has been paid to President Bush's order calling for military tribunals to try any noncitizen suspected of terrorism — an order so thoughtlessly prepared that, months later, operating rules have still not been issued. But out of sight, other menacing things have been happening.

More than 1,000 aliens, some of them lawful permanent residents with green cards, have been detained for extended periods in secrecy. The few cases that the press has been able to examine have disturbing features.

One case has been before Federal District Judge Shira A. Scheindlin in New York. Osama Awadallah, a green card holder living in San Diego, was detained on Sept. 20. He was held as a material witness because an old telephone number of his was found in a car used by one of the Sept. 11 hijackers.

Mr. Awadallah said that in various places of detention across the country he had been brutalized by guards, forced to strip naked before a female officer and denied the right to see a lawyer. He was forced to testify before a federal grand jury while shackled to a chair. He was charged with perjury in two answers.

Judge Scheindlin is considering whether his treatment requires dismissal of the charges. She has said that he may have been "unlawfully arrested, unlawfully searched, abused by law enforcement officials, denied access to his lawyer and family."

Civil liberties have often been overridden in times of crisis and war — as in the removal of Japanese-Americans from the West Coast in World War II. Those occasions were followed by regrets and apologies.

But how will we protect civil liberties in a war without end? The attorney general, John Ashcroft, has given his answer. He told Congress in December that "those who scare peace- loving people with phantoms of lost liberty . . . only aid terrorists."

[Reprinted from The New York Times, Match 9, 2002. Anthony Lewis is a former Times columnist.]

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Attacks on India strain U.S. ties:New Delhi not buying Pakistan as anti-terror ally

By Vikram Chandra (News Editor for MSNBC.com's partner in India, NDTV)

An Indian border security soldier in the Kashmiri capital of Srinigar. Some 60,000 people have been killed in Kashmir since 1989, when militants began to fight for independence from India.

NEW DELHI, Dec. 17 - Over the last three years a quiet revolution had been sweeping through Indian foreign policy. The government, security analysts and the media had all accepted that close ties, perhaps even a strategic partnership, with the United States was the path to choose in the early 21st century. The attacks of Sept. 11 and the subsequent enlistment of India's enemy, Pakistan, as an American ally in the "war on terrorism" created a problem for India - one worsened by last week's Islamic suicide attack on India's parliament building.

TODAY, THE INDIAN government is having a difficult time explaining, at least publicly, how close ties with the United States coincide with the national interest. Since Sept. 11, two bold attacks by Pakistani-based militants have killed dozens in India, one on the regional parliament of Kashmir, the other just last week in New Delhi on the national parliament. India says the attack on last Thursday was planned by Jaish-e-Mohammad and Lashkar-e-Tayyaba, Islamic groups fighting to separate the mostly Muslim region of Kashmir from India, and accuses Pakistani intelligence agency of involvement. India has its troops on high alert and has threatened to retaliate against Pakistan.

A DILEMMA

Yet American troops now use Pakistan as a base for operations in Afghanistan. India, which had been extremely interested in creating a new friendship with the United States after decades of mutual suspicion, may now be wondering whether it can trust its new "friend."

The logic of closer Indian-American ties rested on justifications which have almost become clichés by now. The two largest democracies in the world, with a shared interest in the promotion of pluralism and a shared concern over the rise of Islamic militancy. There also is a shared commitment to high-tech business relations and the prominent role of Indian-Americans in the U.S. economy of the 1990s, especially infotech revolution in Silicon Valley. Throw in the mutual concern for Chinese expansion in Asia, and you can understand why there has been so much talk of "natural allies."

Since Sept. 11, however, just about every senior Indian official has privately complained that America is treating the source of the problem - which, in India's eyes, is Pakistan - as part of the solution. Washington argues that it had little choice early on if it wanted to mount a real war on Afghan soil. Pakistani support seemed completely essential, and Washington has tried to reassure India that part of the effect of this new Pakistani-American relationship would be greater American leverage in keeping Pakistan's extremists in line. With Indian feelings in mind, the U.S. also added some Pakistani groups active in Kashmir to its list of terrorist organizations.

The public stance in India is that this is good news. India's external affairs minister, Jaswant Singh, has said: "India and the U.S. don't have a hyphenated relationship. If the relations between Pakistan and United States improve, very good-why should they not improve?"

NOT BLACK AND WHITE

Immediately after the World Trade Center attacks, President Bush said, "If you harbor terrorists, you are a terrorist." Many in India thought he was talking about Pakistan. It is hardly a secret that thousands of well-trained Islamic fundamentalists cross into Indian-administered Kashmir from the Pakistani side to fight the Indian Army.

Nor is there much dispute that many of these foreign fighters would fall into the category of being "terrorists" - they throw grenades in public places and massacre civilians belonging to other religions. In fact, even Pakistan's former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto told a Kashmiri newspaper last week that she considered foreign militants in Kashmir to be terrorists who were damaging the Kashmiri movement.
Finally, the United States has acknowledged that in the past, Pakistan and its intelligence agency the ISI either openly supported, or at least winked at, the jihad factories that manufactured militant radicals for Kashmir, Afghanistan and other hot spots.

Indians are highly skeptical of American promises to rein in Pakistan's more radical factions. The evidence from Afghanistan since the collapse of the Taliban illustrates what India, and the Northern Alliance, have been saying all along - the Taliban was getting much of its military muscle from Pakistani fanatics, bred in madrassas inside Pakistan.

Many of these militants have given interviews from Northern Alliance prisons in the past weeks testifying that they have fought inside Kashmir before entering Afghanistan, and most of them are from groups like the Jamaat ul Ulema Islami, a Pakistan-based group that has had the cooperation in the past of Pakistani's security services.

Congress Party politician Kapil Sibal says "India must make its position clear to the U.S. that your talk of dealing with terrorism would not really be complete unless you tell Pakistan that all the bases in Pakistan, all the training centers, all the supply of money, all the supply of arms will stop and unless that stops, you too are a terrorist state."

G. Parthasarthy, a former diplomat who is one of India's leading strategic thinkers, says there is concern that Pakistan's military leader Gen. Pervez Musharraf may try to appease hard-liners angry at the loss of their Taliban allies by turning militants loose in Kashmir. "If you noticed, General Musharraf has tried to balance what he has done to Afghanistan to what he is going to do to Kashmir," he said. "So I think he'll give the militants a free hand in Kashmir."

