THE bombs have hit Kabul. Smoke rises above the city and there are reports that an Afghan power plant, one of only two in the country, has been hit. Meanwhile the special forces are on standby, and the necessary allies have been cajoled, bullied and bribed into position.

That is not all that was carefully prepared ahead of Sunday’s launch of the attacks. Crucially for a modern war, public opinion formers at home have been prepared and marshalled into line with a striking degree of unanimity. The voices of dissent can barely be heard over the chorus of approval and self-righteous enthusiasm. It’s the latter that is so jarring, and it’s a sign of how quickly the logic of war distorts and manipulates our understanding. War propaganda requires moral clarity — what else can justify the suffering and brutality? — so the conflict is now being cast as a battle between good and evil. Both bin Laden and the Taliban are being demonized into absurd Bond-style villains, while halos are hung over our heads by throwing the moral net wide: we are not just fighting to protect ourselves out of narrow self-interest, but for a new moral order in which the Afghans will be the first beneficiaries.

The extent to which this is all being uncritically accepted is astonishing. Few gave a damn about the suffering of women under the Taliban on September 10 — now we are supposedly fighting a war for them. Even fewer knew (let alone cared) that Afghanistan was suffering from famine. Now the West is promising to solve the humanitarian crisis that it has hugely exacerbated in the last three weeks with its threat of military action. What is incredible is not just the belief that you can end terrorism by taking on the Taliban, but that doing so can be elevated into a grand moral purpose — rather than it incubating a host of evils from Chechnya to Pakistan.

Is this gullibility? Naivety? Wishful thinking? There may be elements of these, but what is also lurking here is the outline of a form of western fundamentalism. It believes in historical progress and regards the West as its most advanced manifestation. And it insists that the only way for other countries to match its achievement is to adopt its political, economic and cultural values.

It is tolerant towards other cultures only to the extent that they reflect its own values — so it is frequently fiercely intolerant of religious belief and has no qualms about expressing its contempt and prejudice. At its worst, western fundamentalism echoes the characteristics it finds so repulsive in its enemy, bin Laden: first, a sense of unquestioned superiority; second, an assertion of the universal applicability of its values; and third, a lack of will to understand what is profoundly different from itself.

This is the shadow side of liberalism, and it has periodically wreaked havoc around the globe for over 150 years. It is detectable in the writings of great liberal thinkers such as John Stuart Mill, and emerged in the complacent self-confidence of mid-Victorian Britain. But its roots go back further to its inheritance of Christianity’s claim to be the one true faith. The US founding recipe of puritanism and enlightenment bequeathed a profound sense of being morally good. This superiority, once allied to economic and technological power, underpinned the worst excesses of colonialism, as it now underpins the activities of multinational corporations and the IMF’s structural adjustment programmes.

But recognizing this need not be the prelude to an onslaught on liberalism — just the crucial imperative of recognizing that, like all systems of human thought, liberalism has weaknesses as well as strengths. We need to remember this: in the heat of battle and panicky fear of terrorism, liberal strengths such as tolerance, humility and a capacity for self-criticism are often the first victims.

In all systems of human thought, there are contradictions that advocates prefer to gloss over. One of the most acute in liberalism is between its claim to tolerance and its hubristic claim to universality, which Berlusconi’s comments on the superiority of western civilization brought embarrassingly to the fore two weeks ago. It was the sort of thing many privately think, but are too polite to say, argues John Lloyd in this week’s New Statesman. He owns up with refreshing honesty that in the conflict between Islam and Christianity: “Their values, or many of them, contradict ours. We think ours are better.”

Once this kind of hubris is out in the open, at least one can more easily argue with it. These aren’t just academic arguments for the home front before the cameras start rolling on the exodus of refugees into Pakistan. September 11 and its aftermath launched both an aggressive reassertion and a thoughtful re-examination of our culture and its values. Both will have a lasting impact on our relations with the non-western world, not just Muslim world.

