At critical crossroads

THE horror and terror of September 11 has now turned into moments of suspense and worry. Pakistanis are familiar with acts of terrorism and its consequences. They, have, therefore, almost unanimously condemned the killing of innocent people in New York and Washington. There can be no justification for or rationale behind such acts.

It does, however, call for reflection by the entire world leadership. The North needs to change its policies towards the South, just as much as the Muslim world needs to correct its rhetoric against “infidels” and promote a culture of democracy and tolerance within their own countries.

The solution to terrorism does not lie in “waging wars” but in bringing those responsible to justice and in ensuring that governments do not tolerate or promote terrorist gangs. A measured response is called for because an all-out war may polarize the world further, thus playing into the hands of the very forces which encourage terrorism. Since the international alliance against terrorism claims to fight this battle to protect freedoms, it will be expected to be transparent in its moves. It will require greater resolve to uphold the norms of justice, particularly in the face of an adversary who spurns universal values of freedom.

The issue of terrorism is one of the most controversial in contemporary international law and politics. Acts of terror have been glorified as “freedom fighting” and genuine freedom fighters have often been dubbed terrorists. The United Nations too failed to define “terrorism” because the term is emotive and highly loaded politically. The League of Nations failed in 1937 to determine the parameters of “terrorism” and since then there has been no serious attempt to define the term, which continues to be used selectively and vaguely. But whatever definition one accepts , the tragedy of September 11 will cover it all, particularly as none has so far claimed responsibility for it . It has violated the right to live free from fear and the right to life, liberty and security.

The world has changed after September 11. Freedoms will now be compromised in favour of the pressing need for security. Despite the assurances of the West that its campaign will not discriminate against any religion or nationality, Muslims, Pakistanis and Arab nationals are experiencing more prejudice and bias. Airport terminals, employers, buyers and business houses of the West are being selective. The growing flow of refugees from Afghanistan will bring multiple problems for Pakistan. Despite foreign aid, our resources will suffer and our governance deteriorate. Many freedom fighters will be unfairly painted as terrorists and oppressive regimes will take advantage of this new wave of anger against “terrorism”.

In the wake of efforts for a new world of security, Pakistan must strive to acquire a new image. It must be seen as being independent of the West but no friend of terrorist regimes or gangs. Above all, we must make sincere effort at cleaning up our cupboards of all the skeletons we have gathered over the years. Let there be no ambiguity about our present position. It was not courage but plain good sense that compelled us to side with the international community on the question of terrorism. The people of Pakistan are paying for the sins of their past leaders. It ought to be made amply clear so that we are not led into another myth, another trap by our leaders.

Pakistanis take crisis well. This has been no exception. There is no panic and the common people have not taken to the streets in support of the Taliban regime. Their lack of support for the Taliban is not because they respect the government of the US — whom they closely associate with the Israeli atrocities against the Palestinians — but because there is a growing resentment against domestic jihadi groups and disrespect for the Taliban style of government. As such, there was a sigh of relief at the military regime’s decision to join the world alliance against terrorism.

It was not courage but preservation that drove President Musharraf to fall in line with the alliance. The few Jihadi groups and religious parties, who oppose the government’s decision stand alone. The people have wisely decided to back the regime, not because they support army rule but because they have had enough of religious extremism. Tension between the army and the jihadi groups may bode well for the country and democracy but there will be a price to pay for the legacy of the past.

No one can predict the turn of events to follow. It is difficult to grasp the full impact of the future shape of globalization in the wake of the terrorist attacks in the US. So far the emerging signs are not very helpful for Pakistan. We have a tendency to jump to conclusions. The signals given by the West, and reinforced by our government, is that we will be awash with dollars for our support to the world alliance against terrorism.

Such expectations are unreal as the West will carefully watch a nuclear power with a military government at the helm and a tendency to promote obscurantist ideas and practices. The separate electorate system, the so-called Islamization of laws and periodic calls for jihad are breeding grounds for extremism — a spur for the worst type of conservative elements, which, given a chance, will keep us perpetually hostage to Ziaism.