INDIA'S OWN HARD LINE

The more hard-line voices in India feel the momentum may now be with them. They point to Israeli attacks on Yasser Arafat's headquarters as an example of how India should be dealing with terrorism. Top hard-line policy makers say that if those strikes could be condoned by the West because Arafat is doing little to control Hamas or Islamic Jihad, then surely India is entitled to take action against Pakistani camps because Musharraf is doing little to control its militants. The danger with this thinking is, of course, a possible escalation into a nuclear war, but there is a tendency among some to brush that aside as an unlikely scenario.

The government appears to hope that American pressure on Musharraf could still lead to the genuine crackdown India has demanded for a decade. An optimist might hope that would set the stage for renewed talks between India and Pakistan on Kashmir and other issues. The U.S. policy has been to encourage such hopes. If such a scenario were to unfold, events could quickly take India and America back to their focus on the long-term stability of Asia and the pre-Sept. 11 "natural allies" state of affairs.

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Why can't India have a war on terrorism, too?

By Anne Applebaum

Posted Friday, December 28, 2001, at 1:28 PM PT

"India and Pakistan Exchange Sanctions"; "Asia's Other Border Strife." A few months ago, headlines like those might not have made it into American newspapers, let alone onto the front page of the Washington Post. After all, border conflicts have marred the relationship between India and Pakistan since-well, since India and Pakistan first gained their independence. Arguments over the fate of Kashmir have twice broken into major wars, and Muslim insurgents have been fighting the Indian government in Kashmir for more than a decade, killing a staggering 75,000 people in the process.

While it isn't quite true that no one has noticed these outbreaks of violence, it is also hard to argue that this particular conflict has played a central role in world affairs. Since the Cold War ended, it has mattered even less. India is no longer semi-aligned with the Soviet Union, the United States no longer "tilts" toward Pakistan. And no wonder: India and Pakistan fight, make wary peace, and then fight again, with no discernible impact on anyone except Indians and Pakistanis. Although much ink has been spilled on the subject, even the small Indian and Pakistani nuclear arsenals shouldn't necessarily worry us either. If nuclear deterrence worked in Europe, why shouldn't it work in South Asia? Is either India or Pakistan more irrational, more bloody-minded, or more prepared to accept the mass murder of their own citizens than were the United States and the U.S.S.R. at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis?

Yet we are worried, we are involved, and we do care, far more than we did in the past-but not because the conflict itself has changed or even really because it might go nuclear. In the wake of Sept. 11, I argued that the attacks would make the diplomatic world into a very different place and would create new issues that we hadn't even begun to think through. Now here is a test case, the first example of the New New World Order in action: In the past 48 hours, the Indian-Pakistani conflict has exposed almost every fuzzy, unconsidered, unclear aspect of our new foreign policy, and with alarming speed.

For one, we are suddenly prisoners of our own rhetoric. Two weeks ago, a group of suicide bombers leapt from a car and blew themselves up in front of the Indian parliament, killing 14 people. India suspects that the bombers were members of terrorist groups resident in Pakistan, and Indian officials now claim to be at war against "state-sponsored terrorism." If the United States was well within its rights to destroy terrorists who attacked Washington and New York, the Indians are well within their rights to destroy terrorists who attack New Delhi: Imagine a suicide bomb attack on the House of Commons or on the steps of the U.S. Congress. If we are not to appear hypocritical, we are obliged to sympathize with India.

At the same time, we are hijacked by our new military alliances. It just so happens that at this precise moment, the U.S. government finds itself in the unfamiliar position of dependence upon the Pakistani army, whose troops are patrolling the wild Pakistani-Afghan border regions, looking for stray members of al-Qaida, Osama Bin Laden among them. If real tensions break out along the Indian-Pakistani border, those troops will be pulled away to fight. We may be obliged to sympathize with India, but we are also quite desperate to prevent India from attacking Pakistan.

Meanwhile, we are also trapped by the very mistiness of our definitions of terrorism, and our lack of clarity about which terrorists, exactly, we oppose. Certainly, we are very much at war with the remnants of the Taliban and al-Qaida. Both of these groups, however, have been linked with the Kashmiri insurgents. Or perhaps "linked" is the wrong word, since the three groups appear to have been interchangeable. Bin Laden's Afghan camps trained Kashmiri terrorists, who in turn fought to defend the Taliban. Among them was John Walker, the American who was captured fighting with Taliban troops and who had previously fought with Pakistani groups in Kashmir. Whatever our feelings about India and Pakistan, if we are at war with al-Qaida, we should be at war with their Kashmiri allies as well.

Hence the American dilemma. We don't want to take sides-but we have reasons to take both of them. We don't want to get involved-but both India and Pakistan, for their own reasons, are dragging us in. We've never successfully mediated here before-but now we have to. We don't want to play global policeman-but there isn't anyone else who can or will. The United Nations isn't at war with al-Qaida, we are.

So far, the American reaction has been to press hard on both sides. Colin Powell has been working the phones, urging and bullying the Indians not to invade, pressuring and cajoling the Pakistanis to crack down on the terrorist groups that launched the suicide bombers. If he fails-if India and Pakistan go to war-America will pay a price. America's cause will suffer, America's war against terrorism will be diminished, America's particular battle against al-Qaida may even be lost, if Bin Laden escapes.

It's a new twist on events, if you think about it. From the start, it was clear that the impact of America's War on Terrorism would be felt in many distant places. We now know that the opposite is also true: The wars of distant places will make their impact felt in America as well.

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Is the US Training Terrorists?

By Jordan Green and Chris Kromm

Father Roy Bourgeois, the charismatic Maryknoll priest who has, since 1990, led the annual protest against against the United States' most infamous military training facility, wasn't sure it would happen this year. But in mid-September he called around to assess the resolve of the movement. Response was unanimous.

It's very important that we be here, because at the very core of this issue is violence," said Bourgeois. "We're going to mourn the thousands killed on September 11, but we cannot forget the 75,000 in El Salvador who were victims of terrorists trained at the School of the Americas."