It is that aggressive reassertion that smacks of fundamentalism, a point obliquely made by Harold Evans recently: “What do we set against the medieval hatreds of the fundamentalists? We have our fundamentals too: the values of western civilization. When they are menaced, we need a ringing affirmation of what they mean.” The only problem is that “ringing” can block out all other sound and produce nothing but tinnitus.

There is a compelling alternative for how we can coexist on an increasingly crowded planet. Political philosopher Bhikhu Parekh starts from the premise that “the grandeur and depth of human life is too great to be captured in one culture”. That each culture nurtures and develops some dimension of being human, but in that process it misses out others, and that progress will always come from dialogue between cultures.

“We are all prisoners of our subjectivity,” argues Parekh, and that is true of us individually and collectively, so we need others to expose our blindnesses and to increase our understanding of our humanity.

Parekh argues that liberalism is right in asserting that there are universal moral principles (such as the rights of women, free speech and the right to life), but wrong in insisting there is only one interpretation of those principles and that that is its own. Rights come into conflict and every culture negotiates different trade-offs between them.

To understand those trade-offs is sometimes complex and difficult. But no one culture has cracked the perfect trade-off, as western liberalism in its more honest moments is the first to admit. There is a huge amount we can learn from Islam in its social solidarity, its appreciation of the collective good and the generosity and strength of human relationships. Islamic societies are grappling with exactly the same challenge as the West — how to balance freedom and responsibility — and we need each other’s help, not each other’s brands of fundamentalism. If we are asking Islam to stamp out their fundamentalism, we have no lesser duty to do the same. —Dawn/Guardian Service

ADMIT it. Doesn’t President Bush sound perfectly reasonable when he pleads that the “civilized world” must go beyond crushing bin Laden and his cronies in order to root out terrorists wherever they may lurk? Isn’t it terribly hard to resist his righteous call for a global struggle against terrorism, mounting a sort of secular jihad against jihadists? Only spoilsports ask where it will all end. They are much too short-sighted.

Consider that Bush’s ambitious anti-terrorist enterprise, if performed with truly ruthless honesty, will prove extremely enlightening for all the rest of us poor citizens who thereby may get some very rare peeks into how power really works. After all, pursuing terrorist trails all the way to their bitter ends (and bitter beginnings) is likely to create a great many acute embarrassments for the very authorities who form the posse chasing vermin.

In international politics, ruled by fickle realpolitik, the posse itself is likely to be made up of many former bandits, suddenly redefined in Oprah-like political “makeovers” as sheriff’s deputies so as to serve the latest shift in superpower interests. Behold the fantastic record of an Alice-in-Wonderland world where an enemy is exactly what the US government says one is, nothing more and nothing less — until it says otherwise. In and around Nicaragua in the 1980s Somoza’s merrily murderous National Guard, presto, become Ronald Reagan’s freedom-fighting Contras.

In Panama Manuel Noriega was a bosum buddy of the USA one year and public enemy number one the next. In the same decade Saddam Hussein was Uncle Sam’s esteemed pal, but in the 1990s well, you know the rest. (One of us appeared on BBC Radio in 1988 with an American ambassador who staunchly defended Saddam Hussein.) Likewise, the Mujahideen and their zealous Taliban outgrowth were holy warriors of freedom with whom even Rambo revelled in one decade, and incubators of pure evil the next.

Don’t get us wrong about the Soviets, we mean, the Russians and their current warm rapport with America. Weren’t they once the malignant force that America feared enough to support the most vicious dictatorships in the name of democratic values?

Nelson Mandela was imprisoned on Robben Island as a terrorist for decades and whatever happened to him? Menachim Begin was blowing up British soldiers in Palestine in the mid-1940s.

The Northern Alliance, though surely welcome allies, are hardly dedicated defenders of democracy and their cruelty in the temporary takeover of Kabul is too well remembered.

