December 31, 2001	Monday	Shawwal 15, 1422

LONDON: Osama Bin Laden is looking ‘haggard’. A videotape broadcast on al-Jazeera TV showed the Most Wanted Man in the Known World looking haggard. And in case we did not notice how haggard he was looking, the Western media have been pounding us with the word ever since the pictures were released. So George Bush and Tony Blair should be congratulated on the first concrete evidence that their ‘War on Terrorism’ is finally achieving some of its policy objectives.

Of course, they have done terribly well in bringing chaos to Afghanistan, but that has not been one of the policy objectives. When those planes smashed into the World Trade Centre with the loss of 2,500 innocent lives, nobody’s first reaction was: “Well, the sooner we get the Mujahideen and the warlords to take over Kabul the better!” President Bush laid out the policy objectives of his ‘War on Terrorism’ in measured terms: “We must catch the evil perpetrators of this cowardly act and bring them to justice.”

Bringing to justice the people who actually perpetrated the crime was out of the question since they were already dead. They had killed themselves in a typically cowardly fashion. So, President Bush pretty quickly said that he would get whoever egged them on to do it and then he would make them pay for it.

Well, many months later, who has paid for it? US taxpayers have stumped up billions of dollars. They have paid for it. So have the British taxpayers, for some reason which has not yet been explained to them. Uncounted thousands of innocent Afghan citizens have paid for it too - with their lives. It is ‘uncounted’ because nobody in the West seems to have been particularly interested in counting them. It is pretty certain more innocent people have died and are still dying in the bombing of Afghanistan than on Sept 11, but the New York Times does not run daily biographies of them so they do not count.

People have all paid a considerable amount in terms of those precious civil liberties and freedoms that make their way of life in the Free World so much better than everyone else’s. Bit of a conundrum that.

People are all also paying a huge price, all the time, every day, in terms of their daily anxiety quota. They dare not fly in planes or, if they do, they do so in fear and dread. They are constantly fearful of some nameless retribution being visited on them. And it is no good Blair saying this is the terrorists’ fault. Of course it is, but then if people had not joined the Americans in bombing Afghanistan they would not all be so scared.

If the objectives of the ‘War on Terrorism’ were to catch the perpetrators of the Sept 11 attacks, bring them to justice and make the world a safer place, so far the score - on all three objectives - has been nil. People are all jumping around scared that something similar is go going to happen at any moment. No perpetrators have been caught; no perpetrators have been brought to justice.

Mark you, this last is not really surprising. Just think: if the police were setting out to catch a particularly clever and evil murderer, would they go around with loud-hailers announcing where they were going to look for him, pinpoint the areas they intended to search and give him a count of 100 to get away? That is what you do if you are playing hide and seek, not if you want to catch a criminal. The police would have gone to work covertly and tried to find out where he was without his even knowing they were looking for him. That is not a very American way of going about things.

However, finally the ‘War on Terrorism’ is achieving its policy objectives. Osama bin Laden is looking haggard. He may not have been caught or brought to justice but, at the cost of thousands of innocent Afghan lives, billions of dollars of US citizens’ money and the civil liberties of the Free World, the anti-terror war has got him looking haggard.

So keep up the good work, President Bush and Prime Minister Blair, let us see if they can continue in this vein and perhaps - at the cost of only another few billion dollars, a lot more innocent lives, many more civil rights, and the stability of the Middle East, India and Pakistan, and perhaps a Third World War.—Dawn/The Observer News Service.