Graduates of the school implicated in human rights abuses are legion. Human Rights Watch reported last year that seven graduates were connected to Colombian paramilitaries, including Brig. Gen. Jaime Canal Albán, who has been tied to the displacement of 2,000 peasants and at least forty extrajudicial executions.

This year's protest against the School of the Americas--renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHISC)--marked a standoff between the recently galvanized peace movement, and the continuing militarization of US foreign policy. But considering the current climate, the massing of 10,000 on November 18 was a significant statement of informed dissent.

Located on the grounds of the Army's Fort Benning, the facility has remained a potent symbol and a critical mechanism in the vertical integration of the national security apparatus across the hemisphere.

To the veterans of the Central American solidarity movement and the recent crop of globalization activists who want to shut down the facility, the heightened patriotic rhetoric of the past two months has only strengthened their opposition to what they consider a terrorist training camp.

The recent passage of the USA PATRIOT Act made the protests an important test for exploring the boundaries of dissent. The city of Columbus had hoped to block the demonstrations, citing the threat of trespass from multiple entry points and the expectation of "more dangerous groups" than the nonviolent SOA Watch--evidence perhaps of the e-mail surveillance component of the PATRIOT Act in action.

Despite apprehension on both sides, the protests held to a traditional model of nonviolent civil disobedience throughout the weekend, with a peaceful funeral procession in front of the base's closed gate and more than 100 arrests of protesters who symbolically breached the line.

The gate was gradually festooned with wooden crosses, flowers and photographs as the protesters sang a litany of the names of the disappeared, each name accompanied by the invocation: "Presente."

The larger part of the protest was made up of parishioners and students, but groups as varied as Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC) and Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade were also in attendance. The protesters cut across a broad constituency embracing liberation theology and militant anarchism, with all adhering to a tight set of protest ground rules.

The South is central to the military economy of the country. The region is host to 56 percent of enlisted soldiers stationed on American soil and receives more defense dollars per capita than any other. But residents of this small city of 185,000 in the scrub pines of Georgia--economically dependent on the consumer dollars of Fort Benning?s floating troop population--are far from unanimous in their attitude toward the protests.

FLOC organizer Nick Wood told of being approached in a hotel bar by an active-duty soldier who asked why he was protesting. Wood gave his reasons and the soldier responded, "Thanks, I'm glad to know." As he was leaving, the female bartender who had been listening told Wood, "Good luck and God bless you."

What are the prospects for Congressional action to close the Institute? "It's going to be an uphill battle" admitted Bourgeois. The shaken legislative coalition--last year's House resolution fell ten votes shy of passage--may not be able to push through a bill in the next session. But the Maryknoll priest is confident that the critical mass of the movement will soon bear fruit. "At some point, they're going to have to ask, 'Is it worth it?'

December 24, 2001

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My Beating by Refugees Is a Symbol of the Hatred and Fury of this Filthy War - ROBERT FISK  

THEY started by shaking hands. We said "Salaam aleikum" – peace be upon you – then the first pebbles flew past my face. A small boy tried to grab my bag. Then another. Then someone punched me in the back. Then young men broke my glasses, began smashing stones into my face and head. I couldn't see for the blood pouring down my forehead and swamping my eyes. And even then, I understood. I couldn't blame them for what they were doing. In fact, if I were the Afghan refugees of Kila Abdullah, close to the Afghan-Pakistan border, I would have done just the same to Robert Fisk. Or any other Westerner I could find.

So why record my few minutes of terror and self-disgust under assault near the Afghan border, bleeding and crying like an animal, when hundreds – let us be frank and say thousands – of innocent civilians are dying under American air strikes in Afghanistan, when the "War of Civilisation" is burning and maiming the Pashtuns of Kandahar and destroying their homes because "good" must triumph over "evil"?

Some of the Afghans in the little village had been there for years, others had arrived – desperate and angry and mourning their slaughtered loved ones – over the past two weeks. It was a bad place for a car to break down. A bad time, just before the Iftar, the end of the daily fast of Ramadan. But what happened to us was symbolic of the hatred and fury and hypocrisy of this filthy war, a growing band of destitute Afghan men, young and old, who saw foreigners – enemies – in their midst and tried to destroy at least one of them.

Many of these Afghans, so we were to learn, were outraged by what they had seen on television of the Mazar-i-Sharif massacres, of the prisoners killed with their hands tied behind their backs. A villager later told one of our drivers that they had seen the videotape of CIA officers "Mike" and "Dave" threatening death to a kneeling prisoner at Mazar. They were uneducated – I doubt if many could read – but you don't have to have a schooling to respond to the death of loved ones under a B-52's bombs. At one point a screaming teenager had turned to my driver and asked, in all sincerity: "Is that Mr Bush?"

It must have been about 4.30pm that we reached Kila Abdullah, halfway between the Pakistani city of Quetta and the border town of Chaman; Amanullah, our driver, Fayyaz Ahmed, our translator, Justin Huggler of The Independent – fresh from covering the Mazar massacre – and myself. The first we knew that something was wrong was when the car stopped in the middle of the narrow, crowded street. A film of white steam was rising from the bonnet of our jeep, a constant shriek of car horns and buses and trucks and rickshaws protesting at the road-block we had created. All four of us got out of the car and pushed it to the side of the road. I muttered something to Justin about this being "a bad place to break down". Kila Abdulla was home to thousands of Afghan refugees, the poor and huddled masses that the war has produced in Pakistan.

Amanullah went off to find another car – there is only one thing worse than a crowd of angry men and that's a crowd of angry men after dark – and Justin and I smiled at the initially friendly crowd that had already gathered round our steaming vehicle. I shook a lot of hands – perhaps I should have thought of Mr Bush – and uttered a lot of "Salaam aleikums". I knew what could happen if the smiling stopped.

The crowd grew larger and I suggested to Justin that we move away from the jeep, walk into the open road. A child had flicked his finger hard against my wrist and I persuaded myself that it was an accident, a childish moment of contempt. Then a pebble whisked past my head and bounced off Justin's shoulder. Justin turned round. His eyes spoke of concern and I remember how I breathed in. Please, I thought, it was just a prank. Then another kid tried to grab my bag. It contained my passport, credit cards, money, diary, contacts book, mobile phone. I yanked it back and put the strap round my shoulder. Justin and I crossed the road and someone punched me in the back.