A subpoena is pursuing Henry Kissinger, Nobel Peace Prize winner, for his role in the overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile and, as Christopher Hitchens accuses in a new book, he is implicated in many other state terrorist acts too. Dizzying, isn’t it? Blair and Bush claim they are going in to destroy heroin drug traffickers who fund terrorists. Yet, as the Iran-Contra scandal showed, American secret agencies have cultivated the drug trade as a secret revenue source for South-east Asian and then Central American allied forces since the 1950s.

So when is a terrorist (or sponsor of terrorists) not a terrorist (or a sponsor of terrorists)? If we want to punish evil-doers, a consistent and equally applied definition does not seem too much to ask. Noam Chomsky points out that if the US, suppliers of arms to Turks who freely killed Kurds in the 1990s, applied to itself the same legal and ethical criteria that they invoked to intervene in Kosovo, then the US would have to intervene against its own government.

Gerry Adams, president of Sinn Fein, widely regarded as the political wing of the provisional IRA, was no longer a terrorist when President Clinton granted him a US visa in 1994. That sudden, if carefully considered, move hasn’t worked out too badly for an incomparably more peaceful Ulster. Yet the IRA itself was reborn in the 1960s in reaction to the terrorist acts of loyalist paramilitary organizations abetted by a deeply oppressive sectarian regime. Is there legitimate resistance to oppression which does not deserve the name of terrorism? Can’t states be terrorists?

Today Hamas is called a terrorist organization but there is disturbing evidence that before the Israeli-PLO dialogue started Hamas was given covert support by Israel in order to split the Palestinians and isolate them from the PLO and to devalue their cause internationally. Where does one even begin to appraise who is a terrorist when General Pervez Musharraf, on taking power in 1999, halted President Clinton’s effort to train assassins (itself a violation of American law) to get bin Laden? The whole seamy tale of Lumumba and western intelligence agencies in the Congo has no heroes.

States often aid groups that other states regard as terrorists. Clearly, terrorists are not only ragged bands of underfunded outcasts who always fight on the wrong, that is to say, weaker side.

So asking authorities to define terrorism is something the whole world should welcome. Syrian diplomats and Hizbullah Secretary-General Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, who are not in such good odour in the West, make an eminently reasonable request for “a clear, specified and correct definition of terrorism, and to distinguish it from the concept of legitimate resistance.”

If we arrived at a definition acceptable to the entire UN, for example, we would help create an extraordinary permanent coalition, capable of responding aptly to any threat by proper combinations of police work, bombs, bread and mediation. Who can possibly argue against that?

However, the joy of realpolitik is that it is a plaything of the elites, a game restricted to whoever occupies office of power. Every vested interest keeps an inventory of desired items it wants to push at every opportunity.

Hence, George Bush defends a tax cut for the rich as a rational blessing in good times and, as a downturn threatened, as a boon to lift the economy. Rationality is beside the point in such moments.

As Daniel Ellsberg observed in the aftermath of the Vietnam war, it was a credit to the American people that politicians had to lie to them so much about that vile war, although it was shameful that it was so easy to do. Elites historically are allergic to telling ordinary citizens anything worth knowing so we should applaud any chance for free debate about so important an issue as terrorism.

Citizens must try to find out where security measures are really going to help, especially where civil liberties are concerned. Consider the fact that oppressive regimes, including Muslim ones like the one in Algeria, define as terrorists perfectly civilized people who fled to the UK for asylum. So then, is the UK, technically speaking, harbouring terrorists in these cases ? Now the UK is threatening to change the law so that dissidents of any kind are treated as if they were rabid terrorists, particularly if they don’t suit the UK’s political aims of the moment.

Obviously, we must punish the people who perpetrated the World Trade Centre horror. Perhaps we can talk as well about the less obvious forms that terror takes. Arundhati Roy rightly asks why not hunt down and turn in the CEO of Union Carbide for the Bhopal gas leak disaster in which company negligence was responsible for killing thousands and harming many more? Terror takes many forms.

Perhaps the world’s nations eventually can figure out how to protect their citizens from these less conspicuous terrorists, too.

