THE war between the mediaeval and ultra-modern in Afghanistan has seen the retreat of the Taliban turn into a rout. With the US using the heaviest bombardment since the Second World War, including 15,000- pound “daisy cutters” that obliterate all life in an area of 600 square metres, the casualties must have been truly horrendous.

This, rather than any tactical withdrawal, must be the cause of the collapse of the Taliban, which has a poorly trained militia rather than a regular army, and its precipitate abandonment of Kabul, Herat, and Jalalabad, within a few days of the fall of Mazar-i-Sharif, to the Northern Alliance.

Some western intelligence reports going back to the pre- September 11 period say that the Taliban had looked for some face-saving arrangements for the surrender of Osama bin Laden. However, either the US maintained a peremptory approach to achieve its objectives or Osama and his Al Qaeda supporters prevented any conciliatory approach from reaching fruition. Pakistan also made efforts to promote a peaceful settlement during the 26 days that elapsed between September 11 and the launch of attacks on October 7 that also failed to produce the desired result.

As a result of relentless bombing, especially of the Taliban frontlines in the north, the Northern Alliance has been enabled to capture Kabul. Before this happened, President Bush had publicly agreed with President Musharraf in New York that the Northern Alliance would not occupy Kabul, but keep it as an open city for an interim multi-ethnic set-up to be set up under UN auspices. In this the UN might play a role both in the humanitarian and political spheres. However, once the Taliban withdrew from Kabul, a vacuum was created, and as explained by them, the Northern Alliance forces had to take over the control of the city.

It is not surprising that this development, which took place in the presence of US and British special forces that accompanied the Alliance forces, has led some foreign analysts to conclude that Washington had gone back on assurances given to Pakistan regarding the demilitarization of Kabul. Proceeding from this premise, the conclusion is being drawn by these analysts that the rapid results achieved by the US has reduced its dependence on the logistic and political support provided by Pakistan, whose sensitivities can now be ignored.

Such conclusions appear to be somewhat hasty, because Pakistan, which has the longest land frontier with Afghanistan, and whose government took a courageous decision to join the anti-terrorist coalition, is bound to continue playing a major role in connection with the post-Taliban phase. Indeed, the abbreviation of the period of military conflict with the Taliban is in keeping with expectations of President Musharraf. He has been stressing three components of an Afghan settlement, namely a short military phase, political moves to establish a broad-based government, and a phase devoted to the reconstruction of the war-ravaged country. In his address to the UN General Assembly, he appealed for the establishment of an Afghan Trust Fund at the international level, since the requirements of humanitarian relief for the long-suffering people of Afghanistan are truly colossal.

With US and British Special Forces assisting the Northern Alliance, and with relentless pounding from the air of the Taliban forces, the Alliance has achieved rapid results. Two factors led the US President to join President Musharraf in calling upon the Alliance forces not to enter Kabul, until some sort of broad-based political dispensation, acceptable to all major ethnic groups in the country, was formed. One is that the control of Kabul by the Northern Alliance, composed mainly of Tajik and Uzbek forces, would prolong the internal conflict. The other is that there is a history of bitter antagonism between various political factions, which tends to take the form of bloodbath and terrible reprisals. Already, there have been reports of a massacre in Mazar-e-Sharif, where several hundred supporters of the Taliban were killed. Killings and widespread looting have also been reported from Kabul.

With the collapse of the Taliban, and the Northern Alliance forces occupying large areas that were under Taliban control, the time has come for a more active role for the UN, notably in stationing a peacekeeping force in Afghanistan. The Six plus Two group of the UN, which has been playing a role in promoting an Afghan settlement, has been meeting in New York. President Musharraf hoped that the UN would assume its responsibilities at this critical time. This he did in his address to the Pakistani community in New York. The creation of a UN peacekeeping force has assumed great urgency. A British force is being readied to be sent to Afghanistan for peacekeeping functions. Turkey and Bangladesh have also been approached to provide contingents.