How do you walk out of a dream when the characters suddenly turn hostile? I saw one of the men who had been all smiles when we shook hands. He wasn't smiling now. Some of the smaller boys were still laughing but their grins were transforming into something else. The respected foreigner – the man who had been all "salaam aleikum" a few minutes ago – was upset, frightened, on the run. The West was being brought low. Justin was being pushed around and, in the middle of the road, we noticed a bus driver waving us to his vehicle. Fayyaz, still by the car, unable to understand why we had walked away, could no longer see us. Justin reached the bus and climbed aboard. As I put my foot on the step three men grabbed the strap of my bag and wrenched me back on to the road. Justin's hand shot out. "Hold on," he shouted. I did.

That's when the first mighty crack descended on my head. I almost fell down under the blow, my ears singing with the impact. I had expected this, though not so painful or hard, not so immediate. Its message was awful. Someone hated me enough to hurt me. There were two more blows, one on the back of my shoulder, a powerful fist that sent me crashing against the side of the bus while still clutching Justin's hand. The passengers were looking out at me and then at Justin. But they did not move. No one wanted to help. I cried out "Help me Justin", and Justin – who was doing more than any human could do by clinging to my ever loosening grip asked me – over the screams of the crowd – what I wanted him to do. Then I realised. I could only just hear him. Yes, they were shouting. Did I catch the word "kaffir" – infidel? Perhaps I was was wrong. That's when I was dragged away from Justin.

There were two more cracks on my head, one on each side and for some odd reason, part of my memory – some small crack in my brain – registered a moment at school, at a primary school called the Cedars in Maidstone more than 50 years ago when a tall boy building sandcastles in the playground had hit me on the head. I had a memory of the blow smelling, as if it had affected my nose. The next blow came from a man I saw carrying a big stone in his right hand. He brought it down on my forehead with tremendous force and something hot and liquid splashed down my face and lips and chin. I was kicked. On the back, on the shins, on my right thigh. Another teenager grabbed my bag yet again and I was left clinging to the strap, looking up suddenly and realising there must have been 60 men in front of me, howling. Oddly, it wasn't fear I felt but a kind of wonderment. So this is how it happens. I knew that I had to respond. Or, so I reasoned in my stunned state, I had to die.

The only thing that shocked me was my own physical sense of collapse, my growing awareness of the liquid beginning to cover me. I don't think I've ever seen so much blood before. For a second, I caught a glimpse of something terrible, a nightmare face – my own – reflected in the window of the bus, streaked in blood, my hands drenched in the stuff like Lady Macbeth, slopping down my pullover and the collar of my shirt until my back was wet and my bag dripping with crimson and vague splashes suddenly appearing on my trousers.

The more I bled, the more the crowd gathered and beat me with their fists. Pebbles and small stones began to bounce off my head and shoulders. How long, I remembered thinking, could this go on? My head was suddenly struck by stones on both sides at the same time – not thrown stones but stones in the palms of men who were using them to try and crack my skull. Then a fist punched me in the face, splintering my glasses on my nose, another hand grabbed at the spare pair of spectacles round my neck and ripped the leather container from the cord.

I guess at this point I should thank Lebanon. For 25 years, I have covered Lebanon's wars and the Lebanese used to teach me, over and over again, how to stay alive: take a decision – any decision – but don't do nothing.

So I wrenched the bag back from the hands of the young man who was holding it. He stepped back. Then I turned on the man on my right, the one holding the bloody stone in his hand and I bashed my fist into his mouth. I couldn't see very much – my eyes were not only short-sighted without my glasses but were misting over with a red haze – but I saw the man sort of cough and a tooth fall from his lip and then he fell back on the road. For a second the crowd stopped. Then I went for the other man, clutching my bag under my arm and banging my fist into his nose. He roared in anger and it suddenly turned all red. I missed another man with a punch, hit one more in the face, and ran.

I was back in the middle of the road but could not see. I brought my hands to my eyes and they were full of blood and with my fingers I tried to scrape the gooey stuff out. It made a kind of sucking sound but I began to see again and realised that I was crying and weeping and that the tears were cleaning my eyes of blood. What had I done, I kept asking myself? I had been punching and attacking Afghan refugees, the very people I had been writing about for so long, the very dispossessed, mutilated people whom my own country –among others – was killing along, with the Taliban, just across the border. God spare me, I thought. I think I actually said it. The men whose families our bombers were killing were now my enemies too.

Then something quite remarkable happened. A man walked up to me, very calmly, and took me by the arm. I couldn't see him very well for all the blood that was running into my eyes but he was dressed in a kind of robe and wore a turban and had a white-grey beard. And he led me away from the crowd. I looked over my shoulder. There were now a hundred men behind me and a few stones skittered along the road, but they were not aimed at me –presumably to avoid hitting the stranger. He was like an Old Testament figure or some Bible story, the Good Samaritan, a Muslim man – perhaps a mullah in the village – who was trying to save my life.

He pushed me into the back of a police truck. But the policemen didn't move. They were terrified. "Help me," I kept shouting through the tiny window at the back of their cab, my hands leaving streams of blood down the glass. They drove a few metres and stopped until the tall man spoke to them again. Then they drove another 300 metres.

And there, beside the road, was a Red Cross-Red Crescent convoy. The crowd was still behind us. But two of the medical attendants pulled me behind one of their vehicles, poured water over my hands and face and began pushing bandages on to my head and face and the back of my head. "Lie down and we'll cover you with a blanket so they can't see you," one of them said. They were both Muslims, Bangladeshis and their names should be recorded because they were good men and true: Mohamed Abdul Halim and Sikder Mokaddes Ahmed. I lay on the floor, groaning, aware that I might live.

Within minutes, Justin arrived. He had been protected by a massive soldier from the Baluchistan Levies – true ghost of the British Empire who, with a single rifle, kept the crowds away from the car in which Justin was now sitting. I fumbled with my bag. They never got the bag, I kept saying to myself, as if my passport and my credit cards were a kind of Holy Grail. But they had seized my final pair of spare glasses – I was blind without all three – and my mobile telephone was missing and so was my contacts book, containing 25 years of telephone numbers throughout the Middle East. What was I supposed to do? Ask everyone who ever knew me to re-send their telephone numbers?