Let us welcome this extraordinary opportunity to work out a sensible and binding definition of terrorism. Any such definition, of course, will be highly attentive to the shifting contexts in which people act. When visiting East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) Zhou Enlai was asked by Governor Monem Khan if it was true that he once was nearly executed as a terrorist when he was nabbed by Chiang Kai-Shek’s forces? Zhou nodded, smiled and observed that there was a very, very thin line between a traitor and a patriot.

A DISTRICT nazim is reported to have prohibited the use of walls for the writing of any kind of slogans, for or against anything. An explanation not forthcoming, it is presumed that he is worried about the situation created by the prospects of World War III, between the USA and Osama bin Laden.

While not wanting to see the writing on the wall is an understandable weakness with us, it seems that short of banning all sorts of walls, this particular nazim has thought it prudent to stop people from writing on them.

My new neighbour, a German diplomat, has got the landlord of his house to extend the height of our mutual boundary wall by means of white corrugated iron sheeting. When I referred to it as the Iron Curtain, he swore he was not the usual snooty European diplomat taught not to fraternise with Pakistanis for fear that they’ll start asking for visas. I have decided to believe him, though this Berlin Wall rankles.

The newspaper report does not specify the walls to which the nazim’s order applies. Is it in respect of boundary walls or ordinary house walls, and does it cover jail walls and toilet walls? The last-mentioned (their insides at least) are the most favourite writing tablets for graffiti composers and are witness to many a literary gem that was born in a washroom and died there.

If the administration could stop people from writing on walls, a large number of persons in every city would lose their means of livelihood. You would then not be able to read slogans in Urdu saying, “Join our jehad and see Kashmir,” or “Ustad Yusuf, the only reliable astrologer.” A pertinent comment on the powerlessness of the Pakistani President was found written one morning on the wall of the Presidency when ZAB was Prime Minister. It said, “Release poor Chaudhry Fazal Ilahi!”

There are advertising agencies in every city, without posh offices and without pretty girls sitting at reception desks, which specialise in transmitting your message on to bare walls, whether the message is a demand for Islamisation or about a popular washing machine or carries the address of a quack to whom you can turn after dissipating your youth. The practice is so widespread that if the advertisers were told that a wall-owner does not like such inscriptions they will not understand why. they believe all walls are public property and writing on them is a freedom guaranteed by established custom. If you can defecate against them why can’t you inscribe a message on them?

It is not the advertisers’ fault that the number, length and height of walls in the country are increasing day by day. This is not because more and more houses are being built. It is because walls provide a psychological protection against social contamination and fear of the unknown intruder. In Lahore’s Model Town before partition you couldn’t have a boundary wall on the side of your house facing the road. It could only be a green hedge. Now most of the houses there have become enclosed in walls. I see no other reason for this than a feeling of insecurity. People get frightened even when other people look at them from outside.

It is not only the citizenry that is infected with fear. The authorities too seem to suffer from unknown dangers. Danger from where? Fear of what? Of the common people maybe. Look at the boundary wall of Lahore’s beautiful Governor’s House. In any civilised country the house would be displayed to the people on fixed days, as the White House is. But what do the inmates of this palace do? Every few years they make the wall more and more impregnable.

In the early sixties the wall was raised by a couple of feet. After a few years the top surface was treated with broken bottle glass. This was followed by an additional three feet in height in the form of barbed wire. The latest device to protect the inmate is searchlights every twenty yards or so along the wall. Add to this the routine police patrol 24 hours a day and you get the impression that this is not the residence of the Punjab Governor but Fort Knox where the US government keeps its gold.

Go into any street in any part of Karachi or Lahore, or even Islamabad (described as a comparatively safe city) and you will see either new walls being constructed or old ones being raised. Why do people want to be cloistered, and why this abnormal fear of other human beings? What are we trying to hide? The worry of the rich is understandable, but what’s eating the middle class which has hardly anything for dacoits or a grasping government?