If we wish to turn the present crisis into an opportunity for ourselves, we will have to find the political will to radically change our domestic and foreign policies. It will require a sustained process towards democratization of Pakistan and promotion of higher human values and norms. As a first step the military government has to change its orientation and recognize the follies of the past. It has to take the lead in reining in the militant forces they so openly patronized at one time. At the same time, political forces have to be involved in mobilizing public opinion and in decision making at this critical juncture. Therefore, general elections should be held sooner rather than later.

The government can force people to attend its rallies but it cannot command the receptivity and enthusiasm needed to carry the actual message of the moment far and wide. The armed forces can easily control the militants but recent events have shown that without involving the political forces, the military cannot motivate and mobilize the people sufficiently to express their strong disapproval of acts of terrorism carried out in the name of religion.

Militant religious groups could easily exploit the emotions of a large conservative fringe in the country if they are seen to be taken to task because of the demands of the West and without visible support of the people of Pakistan. Any such backlash will only strengthen militant groups and marginalize the people , silencing their voices infinitely.

The campaign against terrorism, as it is being called, will last quite a while, its first target being Osama bin Laden and the Taliban regime in Kabul. This puts Pakistan’s foreign policy in a dilemma. The Northern Alliance, an avowed enemy of Pakistan, will be on board to push the Taliban southwards. As a reward, the Northern Alliance will ask for their piece of the cake when the booty in Afghanistan comes to be distributed. Pakistan will need better political and diplomatic skills along with a vision to play a positive role in the emerging context. It is, therefore, imperative that the democratic process starts immediately so that a broader-based government brings full force of public opinion to bear on the critical decisions that are clearly involved.

Generally, politicians rather than generals have a better understanding of political dynamics and will be more willing to take a regional approach in the days to follow. Pakistan must acquire an image of a serious player with a fresh approach in building peace in the region. We are being led to the final crossroads with an opportunity to choose between being regarded as hidebound or counted as a mature player, capable of moving ahead with a new resolve and confidence.

This is not a war on terror

WHILE covering the Russian occupation of Afghanistan, I would, from time to time, drive down through Jalalabad and cross the Pakistan border to Peshawar to rest.

In the cavernous, stained interior of the old Intercontinental Hotel, I would punch out my stories on a groaning telex machine beside an office bearing the legend “Chief Accountant” on the door. On the wall next to that office — I don’t know if it was the chief accountant who put it there — was a framed piece of paper bearing four lines of Kipling that I still remember: A scrimmage at a border station. A canter down a dark defile. Five thousand pounds of education. Felled by a five-rupee jezail.

Or, I suppose today, a Kalashnikov AK-47, home-produced in Quetta, or one of those slick little Blowpipe missiles that we handed over to the Mujahedin with such abandon in the early eighties so that they could kill their — and our — Russian enemies.

But I’ve been thinking more about the defiles, the gorges and overhanging mountains, the sheer rock walls 4,000 feet in height, the caves and the massive tunnels which Osama bin Laden cut through the mountains. Here, presumably, are the “holes” from which the West is going to “smoke out” Mr bin Laden, always supposing that he’s been obliging enough to run away and hide in them. For there is already a growing belief — founded on our own rhetoric — that Mr bin Laden and his men are on the run, seeking their hiding places.

I’m not so certain. I’m very doubtful about what Mr bin Laden is doing right now. In fact, I’m not at all sure what we — the West — are doing. True, our destroyers and aircraft carriers and fighter aircraft and heavy bombers and troops are massing in the general region of the Gulf. Our SAS boys — so they say in the Middle East — are already climbing around northern Afghanistan, in the region still controlled by the late Ahmad Shah Masoud’s forces. But what exactly are we planning to do? Kidnap Mr bin Laden? Storm his camps and kill the lot of them, Mr bin Laden and all his Algerian, Egyptian, Jordanian, Syrian and Gulf Arabs?

If this seems fanciful, you should listen to what’s coming out of Washington and Tel Aviv. While The New York Times Pentagon sources are suggesting that Saddam may be chapter two, the Israelis are trying to set up Lebanon — the “centre of international terror,” according to Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon — for a bombing run or two, along with Yasser Arafat’s little garbage tip down in Gaza where the Israelis have discovered, mirabile dictu, a “bin Laden cell.”