Until recently Pakistan was reluctant to send its troops, mainly because of the image of its close association with the Taliban in the early years of their takeover of most of Afghanistan. However, the time has now come for Pakistan to reconsider its position. Many leaders of the Northern Alliance have close links with India, which has been extending military and financial assistance to it. There can be little doubt that India would seek to exploit the situation created by the new power vacuum in Afghanistan to help establish a dispensation that would downgrade the representation of the Pashtuns and also adopt a hostile posture towards Pakistan.

There are sound reasons for Pakistan to contribute a contingent to the proposed UN peacekeeping force in Afghanistan. It has a long history of association with the UN peacekeeping forces in many parts of the world. Its geographical location makes its participation in peacekeeping and rehabilitation efforts virtually indispensable, considering that it provides the most convenient transit facilities for Afghanistan. It is also playing host to the largest concentration of Afghan refugees anywhere, whose number may grow as winter sets in, adding to the plight of millions in Afghanistan who are on the verge of starvation.

From the latest indications from New York, it appears that while agreement has been reached in the UN on the establishment of a broad-based political dispensation in Afghanistan, a delay of several weeks may occur before a set-up acceptable to all ethnic groups can materialize. In the meantime, the Northern Alliance has assumed control of Kabul. However knowing the realities of Afghan political and ethnic life, this can only be a transitory arrangement. Ultimately, the city should be under the control of a UN-sponsored force that would provide security to the residents and a protective umbrella for the proposed broad-based multiethnic regime in Kabul.

Earlier estimates that the war in Afghanistan might continue for several months or years are proving wrong in the light of the Taliban’s hasty retreat from northern and western Afghanistan. The logic of setting up a broad-based government in Kabul is that attention should now shift to the second and third phases of the task of the anti-terrorist coalition. These have to do with the replacement of Taliban rule with a government acceptable to all major components of the multiethnic country, under which the remnants of terrorist groups can be rooted out and urgently needed rehabilitation efforts undertaken.

There are reassuring moves both at the UN and by major powers to restore peace and stability in a country that has gone through nearly a quarter century of ravages, destruction and conflict. The immediate reality is that a virtual disintegration of Afghan society has taken place, as different factions and leaders have assumed control of various cities and parts of the country. The Uzbek warlord, Rashid Dostum, is again in control of Mazar-e-Sharif, Commander Ismail has reoccupied Herat, while Kabul is under General Fahim. Non-Taliban Pashtun leaders have assumed control of Jalalabad and Ningarhar. This underlines the need for urgent and concerted efforts to ensure that the anarchy and conflict of the pre-Taliban period does not recur in Afghanistan.

The current scale-down in the military operations and a more meaningful role for the UN are the two components of an international strategy following the virtual collapse of the Taliban’s military resistance. President Musharraf’s visit to France, Britain and the US, which was preceded by brief halts in Iran and Turkey, should facilitate movement towards a new phase of pacification and reconstruction in war-torn Afghanistan.

It is reassuring that, according to latest reports, a three-point plan for a political settlement in Afghanistan, backed by Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, has received the endorsement of both the US and Russia.

SAADAT HASAN MANTO’s last days were hard and unhappy and though it is forty-six years since he died, there are some who have memory of those times, either from direct knowledge or from accounts of direct witnesses.

Manto’s last reported words, “this degradation must now end” must have come straight from the heart. Remembered by the people but to this day unacknowledged by the state, he lies under tons of earth in Lahore, wondering who of the two, he or the one above, is the greater storywriter.

Had his tombstone borne the epitaph he wrote for himself, it would have triggered judgments of apostasy against him. That would have amused him because only someone with his sense of humour could have dedicated one of his books to the editor of a Delhi rag because “it has heaped the most abuse on me”. Some years ago, Ahmed Rahi who was the closest among Manto’s younger friends, said that Manto had not died in 1955; he had started dying the day he left Bombay. In Lahore, he never found any regular work or employment. He longed for a place where he could go every morning and work. He never found it. He was a methodical man.In Bombay he followed a strict routine. In Lahore he was lost. And the less he earned, the more he drank, increasingly with people who had nothing to do with literature, though some of them were good human beings, better than the publishers who exploited him. It is a miracle that under those unspeakable conditions, Manto produced work of such enduring power.