Is it that in the prevailing free-for-all where even the most ordinary family manages to acquire something or the other beyond its normal means, an element of secrecy must be maintained? Is that why there is so much stress on chardivari, the four walls? It is mutual. You don’t peep over my wall and I won’t peep over yours. In localities with bungalows huge iron gates bar the entry of even the residents who have to honk the car horn for minutes before they are let in. The more sophisticated have a two-way talkie at the gate so that visitors may announce their identity. The only thing now left is to have a password. If Sonny has forgotten it when he comes home late at night, he may as well go and sleep elsewhere.

One asks, why this obsession to enclose oneself, and against what? I have questioned many friends. “There are no hawkers in this locality, no buffaloes, not even a stray dog. Against what contingency do you keep your outer gate closed when you can’t keep determined interlopers out? There is no plausible explanation. Only a vague answer, “You never know these days.”

We must ask ourselves about the fears of “these days” that haunt us. We must make a collective effort to get rid of these fears, whether they are real or imaginary. We shall have to have more trust in humanity, in our neighbours, in ourselves. But to fight these fears we must first identify them and also decide whether it is society that can help us get rid of them or the state. Its no use tilting at unknown windmills.

THE horror is unspeakable. Like every American, I am paralyzed by the carnage on the news, on our streets. My head pounds, thinking of the grief engulfing thousands of families whose loved ones were killed or injured on Black Tuesday. When I close my eyes, I see bodies tumbling from the windows of skyscrapers.

Like every American, I am afraid. Wondering what this means for us. Wondering whether it’s over, or when and where the next attack will take place. It’s the first time I’ve felt the kind of fear I imagine that people in other countries feel when they are at war.

Like every American, I am outraged. And I want justice. But perhaps unlike many other Americans, I’m feeling something else too. A different kind of fear. I’m feeling what my 6 million fellow American Muslims are feeling — the fear that we too will be considered guilty in the eyes of America, if it turns out that the madmen behind this terrorism were Muslim.

I feel as though I’ve suddenly become the enemy of two groups — those who wish to hurt Americans, and those Americans who wish to strike back. It’s a frightening corner to be in. In the past, when lone Muslims have committed acts of terrorism — or have been mistakenly assumed to be guilty, as in Oklahoma City — hate crimes have abounded against American Muslims who look like they’re from “that part of the world,” against American mosques, against American children in Muslim schools who pray to the same peace-loving God as Jews and Christians.

I am afraid to hear people openly state that Muslim blood is worthless and deserves to be spilled, as I heard when I was in college during the Persian Gulf War. I am afraid that my son won’t understand why strangers aren’t smiling at him the way they used to. I am afraid that we will be dehumanized because of our skin colour, or features, or clothing. My heart aches each time a friend or relative calls, CNN blaring in the background, and sadly reminds me, “It’s over for us now. Muslims are done for.”

I was briefly heartened to hear author Tom Clancy, interviewed on CNN, explaining that Islam is a peaceful religion and that we as Americans must not let go of our ideals of religious tolerance, because it’s the way our country behaves when it’s been hurt that really reflects who we are.

Still, I’m afraid that Americans might view the televised images of a few misguided and deeply wounded people overseas celebrating the pain that America is now feeling, and will assume that I too must share that anti-American sentiment, that I, or my family, or my community, or my religion, could be part of the problem.

And though I, like other Americans, want the perpetrators brought to justice, I shudder to think of the innocent lives that may be unnecessarily lost overseas in that pursuit. Children like ours. Mothers like us.

Every time I hear of an act of terrorism, I have two prayers. My first is for the victims and their families. My second is, please don’t let it be a Muslim. Because unlike when an act of terrorism is committed by a Christian or a Jew, when it is a Muslim, it’s not considered an isolated act perpetrated by an isolated group of madmen. That we Muslims love our country as you do, and that we are bleeding and grieving alongside you.—Dawn/The Washington Post

The writer is an Arab journalist.

(This assessment of the post-September 11 Afghan scenario was made shortly before the start of the American air strikes against that country on Sunday.)