Goddamit, I said and tried to bang my fist on my side until I realised it was bleeding from a big gash on the wrist – the mark of the tooth I had just knocked out of a man's jaw, a man who was truly innocent of any crime except that of being the victim of the world.

I had spent more than two and a half decades reporting the humiliation and misery of the Muslim world and now their anger had embraced me too. Or had it? There were Mohamed and Sikder of the Red Crescent and Fayyaz who came panting back to the car incandescent at our treatment and Amanullah who invited us to his home for medical treatment. And there was the Muslim saint who had taken me by the arm.

And – I realised – there were all the Afghan men and boys who had attacked me who should never have done so but whose brutality was entirely the product of others, of us – of we who had armed their struggle against the Russians and ignored their pain and laughed at their civil war and then armed and paid them again for the "War for Civilisation" just a few miles away and then bombed their homes and ripped up their families and called them "collateral damage".

So I thought I should write about what happened to us in this fearful, silly, bloody, tiny incident. I feared other versions would produce a different narrative, of how a British journalist was "beaten up by a mob of Afghan refugees". And of course, that's the point. The people who were assaulted were the Afghans, the scars inflicted by us – by B-52s, not by them. And I'll say it again. If I was an Afghan refugee in Kila Abdullah, I would have done just what they did. I would have attacked Robert Fisk. Or any other Westerner I could find.

[Editor’s Note: All credits to the author, and the Independent, in which this article appeared on 12/10/2001.]

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The Algebra of Infinite Justice

by Arundhati Roy

[Editor’s Note: All credits belong to the author. This article was first published in The Guardian in England, on Saturday September 29, 2001. As of November 3, no American leading publisher, newspaper or magazine, agreed to carry this article. This is according to Ms. Roy’s agent, Mr. David Godwin (see New York Times piece on Ms. Roy, on November 3). My Roy is the controversial and best-selling Indian author of the Booker Award novel, The God of Small Things. She is also a qualified architect, and leading activist whose fights include that against dams being built in areas that will affect locales occupied by India’s Dalits.]

IN the aftermath of the unconscionable September 11 suicide attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Centre, an American newscaster said: "Good and evil rarely manifest themselves as clearly as they did last Tuesday. People who we don't know massacred people who we do. And they did so with contemptuous glee." Then he broke down and wept.

Here's the rub: America is at war against people it doesn't know, because they don't appear much on TV. Before it has properly identified or even begun to comprehend the nature of its enemy, the US government has, in a rush of publicity and embarrassing rhetoric, cobbled together an "international coalition against terror", mobilised its army, its air force, its navy and its media, and committed them to battle.

The trouble is that once America goes off to war, it can't very well return without having fought one. If it doesn't find its enemy, for the sake of the enraged folks back home, it will have to manufacture one. Once war begins, it will develop a momentum, a logic and a justification of its own, and we'll lose sight of why it's being fought in the first place.

What we're witnessing here is the spectacle of the world's most powerful country reaching reflexively, angrily, for an old instinct to fight a new kind of war. Suddenly, when it comes to defending itself, America's streamlined warships, cruise missiles and F-16 jets look like obsolete, lumbering things. As deterrence, its arsenal of nuclear bombs is no longer worth its weight in scrap. Box-cutters, penknives, and cold anger are the weapons with which the wars of the new century will be waged. Anger is the lock pick. It slips through customs unnoticed. Doesn't show up in baggage checks.

Who is America fighting? On September 20, the FBI said that it had doubts about the identities of some of the hijackers. On the same day President George Bush said, "We know exactly who these people are and which governments are supporting them." It sounds as though the president knows something that the FBI and the American public don't.

In his September 20 address to the US Congress, President Bush called the enemies of America "enemies of freedom". "Americans are asking, 'Why do they hate us?' " he said. "They hate our freedoms - our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other." People are being asked to make two leaps of faith here. First, to assume that The Enemy is who the US government says it is, even though it has no substantial evidence to support that claim. And second, to assume that The Enemy's motives are what the US government says they are, and there's nothing to support that either.

For strategic, military and economic reasons, it is vital for the US government to persuade its public that their commitment to freedom and democracy and the American Way of Life is under attack. In the current atmosphere of grief, outrage and anger, it's an easy notion to peddle. However, if that were true, it's reasonable to wonder why the symbols of America's economic and military dominance - the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon - were chosen as the targets of the attacks. Why not the Statue of Liberty? Could it be that the stygian anger that led to the attacks has its taproot not in American freedom and democracy, but in the US government's record of commitment and support to exactly the opposite things - to military and economic terrorism, insurgency, military dictatorship, religious bigotry and unimaginable genocide (outside America)? It must be hard for ordinary Americans, so recently bereaved, to look up at the world with their eyes full of tears and encounter what might appear to them to be indifference. It isn't indifference. It's just augury. An absence of surprise. The tired wisdom of knowing that what goes around eventually comes around. American people ought to know that it is not them but their government's policies that are so hated. They can't possibly doubt that they themselves, their extraordinary musicians, their writers, their actors, their spectacular sportsmen and their cinema, are universally welcomed. All of us have been moved by the courage and grace shown by firefighters, rescue workers and ordinary office staff in the days since the attacks.

America's grief at what happened has been immense and immensely public. It would be grotesque to expect it to calibrate or modulate its anguish. However, it will be a pity if, instead of using this as an opportunity to try to understand why September 11 happened, Americans use it as an opportunity to usurp the whole world's sorrow to mourn and avenge only their own. Because then it falls to the rest of us to ask the hard questions and say the harsh things. And for our pains, for our bad timing, we will be disliked, ignored and perhaps eventually silenced.

The world will probably never know what motivated those particular hijackers who flew planes into those particular American buildings. They were not glory boys. They left no suicide notes, no political messages; no organisation has claimed credit for the attacks. All we know is that their belief in what they were doing outstripped the natural human instinct for survival, or any desire to be remembered. It's almost as though they could not scale down the enormity of their rage to anything smaller than their deeds. And what they did has blown a hole in the world as we knew it. In the absence of information, politicians, political commentators and writers (like myself) will invest the act with their own politics, with their own interpretations. This speculation, this analysis of the political climate in which the attacks took place, can only be a good thing.