Sayyed Faizi, a friend, writes from Vienna, “The next time a collection of Manto is published, it should be dedicated to Ahmed Rahi or Naseer Anwar who were his true friends. In the last years, the domestic tension he faced was unbearable. His drinking was hard on the family and there were arguments. After he died, incense was burnt in the entire house and the walls whitewashed. Also followed was the ritual of placing assafoetida-fried lentil, a piece of fish, and some onion and garlic on a loaf of bread on the outstretched hand of a beggar to keep the departed spirit away. Items in his personal use were not kept. These are heartbreaking things and perhaps they are best left unsaid.”

The ambulance that carried Manto to the hospital on the night he died was called by Prof. G. M. Asar, neighbour and drinking friend. On duty in the emergency room was a brash doctor who felt for Manto’s pulse and said, “Why have you brought him here? You should have taken him to the Miani Sahib graveyard.” Manto’s sister Nasira Iqbal collapsed to the ground when she heard those words.

Faizi says under an arrangement with Lahore’s leading publishers, any payment due to Manto came to Safia Manto. His drinking money came from friends, chance acquaintances or little known publishers and magazines. Some years before his death, Prof. Asar wrote a piece about Manto’s last days which was greatly resented by the family, but Asar insisted that he had only written the bitter truth.

A few months before his death, Manto wrote a very Mantoesque piece about himself, some excerpts from which follow.

“A good deal has been written and said about Manto, more against, than for. No one in his right mind can make much sense of what Manto is like by reading that stuff. And now that I have sat down to write about Manto, I realize how tough the job is; though, in a way, it is also easy because I have watched him from close. In fact, I am his double.

“We were born together and I think we will die the same way. But it is possible that Saadat Hasan may die and Manto may live. This is going to be painful because I have done my best to remain his friend. If he lives and I die, it would be like an egg shell with no white or yellow inside.

“Now let me tell you how this ass became a short story writer. Critics have written long, learned essays about him to prove how learned they are. They have made references to Schaupenhaur, Freud, Hegel, Nietzsche and Marx but they are all off the mark.

“Manto’s short story writing is the result of a clash between two opposites. His father, may God be kind to him, was a harsh man and his mother a tender-hearted lady. These two millstones ground the piece of grain whose outcome was expelled to the world in the shape of Manto.

“Let me turn to his student days. He was an intelligent nipper and very naughty. No taller than three and a half feet, he was also the last of his father’s children. Though his parents loved him, he never had a chance to meet his three much older brothers who were studying abroad. Though they were his step brothers, he wanted them to get to know him and treat him in an elder brother way, but it was not to be. And when it did happen, Manto was already famous as a great short story writer.

“Manto was a restless youth but he wanted to get an education. He failed his entrance exam twice and when he passed, it was a third. It may surprise you to know that he flunked Urdu. When people say he is a great stylist, I laugh because to this day he knows little Urdu. He runs after words as a butterfly hunter runs after butterflies but fails to entrap them which is why his writing lacks pretty words. Though he wields a big stick, he has gleefully taken every beating that has been given to him.

“He cannot walk a straight course. He is like a tightrope walker whom people expect to fall any moment but so far he hasn’t. Perhaps he will fall flat on his face one day and never gt up. I know that before he dies, he will say that he fell because he wanted to get this one humiliation out of the way.

“He is a first-rate fraud who is fond of saying that it is not he who thinks up a story but the story that thinks him up. This is an bsolute fraud because I know that when he is about to write a story, he is like a hen about to lay an egg. His wife is sick of him. She often tells him to stop writing stories and open a shop, but there already is a shop in Manto’s mind which has more things than any shop can ever have.

“People think he is immoral and irreligious and to some extent it is so. However, before he begins writing, the first thing he puts on top of the page is 786. This man who denies God otherwise, turns into a believer on paper ... Manto also believes that those who give him advice are fools and need it themselves.”

Well, that was the man that was and he was one of a kind, and there are no two things about that.

IT was in the late eighties that Fukuyama wrote his famous essay “The End of History” — later expanded and published as a rather controversial book bearing the same title. That sparked a heated debate about the likely future shape of things in the post-cold war era.