The Arabs, of course, would also like an end to world terror. But they would like to include a few other names on the list. Palestinians would like to see Mr Sharon picked up for the Sabra and Chatila massacre, a terrorist slaughter carried out by Israel’s Lebanese allies — who were trained by the Israeli army - in 1982. At 1,800 dead, that’s only a quarter of the number killed on September 11. Syrians in Hama would like to put Rifaat Al-Assad, the brother of the late president, on their list of terrorists for the mass killings perpetrated by his Defence Brigades in the city of Hama in the same year. At 20,000, that’s more than double the September 11 death toll.

The Lebanese would like trials for the Israeli officers who planned the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, which killed 17,500 people, most of them civilians — again, well over twice the September 11 statistic. Christian Sudanese would like President Omar al-Bashir arraigned for mass murder.

But, as the Americans have made clear, it’s their own terrorist enemies they are after, not their terrorist friends or those terrorists who have been slaughtering populations outside American “spheres of interest.” Even those terrorists who live comfortable in the US but have not harmed America are safe: take, for example, the pro-Israeli militiaman who murdered two Irish UN soldiers in southern Lebanon in 1980 and who now live in Detroit after flying safely out of Tel Aviv. The Irish have the name and address, if the FBI are interested — but of course they’re not.

So we are not really being asked to fight “world terror.” We are being asked to fight America’s enemies. If that means bagging the murderers behind the atrocities in New York and Washington, few would object. But it does raise the question of why those thousands of innocents are more important — more worthy of our effort and perhaps blood — than all the other thousands of innocents. And it also raises a much more disturbing question: whether or not the crime against humanity committed in the US on September 11 is to be met with justice — or a brutal military assault intended to extend American political power in the Middle East.

Either way, we are being asked to support a war whose aims appear to be as misleading as they are secretive. We are told by the Americans that this war will be different from all others. But one of the differences appears to be that we don’t know who we are going to fight and how long we are going to fight for. Certainly, no new political initiative, no real political engagement in the Middle East, no neutral justice is likely to attend this open-ended conflict. The despair and humiliation and suffering of the Middle East peoples do not figure in our war aims — only American and European despair and humiliation and suffering.

As for Mr bin Laden, no one believes the Taliban are genuinely ignorant of his whereabouts. He is in Afghanistan. But has he really gone to ground? During the Russian war, he would emerge, again, to fight Afghanistan’s Russian occupiers, to attack the world’s second superpower. Wounded six times, he was a master of the tactical ambush, as the Russians found out to their cost.

Evil and wicked do not come close to describing the mass slaughter in the US. But — if it was Mr bin Laden’s work — that does not mean he would not fight again. And he would be fighting on home ground. There are plenty of dark defiles into which we may advance. And plenty of cheap rifles to shoot at us. And that wouldn’t be a “new kind of war” at all. —Courtesy: The Independent

Sanyal’s vanished Lahore: PRIVATE VIEW

B. C. SANYAL, the celebrated Indian sculptor and painter, who will be a hundred years old next year — 99 not out Shafiqur Rehman would have called it — has been everywhere and seen everything but his nostalgia for Lahore, where he lived and worked from 1929 to 1947 has deepened as the years have gone by. To this day, he calls Lahore “my Lahore”.

He lives, not in his native Bengal that he left a long time ago, but Delhi. Some years back, he published a book of reminiscences that he called — for some reason — ‘The Vertical Woman’.

Earlier this year, it was published in Pakistan and for that we have to thank Ajmal Kamal, publisher of that superb Urdu literary quarterly ‘Aaj’ who produced the edition and to Ahmed Salim who sought out Sanyal in Delhi and obtained his permission to print.

Sanyal left Lahore in the maelstrom of 1947 and did not return to the city where he spent, he says, the best years of his life, until 1986. He revisited his old haunts, reliving a time that is now remote enough to be almost mythical. He went to the old Mayo School of Arts where he had taught for some time before he was asked to leave because he had fallen in love with the principal’s daughter, a doe-eyed Bengali girl named Kalyani Gupta — and she with him. Both the father and the gods who preside over such things were against it.