IT IS now more than three weeks since September 11 Black Tuesday. The whole world looked on with shock and horror at the collapsing towers of the World Trade Centre. The US was convulsed with anger and grief like a stricken giant not knowing where to strike against an unseen enemy.

The US as the world’s only superpower could not avoid feeling ‘how dare they do this to us!’ President Bush had no option but to express himself in strident terms. The first requirement was to define an enemy against whom the US wrath could be directed, a generalized war against terrorism was not good enough. It finally decided to zero in on Osama bin Laden as representing the most suitable object for this purpose.

Willy-nilly Pakistan again became a front-line state, with all its pros and cons. There was no question of declining to cooperate. It would have been like standing in the way of an enraged bull elephant with the defensive equivalent of a popgun. The only possible course of action was to get out of its way as quickly as possible. The alternative of General Musharraf humming and hawing was also out of the question — it would have been like haggling with the bereaved at a dearly loved one’s funeral.

Pakistan now finds itself in an uncomfortable position bordering on the untenable. It has a fairly large number of Pushtun citizens who are more or less committed to their Pushtun brothers in Afghanistan. The present problem was precipitated by Maulana Burhanuddin Rabbani, a non-Pushtun, going back on the agreement to have a rotating president from amongst the various factions who had apparently succeeded in driving out the Russians.

When it was the Pushtun nominee, Gulbadin Hekmatyar’s turn to take over, Rabbani refused to step down. Probably he expected Gulbadin to do the same to him later. It was a sort of preemptive strike and was the start of the civil war, encouraged and supported by Pakistan’s Pushtuns (Pathans) and fundamentalist generals.

I recall my Pathan friends and acquaintances shaking their heads wisely and saying the Saddo Zais and Mohammed Zais will not accept anything other than Pushtun rule in Afghanistan. Since my knowledge of Pathan tribes is rather sketchy, maybe other Zais were also involved. With the failure of Gulbadin, the Taliban were chosen as the champions of the Pushtun cause, the largest single ethnic group in Afghanistan.

The beliefs of the Taliban were more or less in accordance with the public norms of social behaviour in Saudi Arabia, and canvassing the financial support of Saudi Arabia was not difficult. The only difference is the outward manifestation of opulence in one, and the subsistence-level existence in the other. The UAE, although a more relaxed society, also chipped in for good measure. In many ways the UAE is a more relaxed society than Pakistan.

Our foreign minister’s statement that the Northern Alliance comprising Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazaras would not be an acceptable government for Afghanistan is in line with this thinking. It begs the question: are the Taliban really the best government for Afghanistan? and also the question of how the smaller ethnic groups are to be accommodated. Having released the fundamentalist genie from the bottle, how do we get it back in?

King Zahir Shah presents an option. But Pakistan, for some reason never quite clear to many, has always been opposed to the Afghan royal family. Our perennial argument is that Afghanistan opposed Pakistan’s entry into the United Nations. Since ‘Indian’ territory was up for grabs in 1947, I suppose Afghanistan was eyeing the fertile Peshawar valley. After all, there was a movement in the NWFP itself that there should be no partition of the subcontinent or, alternatively, they should be allowed to create Pushtunistan. Its exact status remained a bit unclear. Since then it is Pakistan which has been messing around with the Afghans.

President Ayub was reported to have a personal animus against the King. It got to the point where we interrupted Afghanistan’s transit trade through Pakistan circa 1961 or so. But the contretemps was finally resolved. Afghanistan has never embarrassed Pakistan in its moments of crisis. In 1965, it reassured us that we should not worry about any hostile reaction from their side. In 1971, when lunacy reigned supreme in the then West Pakistan, they again did nothing to embarrass us.

Though I don’t know them at all, I have unconsciously a soft spot for the Afghan royal family; they were and probably are more civilized than our own rulers. Jashn-e-Kabul was one of the best venues for subcontinental classical music. During the Jashn, a most remarkable rendition of the raag “Darbari” by Pandit Onkar Nath Thakur was broadcast from radio Kabul circa 1949/50. I still carry the memory.