But war is looming large. Whatever remains to be said must be said quickly. Before America places itself at the helm of the "international coalition against terror", before it invites (and coerces) countries to actively participate in its almost godlike mission - called Operation Infinite Justice until it was pointed out that this could be seen as an insult to Muslims, who believe that only Allah can mete out infinite justice, and was renamed Operation Enduring Freedom- it would help if some small clarifications are made. For example, Infinite Justice/Enduring Freedom for whom? Is this America's war against terror in America or against terror in general? What exactly is being avenged here? Is it the tragic loss of almost 7,000 lives, the gutting of five million square feet of office space in Manhattan, the destruction of a section of the Pentagon, the loss of several hundreds of thousands of jobs, the bankruptcy of some airline companies and the dip in the New York Stock Exchange? Or is it more than that? In 1996, Madeleine Albright, then the US secretary of state, was asked on national television what she felt about the fact that 500,000 Iraqi children had died as a result of US economic sanctions. She replied that it was "a very hard choice", but that, all things considered, "we think the price is worth it". Albright never lost her job for saying this. She continued to travel the world representing the views and aspirations of the US government. More pertinently, the sanctions against Iraq remain in place. Children continue to die.

So here we have it. The equivocating distinction between civilisation and savagery, between the "massacre of innocent people" or, if you like, "a clash of civilisations" and "collateral damage". The sophistry and fastidious algebra of infinite justice. How many dead Iraqis will it take to make the world a better place? How many dead Afghans for every dead American? How many dead women and children for every dead man? How many dead mojahedin for each dead investment banker? As we watch mesmerised, Operation Enduring Freedom unfolds on TV monitors across the world. A coalition of the world's superpowers is closing in on Afghanistan, one of the poorest, most ravaged, war-torn countries in the world, whose ruling Taliban government is sheltering Osama bin Laden, the man being held responsible for the September 11 attacks.

The only thing in Afghanistan that could possibly count as collateral value is its citizenry. (Among them, half a million maimed orphans.There are accounts of hobbling stampedes that occur when artificial limbs are airdropped into remote, inaccessible villages.) Afghanistan's economy is in a shambles. In fact, the problem for an invading army is that Afghanistan has no conventional coordinates or signposts to plot on a military map - no big cities, no highways, no industrial complexes, no water treatment plants. Farms have been turned into mass graves. The countryside is littered with land mines - 10 million is the most recent estimate. The American army would first have to clear the mines and build roads in order to take its soldiers in.

Fearing an attack from America, one million citizens have fled from their homes and arrived at the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. The UN estimates that there are eight million Afghan citizens who need emergency aid. As supplies run out - food and aid agencies have been asked to leave - the BBC reports that one of the worst humanitarian disasters of recent times has begun to unfold. Witness the infinite justice of the new century. Civilians starving to death while they're waiting to be killed.

In America there has been rough talk of "bombing Afghanistan back to the stone age". Someone please break the news that Afghanistan is already there. And if it's any consolation, America played no small part in helping it on its way. The American people may be a little fuzzy about where exactly Afghanistan is (we hear reports that there's a run on maps of the country), but the US government and Afghanistan are old friends.

In 1979, after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the CIA and Pakistan's ISI (Inter Services Intelligence) launched the largest covert operation in the history of the CIA. Their purpose was to harness the energy of Afghan resistance to the Soviets and expand it into a holy war, an Islamic jihad, which would turn Muslim countries within the Soviet Union against the communist regime and eventually destabilise it. When it began, it was meant to be the Soviet Union's Vietnam. It turned out to be much more than that. Over the years, through the ISI, the CIA funded and recruited almost 100,000 radical mojahedin from 40 Islamic countries as soldiers for America's proxy war. The rank and file of the mojahedin were unaware that their jihad was actually being fought on behalf of Uncle Sam. (The irony is that America was equally unaware that it was financing a future war against itself.)

In 1989, after being bloodied by 10 years of relentless conflict, the Russians withdrew, leaving behind a civilisation reduced to rubble.

Civil war in Afghanistan raged on. The jihad spread to Chechnya, Kosovo and eventually to Kashmir. The CIA continued to pour in money and military equipment, but the overheads had become immense, and more money was needed. The mojahedin ordered farmers to plant opium as a "revolutionary tax". The ISI set up hundreds of heroin laboratories across Afghanistan. Within two years of the CIA's arrival, the Pakistan-Afghanistan borderland had become the biggest producer of heroin in the world, and the single biggest source of the heroin on American streets. The annual profits, said to be between $100bn and $200bn, were ploughed back into training and arming militants.

In 1995, the Taliban - then a marginal sect of dangerous, hardline fundamentalists - fought its way to power in Afghanistan. It was funded by the ISI, that old cohort of the CIA, and supported by many political parties in Pakistan. The Taliban unleashed a regime of terror. Its first victims were its own people, particularly women. It closed down girls' schools, dismissed women from government jobs, and enforced sharia laws under which women deemed to be "immoral" are stoned to death, and widows guilty of being adulterous are buried alive. Given the Taliban government's human rights track record, it seems unlikely that it will in any way be intimidated or swerved from its purpose by the prospect of war, or the threat to the lives of its civilians.

After all that has happened, can there be anything more ironic than Russia and America joining hands to re-destroy Afghanistan? The question is, can you destroy destruction? Dropping more bombs on Afghanistan will only shuffle the rubble, scramble some old graves and disturb the dead.

The desolate landscape of Afghanistan was the burial ground of Soviet communism and the springboard of a unipolar world dominated by America. It made the space for neocapitalism and corporate globalisation, again dominated by America. And now Afghanistan is poised to become the graveyard for the unlikely soldiers who fought and won this war for America.