Sanyal left Mayo, founded by Lockwood Kipling, Rudyard’s father, but he did not leave Lahore. He had fallen in love with the city as much as he had fallen in love with Kalyani. In time, he set up his own studio in a basement in Dyal Singh Mansions.

The failed affair with Kalyani is the second affair centred around a Bengali girl in the city of Lahore in the years before independence that did not come to fruition.

While Sanyal went on from Kalyani to meet and marry a Punjabi girl named Snehlata, the poet Meeraji who was smitten by Meera Sen, another Bengali girl who lived in Lahore, carried the pain of unrequited love to his grave. Modern Urdu poetry remains in Meera Sen’s debt because had there been no Meera Sen, there would have been no Meeraji. Who then would have written: ‘Harkara laya saiyyaan-ji se joohi ke phool, aur sandesa bhool gaya.’

But to return to Sanyal, after some years, he moved his studio to the top of the Regal cinema in what was once a school for ballroom dancing run by the enterprising Lahore impresario and man about town, Aslam Lodhi. Lodhi later set up a number of popular bars around the city. One of his restaurants, Volga, was in business on the Mall until the early 1960s.

Sanyal came to Lahore on a commission from Calcutta, where he had recently graduated from the Calcutta School of Painting, to do a sculpture of Lala Lajpat Rai. Its completion was timed with the annual Congress session. He completed the assignment but was not paid. Out of work, one day, he went to see the British principal of the Mayo School of Art, Lionel Heath, who offered him a job because he was pleased with his work, including Heath’s sculpted head. Sanyal remained at Mayo until the Kalyani affair seven years later.

Sanyal’s studio became one of the hubs of literary, artistic and cultural activities, according to the late Safdar Mir ‘Zeno’. The Progressive Writers would meet there, as would the Indo-Soviet Friendship Society. Celebrated performing artists like Uday Shankar — Ravi Shankar’s brother — and Ram Gopal would visit Sanyal’s studio when in Lahore. Once Rajani Palme Dutt came to lecture there.

The Lahore of the 1930s and the war years was a scintillating place. It was here that the painters Abdul Rehman Chughtai, Roop Krishna Bevan Petman and Amrita Sher-Gil lived and worked.

Of the younger painters who studied under Sanyal were Zubaida Agha and Razia Sirajuddin who later married Prof. Sirajuddin. Lahore was also the home of the Punjab Literary League which may have been involved in the organization of Amrita Sher-Gil’s first solo show at Faletti’s in November 1937.

The late Abdullah Butt who knew Sher-Gil well and who was one of the moving spirits behind the Punjab Literary League, used to talk to me about those days back in the middle sixties when in the evening we would saunter down the Mall to one of the city’s watering holes for the cup that cheers. In the Punjab University Library, there still may be old issues of a journal the League used to bring out, one of which carried a report of Sher-Gil’s show. Sir Abdul Qadir, Manzur Qadir’s father, was president of the League.

Among Sanyal’s friends were Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Charles Fabri, curator of the Lahore Museum. Sanyal was not in Lahore when independence came, but came back in October and found himself in a new and unpleasant world. All cinemas had been sealed since they belonged to non-Muslims and that included Regal which included Sanyal’s studio and all that was in it. He was finally allowed to enter his studio and take away some paintings and sculptures. He was assisted by Anwar Ali, creator of the immortal ‘Pakistan Times’ cartoon imp Nanna. A teak easel Sanyal gave Anwar Ali as a parting gift is still with him.

When Sanyal came to Lahore in 1986, he was delighted to discover that the Lahore Museum housed 14 of his works which he had long considered lost. Unhappily, the works are not on display but stored in the basement.

As a salute to Sanyal, the government of Pakistan should gift these pieces back to him on his 100th birthday next year because they are his, legally and morally. But would it? The gentlemen in charge of the ministries of culture and agriculture — you can’t tell one from the other — are unlikely to be of much assistance there.