It is true that if you have an unfriendly or at least not an entirely friendly state on your eastern border, you need friendly states on your western border. while the Taliban are well disposed towards Pakistan, they are wayward, unpredictable and ruthless. Because of our obsession with Pushtun rule in Afghanistan, our relations with Tehran have been soured. If Zahir Shah presents even the shadow of an option we should be prepared to look at it.

Our eastern neighbour has been talking incessantly since September 11 about cross-border terrorism. In one of the ‘Indian’ TV programmes broadcast from BBC, Mr L.K. Advani was being interviewed. He brought up the issue of a gentleman by the name of Daud Ibrahim who had allegedly been involved in a major terrorist act several years ago in Bombay. Mr Advani alleged that Mr Ibrahim was alive and well in Pakistan, but General Musharraf had denied this during his Agra visit. Didn’t that make him a liar? Whatever the truth about Mr Ibrahim, such language is normally not used by responsible politicians. Obviously, for some reason, the iron has recently entered Mr Advani’s soul to an unprecedented depth.

For example, the accession of Kashmir to India was engineered by Mountbatten and Pandit Nehru under somewhat murky circumstances. So much so that India agreed to a plebiscite under UN auspices. Even the UN Administrator, Admiral Nimitz, had been appointed. Later, Mr Nehru backed out of this commitment. Even when we went to war with India on this issue no responsible political figure in Pakistan has ever referred to Panditji as a liar and a cheat.

The major issue is how US policy is going to deal with these developments. People undertake suicidal attacks of terrorism when they have been driven to black despair. Day before yesterday’s terrorist, becomes yesterday’s freedom fighter and today’s prime minister as illustrated by the career of Menachim Begin. The only person on American TV who mentioned inequality and injustice was James Wolfensohn, the President of the World Bank, and he was on for five seconds and has never reappeared. The message that seems to have gone out from the Arab world, particularly Saudi Arabia, the only country with any influence, is that something has to be done about Palestine. So far American pressure has been unable to rein in Mr Sharon.

The biggest asset of the US in the Middle East is Saddam Hussein. There is no question of the US removing him. For eight years he fought Iran to blunt the edge of the Iranian revolution. Then, under somewhat mystifying circumstances surrounding the advice tendered to Saddam by the US ambassador to Iraq, he proceeded to attack and occupy Kuwait. It was a singularly foolish act to refuse to budge from Kuwait against an ultimatum from the coalition forces led by the US. His action was dignified by the fancy term ‘strategic defiance’, which our General Aslam Beg seemed to have obtained from somewhere or other. The rest is fairly recent knowledge. It converted Saddam Hussein into a permanent threat to Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

The Arabs paid for the war and the US obtained a military foothold in a strategically important area. Saddam Hussein remains a nasty piece of work. The people of Iraq have borne the brunt of the sanctions and have also served as target practice for US and British warplanes from time to time. Half a million children are estimated to have died as a result of the sanctions. But sanctions remain in place.

As a result of recent events, Pakistan today faces its moment of truth, which it has been trying to avoid for the last many years. We are in the process of creating a narrow-minded bigoted society. I have nothing against fundamentalists as long as they don’t impose their beliefs on us. This reversal cannot be done by a swift wave of the magic wand, but we can return to moderation through a policy of steady pressure in the appropriate direction. However, there should be an all-out attempt to stop sectarian killings.

The problem of fundamentalism is linked with the Taliban. How do we remove the burden of the Taliban from the backs of the Afghan people? It must be admitted that in the past, before the Russian invasion, Afghan was a two-tier society — a thin crust at the top, which was more westernized than our own upper class. The bulk of Afghan society bordered on the Stone Age. Visiting Ghazni about 30 years ago, all the women were as fully covered as desired by the Taliban today.

For the present, at least we should stop driving Afghan refugees back at the point of a bayonet to suffer cold, hunger and death. The world is listening and will come to their and our help.