And what of America's trusted ally? Pakistan too has suffered enormously. The US government has not been shy of supporting military dictators who have blocked the idea of democracy from taking root in the country. Before the CIA arrived, there was a small rural market for opium in Pakistan. Between 1979 and 1985, the number of heroin addicts grew from zero to one-and-a-half million. Even before September 11, there were three million Afghan refugees living in tented camps along the border. Pakistan's economy is crumbling. Sectarian violence, globalisation's structural adjustment programmes and drug lords are tearing the country to pieces. Set up to fight the Soviets, the terrorist training centres and madrasahs, sown like dragon's teeth across the country, produced fundamentalists with tremendous popular appeal within Pakistan itself. The Taliban, which the Pakistan government has sup ported, funded and propped up for years, has material and strategic alliances with Pakistan's own political parties.

Now the US government is asking (asking?) Pakistan to garotte the pet it has hand-reared in its backyard for so many years. President Musharraf, having pledged his support to the US, could well find he has something resembling civil war on his hands.

India, thanks in part to its geography, and in part to the vision of its former leaders, has so far been fortunate enough to be left out of this Great Game. Had it been drawn in, it's more than likely that our democracy, such as it is, would not have survived. Today, as some of us watch in horror, the Indian government is furiously gyrating its hips, begging the US to set up its base in India rather than Pakistan. Having had this ringside view of Pakistan's sordid fate, it isn't just odd, it's unthinkable, that India should want to do this. Any third world country with a fragile economy and a complex social base should know by now that to invite a superpower such as America in (whether it says it's staying or just passing through) would be like inviting a brick to drop through your windscreen.

Operation Enduring Freedom is ostensibly being fought to uphold the American Way of Life. It'll probably end up undermining it completely. It will spawn more anger and more terror across the world. For ordinary people in America, it will mean lives lived in a climate of sickening uncertainty: will my child be safe in school? Will there be nerve gas in the subway? A bomb in the cinema hall? Will my love come home tonight? There have been warnings about the possibility of biological warfare - smallpox, bubonic plague, anthrax - the deadly payload of innocuous crop-duster aircraft. Being picked off a few at a time may end up being worse than being annihilated all at once by a nuclear bomb.

The US government, and no doubt governments all over the world, will use the climate of war as an excuse to curtail civil liberties, deny free speech, lay off workers, harass ethnic and religious minorities, cut back on public spending and divert huge amounts of money to the defence industry. To what purpose? President Bush can no more "rid the world of evil-doers" than he can stock it with saints. It's absurd for the US government to even toy with the notion that it can stamp out terrorism with more violence and oppression. Terrorism is the symptom, not the disease. Terrorism has no country. It's transnational, as global an enterprise as Coke or Pepsi or Nike. At the first sign of trouble, terrorists can pull up stakes and move their "factories" from country to country in search of a better deal. Just like the multi-nationals.

Terrorism as a phenomenon may never go away. But if it is to be contained, the first step is for America to at least acknowledge that it shares the planet with other nations, with other human beings who, even if they are not on TV, have loves and griefs and stories and songs and sorrows and, for heaven's sake, rights. Instead, when Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, was asked what he would call a victory in America's new war, he said that if he could convince the world that Americans must be allowed to continue with their way of life, he would consider it a victory.

The September 11 attacks were a monstrous calling card from a world gone horribly wrong. The message may have been written by Bin Laden (who knows?) and delivered by his couriers, but it could well have been signed by the ghosts of the victims of America's old wars. The millions killed in Korea, Vietnam and Cambodia, the 17,500 killed when Israel - backed by the US - invaded Lebanon in 1982, the 200,000 Iraqis killed in Operation Desert Storm, the thousands of Palestinians who have died fighting Israel's occupation of the West Bank. And the millions who died, in Yugoslavia, Somalia, Haiti, Chile, Nicaragua, El Salvador, the Dominican Republic, Panama, at the hands of all the terrorists, dictators and genocidists whom the American government supported, trained, bankrolled and supplied with arms. And this is far from being a comprehensive list.

For a country involved in so much warfare and conflict, the American people have been extremely fortunate. The strikes on September 11 were only the second on American soil in over a century. The first was Pearl Harbour. The reprisal for this took a long route, but ended with Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This time the world waits with bated breath for the horrors to come.

Someone recently said that if Osama bin Laden didn't exist, America would have had to invent him. But, in a way, America did invent him. He was among the jihadis who moved to Afghanistan in 1979 when the CIA commenced its operations there. Bin Laden has the distinction of being created by the CIA and wanted by the FBI. In the course of a fortnight he has been promoted from suspect to prime suspect and then, despite the lack of any real evidence, straight up the charts to being "wanted dead or alive". From all accounts, it will be impossible to produce evidence (of the sort that would stand scrutiny in a court of law) to link Bin Laden to the September 11 attacks. So far, it appears that the most incriminating piece of evidence against him is the fact that he has not condemned them.

From what is known about the location of Bin Laden and the living conditions in which he operates, it's entirely possible that he did not personally plan and carry out the attacks - that he is the inspirational figure, "the CEO of the holding company". The Taliban's response to US demands for the extradition of Bin Laden has been uncharacteristically reasonable: produce the evidence, then we'll hand him over. President Bush's response is that the demand is "non-negotiable". (While talks are on for the extradition of CEOs - can India put in a side request for the extradition of Warren Anderson of the US? He was the chairman of Union Carbide, responsible for the Bhopal gas leak that killed 16,000 people in 1984. We have collated the necessary evidence. It's all in the files. Could we have him, please?)

But who is Osama bin Laden really? Let me rephrase that. What is Osama bin Laden? He's America's family secret. He is the American president's dark doppelgänger. The savage twin of all that purports to be beautiful and civilised. He has been sculpted from the spare rib of a world laid to waste by America's foreign policy: its gunboat diplomacy, its nuclear arsenal, its vulgarly stated policy of "full-spectrum dominance", its chilling disregard for non-American lives, its barbarous military interventions, its support for despotic and dictatorial regimes, its merciless economic agenda that has munched through the economies of poor countries like a cloud of locusts. Its marauding multinationals who are taking over the air we breathe, the ground we stand on, the water we drink, the thoughts we think. Now that the family secret has been spilled, the twins are blurring into one another and gradually becoming interchangeable. Their guns, bombs, money and drugs have been going around in the loop for a while. (The Stinger missiles that will greet US helicopters were supplied by the CIA. The heroin used by America's drug addicts comes from Afghanistan. The Bush administration recently gave Afghanistan a $43m subsidy for a "war on drugs"....)