Sanyal’s Lahore was also Amrita Sher-Gil’s Lahore though she did not live there — or on this earth — for very long. Sanyal knew her well. This was the city she had finally chosen as home. And this is where she died on December 5, 1941, at the age of 28. She lived in 23 Ganga Ram Mansions which was where she died of peronitis that in those pre-antibiotic days was fatal if not treated in time. Iqbal Singh, who was obviously in love with her, wrote about her last journey movingly in the biography that he published in 1984.

“Amrita’s body was carried in a black hearse. It was covered with a Kashmiri shawl. At the last moment, someone discovered that no arrangements had been made to get any flowers to lay on the body. Some friends, who had gardens in their houses, rushed and brought some flowers.

“There were not many mourners — perhaps about thirty or forty and they were mostly in their cars. The cortege moved pretty fast through the Mall, Lower Mall, past the Badshahi Mosque and the Lahore Fort, and then on to the burning ghat on the left bank of the Ravi ... The last rite was performed by Amrita’s father, Umrao Singh. He lit the funeral pyre ... As I sat there watching the body of the precocious, elegant and beautiful Amrita being consumed by the leaping flames, I remember saying to myself, and the conviction has grown through the years — ‘We shall never see the like of her again.’”

Will Lahore remember Amrita Sher-Gil who will have been dead 60 years on December 5, 2001? Will someone light a candle to her memory on the banks of the Ravi that the Greeks called the Hydroates?

This way of life

FROM now on the question will be how much security vs. how much freedom this country will need to survive.

I had this conversation with Miguel Santa Cruz, a friend from a South American country. I told him, “I want fail-safe security, but I also want to say anything I want to. That is what this war is all about. For example, If we’re going to keep our freedoms, that means defending Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson even if I don’t agree with anything they say.”

Miguel said, “Who are Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson?”

“They are TV preachers. So if we’re really going to preserve our way of life, I have to support Jerry Falwell. Just after the terrorist attacks, he told Pat Robertson on television that God was angry with us because this country supports homosexuality, abortion rights, atheism, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the People for the American way. It was not the message Americans wanted to hear at that moment and the next day he retracted it.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

I said, “He had a right to say it. The entire fabric of this country is woven around the First Amendment. We are permitted to say anything we want to. I have my own feelings about God and they are not anything like Falwell’s and Pat Robertson’s. I’m for planned parenthood. I give money to the American Civil Liberties Union and I’m against prayers in school. Therefore, I have to let the TV preachers have their mikes to protect my own way of life.”

“What about atheists?” Miguel asked me. “Do you support the godless people?”

“In America, you can find any cause you want to. When it comes to publications, you can buy papers on the extreme right or the extreme left, and I can’t stomach either one of them. But if they aren’t permitted to publish what they want to, then neither can the Washington Post and the New York Times.

“What about demonstrations?”

“You are protected by the Constitution, even though most Americans don’t protest in the streets. The thing that scares me is that people will do anything in the name of security, while they are really talking about taking our freedoms away. They are saying free speech will give aid and comfort to the enemy, but if we can’t say what we want to, we’ll give terrorists more aid and comfort than ever before.”

“So that means if your way of life survives ,you have to let everyone say anything they want to?”

“You don’t have to agree with everybody, but you can’t stop anyone from saying what he’s thinking out loud. It’s what we are all about.”

Miguel said, “I have a cousin who is always yelling about the environment and he keeps throwing his body against a nuclear plant.”

I said, “He’s lucky to live here.” —Dawn/Tribune Media Services

As history repeats itself

EVERY ten or fifteen years there comes a swivel moment in the poker game of history that determines the fortunes of the world. In 1964 an American president sent a few troops to a country called Vietnam to save the world from Communism. In 1979 the Soviet Union sent troops into Afghanistan to save Communism from the world. In 1990 Saddam Hussein sent troops into Kuwait to seize its oil for Iraq.

And now in 2001 a network of shadows has sent a few of its troops into the United States to prove that it can hit the most sacred symbols of America’s military and economic power. Since this is a story of human beings, there are emotional chains and practical, if hidden, interconnections between events.