The book created quite a stir in intellectual circles worldwide and, with the commonly perceived “clear triumph” of the liberal democratic system and “decisive defeat” of communism, it did seem for a while that we were heading inexorably towards a democratically oriented unipolar world presaging the “end of history.” But this was not to be, as amply evident from the cataclysmic events of the past few weeks.

Human history is essentially a chronicle of mankind’s progress through the ages. However, most eminent political thinkers have always firmly believed that the evolution of human societies — from simple tribal ones based on serfdom and subsistence agriculture to modern technology-driven complex egalitarian structures — is not an open-ended process; it would cease when mankind achieves a stable societal equilibrium which satisfies its deepest and most fundamental urges, thereby creating conditions conducive to the elimination of deep ideological conflicts and violent political upheavals.

That stage can be construed as “end of history” not because important events would no longer occur thereafter but because there would be little room for new ideological ground to be broken since all big and contentious issues would have been resolved by then.

Hard-core Marxists believed, and some still do, that the emergence of a genuine communist society would herald the end of history. This, perhaps, is no longer a credible proposition after the collapse of so many communist regimes and societies, admittedly very imperfect ones, under the strain of the 50-year long cold war. On the other hand, Fukuyama’s thesis was that, with communism already defeated and discredited, liberal democracy would very likely become the culminating point of political evolution of human societies. This theory, too, has suffered a setback as a consequence of the events of September 11 and their aftermath, which appear to have turned the whole world scenario on its head.

People in all parts of the world, being terribly weary of the ravages of wars, earthquakes and floods, and numerous other natural calamities which plagued our little planet regularly in the 20th century, had looked forward with great expectations to the dawn of a new millenium, hoping that it would usher in an era of enhanced peace, progress and prosperity for all mankind. Instead, we find ourselves poised perilously on the brink of a catastrophic multinational conflict, which could possibly snowball into a conflagration, in the very first year of the new millenium.

The trigger, of course, was the most horrific terrorist outrage in history: the destruction through “kamikaze” plane attacks on September 11 of three world famous landmarks in the United States: the twin towers of the World Trade Centre in New York and one wing of the Pentagon (American GHQ) just outside Washington. The suddenness and severity of this savage onslaught jolted the American nation very badly as it wrought unimaginable devastation in the country, including loss of about 6,000 lives and serious injuries to many thousands more, besides incalculable economic damage. America was hurt and humiliated beyond belief; nothing will ever be the same again in “America the beautiful” after this mega-disaster.

This evil but spectacular terrorist operation was obviously planned very meticulously by some highly accomplished professionals who were, it appears, nursing very deep hatred against the United States and wanted desperately to get even with it. They seemed to care precious little for human life, including their own. The conceptual daring of the operation as well as the ruthless efficiency of its execution were unmistakable.

Though as many as four planes were hijacked in less than a couple of hours on the morning of Sept. 11 to mount this attack, the identity of the culprits has not been established so far, more than seven weeks after the event, despite vast resources deployed by the US authorities to solve this heinous crime.

Osama bin Laden and his Al-Qaeda group have, of course, been declared prime suspects though the evidence gathered against them so far is only indirect and not very convincing. A cloak of secrecy has been thrown around whatever evidence is available ostensibly on grounds of national security but perhaps more to keep its many weaknesses hidden. It is difficult to believe, however, that a terrorist operation of such magnitude, precision, and complexity could have been carried out by Al-Qaeda alone without the active involvement of one or more intelligence agencies of some advanced countries.

One can hardly fail to recognize the symbolic significance of the choice of such historical landmarks as targets for destruction: the World Trade Centre as the most visible symbol of American preeminence in the world of finance and the Pentagon as the military signpost of its sole superpower status. Thus, in one fell swoop, the terrorists succeeded in not only demolishing these symbols of American power and affluence but also shattered the myth of “Fortress America”, meaning its supposed invulnerability to any attack from outside y virtue of its locational advantage and unrivalled power. Was this outrage really meant to be a strong signal to the world community that the countdown to the end of the era of American predominance in world affairs has now begun?