Now Bush and Bin Laden have even begun to borrow each other's rhetoric. Each refers to the other as "the head of the snake". Both invoke God and use the loose millenarian currency of good and evil as their terms of reference. Both are engaged in unequivocal political crimes. Both are dangerously armed - one with the nuclear arsenal of the obscenely powerful, the other with the incandescent, destructive power of the utterly hopeless. The fireball and the ice pick. The bludgeon and the axe. The important thing to keep in mind is that neither is an acceptable alternative to the other.

President Bush's ultimatum to the people of the world - "If you're not with us, you're against us" - is a piece of presumptuous arrogance. It's not a choice that people want to, need to, or should have to make.

© Arundhati Roy 2001

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Against Rationalization

by Christopher Hitchens

IT was in Peshawar, on the Pakistan-Afghanistan frontier, as the Red Army was falling apart and falling back. I badly needed a guide to get me to the Khyber Pass, and I decided that what I required was the most farouche-looking guy with the best command of English and the toughest modern automobile. Such a combination was obtainable, for a price. My new friend rather wolfishly offered me a tour of the nearby British military cemetery (a well-filled site from the Victorian era) before we began. Then he slammed a cassette into the dashboard. I braced myself for the ululations of some mullah but received instead a dose of "So Far Away." From under the turban and behind the beard came the gruff observation, "I thought you might like Dire Straits."

This was my induction into the now-familiar symbiosis of tribal piety and high-tech; a symbiosis consummated on September 11 with the conversion of the southern tip of the capital of the modern world into a charred and suppurating mass grave. Not that it necessarily has to be a symbol of modernism and innovation that is targeted for immolation. As recently as this year, the same ideology employed heavy artillery to destroy the Buddha statues at Bamiyan, and the co-thinkers of bin Laden in Egypt have been heard to express the view that the Pyramids and the Sphinx should be turned into shards as punishment for their profanely un-Islamic character.

Since my moment in Peshawar I have met this faction again. In one form or another, the people who leveled the World Trade Center are the same people who threw acid in the faces of unveiled women in Kabul and Karachi, who maimed and eviscerated two of the translators of The Satanic Verses and who machine-gunned architectural tourists at Luxor. Even as we worry what they may intend for our society, we can see very plainly what they have in mind for their own: a bleak and sterile theocracy enforced by advanced techniques. Just a few months ago Bosnia surrendered to the international court at The Hague the only accused war criminals detained on Muslim-Croat federation territory. The butchers had almost all been unwanted "volunteers" from the Chechen, Afghan and Kashmiri fronts; it is as an unapologetic defender of the Muslims of Bosnia (whose cause was generally unstained by the sort of atrocity committed by Catholic and Orthodox Christians) that one can and must say that bin Ladenism poisons everything that it touches.

I was apprehensive from the first moment about the sort of masochistic e-mail traffic that might start circulating from the Chomsky-Zinn-Finkelstein quarter, and I was not to be disappointed. With all due thanks to these worthy comrades, I know already that the people of Palestine and Iraq are victims of a depraved and callous Western statecraft. And I think I can claim to have been among the first to point out that Clinton's rocketing of Khartoum--supported by most liberals--was a gross war crime, which would certainly have entitled the Sudanese government to mount reprisals under international law. (Indeed, the sight of Clintonoids on TV, applauding the "bounce in the polls" achieved by their man that day, was even more repulsive than the sight of destitute refugee children making a wretched holiday over the nightmare on Chambers Street.) But there is no sense in which the events of September 11 can be held to constitute such a reprisal, either legally or morally.

It is worse than idle to propose the very trade-offs that may have been lodged somewhere in the closed-off minds of the mass murderers. The people of Gaza live under curfew and humiliation and expropriation. This is notorious. Very well: Does anyone suppose that an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza would have forestalled the slaughter in Manhattan? It would take a moral cretin to suggest anything of the sort; the cadres of the new jihad make it very apparent that their quarrel is with Judaism and secularism on principle, not with (or not just with) Zionism. They regard the Saudi regime not as the extreme authoritarian theocracy that it is, but as something too soft and lenient. The Taliban forces viciously persecute the Shiite minority in Afghanistan. The Muslim fanatics in Indonesia try to extirpate the infidel minorities there; civil society in Algeria is barely breathing after the fundamentalist assault.

Now is as good a time as ever to revisit the history of the Crusades, or sorry history of partition in Kashmir, or the woes of the Chechens and Kosovars. But the bombers of Manhattan represent fascism with an Islamic face, and there's no point in any euphemism about it. What they abominate about "the West," to put it in a phrase, is not what Western liberals don't like and can't defend about their own system, but what they do like about it and must defend: its emancipated women, its scientific inquiry, its separation of religion from the state. Loose talk about chickens coming home to roost is the moral equivalent of the hateful garbage emitted by Falwell and Robertson, and exhibits about the same intellectual content. Indiscriminate murder is not a judgment, even obliquely, on the victims or their way of life, or ours. Any decent and concerned reader of this magazine could have been on one of those planes, or in one of those buildings--yes, even in the Pentagon.

The new talk is all of "human intelligence": the very faculty in which our ruling class is most deficient. A few months ago, the Bush Administration handed the Taliban a subsidy of $43 million in abject gratitude for the assistance of fundamentalism in the"war on drugs." Next up is the renewed "missile defense" fantasy recently endorsed by even more craven Democrats who seek to occupy the void "behind the President." There is sure to be further opportunity to emphasize the failings of our supposed leaders, whose costly mantra is "national security" and who could not protect us. And yes indeed, my guide in Peshawar was a shadow thrown by William Casey's CIA, which first connected the unstoppable Stinger missile to the infallible Koran. But that's only one way of stating the obvious, which is that this is an enemy for life, as well as an enemy of life.

October 8, 2001

[Editor’s Note: All credits goes to the author and The Nation, in which this extremely controversial article appeared on October 8, 2001. Mr. Hitchens is the author of numerous works of non-fiction, and is a seasoned international reporter. One of his latest books is on the former American Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, which argues that Mr. Kissinger should be tried in Hague for crimes against humanity. Mr. Hitchens is a regular columnist for The Nation.]

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