America was justifiably incensed at this vile and unprovoked act of outrage and, consequently, there was a flood of demands from all over the country for immediate and strong retaliatory action. President Bush lost no time in making a very belligerent TV appearance to declare war on world terrorism and promised, in true cowboy style, that Osama bin Laden would be captured “dead or alive.”

Some member nations of the loosely linked international coalition against terrorism, hurriedly put together by the US, then sprang into action to annihilate the Taliban militarily. For over five weeks, intensive air strikes against the Taliban militia until Mazar-i-Sharif fell to the Northern Alliance, followed by Kabul, Herat, Jalalabad and other cities in rapid succession.

However, Osama remains unharmed and has, in fact, gained considerably in stature among the obscurantist elements in our society. On the other hand, heavy civilian casualties as well as other collateral damage resulting from savage US bombing is creating a mounting backlash of anti-American sentiment in not only Muslim countries but throughout the world.

The American dilemma is that they do not quite understand why the “Ugly American” syndrome has become so strong worldwide. They seek comforting but patently incorrect answers like the ones repeatedly voiced by President Bush in his TV addresses: “We stand for freedom and they hate it. We are rich and they envy us. We are strong and they resent this.” It does not require great intellect to realize that there is something much stronger at work than just deprivation and jealousy — a perceived higher cause to fight for — that alone can move the aggrieved not only to kill but also to willingly sacrifice their own lives.

The real problem lies with unprincipled American policies which are grossly skewed to serve only their own and their close collaborators’ selfish interests often at the cost of legitimate vital interests of most other countries. America somehow feels free to defy decisions of the International Court of Justice and violate provisions of any important international treaty to which it is a signatory (global warming treaty for one) whenever these do not suit the commercial interests of the United States.

Above all, its blind support to Israel in all the latter’s criminal excesses on the hapless Palestinians and Arab countries as well as the prolonged cruel economic blockade of Iraq causing untold hardships to innocent civilians, including millions of women and children, has created intense hatred for America as an unprincipled global bully.

The 21st century is likely to see greatly increased activity by such ‘post-modern’ terrorists. At least one thing is certain: we are in for very turbulent times which could make world peace and harmony seem a very distant dream. The “end of history” would then get pushed back even further — completely out of sight.

The writer is a former federal secretary.

LITTLE streaks of white jet-smoke in the sky over Washington speak of the new security mood in the United States. The air force has intensified its vigil over skies that once were immune from the problems that beset ordinary mortals in the rest of the world.

But it would take more than one air force, even America’s, to provide any sense of aerial comfort to New York, whose skies are a mass of red commercial dots as craft of every kind descends on the airports that thrive with the world’s attention. This is the city that the world visits every day and every night.

September 11 is too traumatic to disappear from the consciousness so quickly; maybe it never will. But there is evidence that the depression is lifting. The vigour is back in the neon, and chatter is back on the sudden intimacy-wavelength that connects strangers on the streets.

Reminiscence dominates the content of print media, even as television descends to boredom with its repetitive formula of green squiggles purporting to be still life from Afghanistan and analysis that now shrieks in order to be heard above the drone. Print has become once again the most powerful means of communication, employing as it does the brain above the camera. Magazines like the venerable New Yorker and the newborn Talk are at their best. Talk is edited by Tina Brown; Hillary Clinton helped make the first issue about two years ago a bestseller by discussing her husband’s infidelities.

The latest issue has a piece by Chelsea Clinton, who, like her father, is now studying at Oxford. She was in Manhattan on September 11, staying with a friend. She called her mother the moment the sky exploded and the earth trembled. An assistant to her mother picked up the phone, and then the line went dead.

Like the rest of the world Chelsea was hypnotized by the television screen. Then she heard the deafening rumble of the first tower and the only image she could think of was Humpty Dumpty. Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall... Humpty Dumpty had a big fall... She went out. People were flying through the avenues like debris through a storm, shouting “Fire!” and “Bomb!” She writes: “We were all crying. We all thought we were literally going to have fire rain down on us... For a brief moment I truly thought I was going to die. Once we stopped running, I started praying. I prayed for my country and my city...”