The parallel between Vietnam and Afghanistan is a cliche. Iraq is the only country to publicly applaud the jihadis who destroyed the twin towers of New York, the Pentagon of Washington and forced the president of America into hiding in his own country for a good part of a day that will define this decade, a day on which began, in the words of President George Bush, the first war of the twenty-first century. If, as certain optimistic academics wrote, history came to an end with the defeat of the Soviet Union after four decades of cold war, then history was clearly reborn on Tuesday, the 11th of September, 2001.

About 38,000 Americans died in Vietnam. The count is not over, but more than 15,000 Americans may have already died on the first day of the first war of the twenty-first century. America has a lot to recover from the debris of the Pentagon, starting with its credibility. Washington has to answer an assertion made by Osama bin Laden in a videotape that swam across websites and was hawked in bazaars in June: “America is much weaker than it appears.”

Am I mistaken when I begin this chapter with an event that took place in a small town in the north of Afghanistan — Faizabad? Two “journalists”, Moroccans with Belgian passports named Karim and Kassam, travelled from London to Pakistan and from there to Kabul. In the capital of Afghanistan they met Taliban officials on the pretext of working on a story. On September 9 these “journalists” met, by appointment for an interview, Ahmad Shah Masood, leader of the Northern Alliance against Kabul, a war hero many times over, and the only commander who prevented the Taliban from controlling the whole of Afghanistan. The two fake journalists carried bombs, either hidden in a camera or strapped to the body. They blew themselves up, and Masood died later from shrapnel wounds. It was the first of the suicide missions that would shake the world. How does Faizabad connect with New York, Washington, Boston, Pittsburgh, Florida and perhaps a few place-names we have yet to learn about?

The most remarkable aspect of this operation was the superb planning. Analysts will long debate and study what this multi-city, years-long operation revealed and what it exposed of America’s government, its private and public institutions, free-and-fluid society, and, of course, mindspace. But there is no doubt that those who thought this out, thought it through very thoroughly. This operation was planned by someone who understood America, who knew how it worked, who knew where it was porous. It was done by someone who had lived for some years in the United States, and had probably worked with its administration at some level.

Someone who knew the psychological impact of a strike on symbols as powerful as the First Home of politics, the First Home of the military, and the First Home of finance. Someone with the biodata of Osama bin Laden, who once spent his father’s money at high society hangouts and, when a sudden opportunity arose, worked with the CIA to fill an empty life with the adventure of a war against the Soviets in Afghanistan. In the process Osama bin Laden found his conviction, but he did not lose his memory.

It is axiomatic that those who planned the invasion of the United States were aware of the fury of the American response. They were probably goading this response, in any case, in their search for an apocalypse. If Osama bin Laden was the mastermind, then he knew that he would be emotional target and Kabul the political destination. America would declare war. What would be the nature of this assault? Americans would of course use their aircraft carriers in the Indian Ocean, for which they needed no one’s permission. The south was in that sense secure, and undefended by Kabul. India would obviously help in any way it could, but geopolitics imposed limitations on what India could do for the war effort. Pakistan was easy to read. Its government did not have the strength to stand up to any American wish list.

American air power would operate from Pakistan and perhaps India as well. But ground troops as an assault force through the Pakistan-Afghanistan border were another matter. Pakistan was not a country where the government was in full control. There would be popular sentiment against an American presence; worse, there was the potential for sabotage by the innumerable, armed jihadi groups spawned for reasons stretching from Moscow to Kashmir. The most effective land assault could only be from the north, through that small gap outside the control of the Taliban near Tajikistan. Russia, embittered by Chechnya, would be a ready ally, but with reservations about sending its own troops. Americans would be reluctant as well to involve its troops; and if forced to do so, would minimize the body exposure.

Washington would always prefer to use the men under Masood, re-arming them with the best weaponry, and filling out ranks with well-paid recruits from the Tajiks or any tribes that were willing to cooperate for any reason in the drive towards Kabul. But all soldiers need a commander to lead, a target to achieve, and a treasurer to keep them well-fed. The moment that Masood, the Lion of Panjsher, had been waiting for ever since he lost to the Taliban would have arrived. The elimination of Ahmad Shah Masood was not an accident.

One thought must have already entered the mind of President George Bush Jr as he follows almost precisely in the footsteps of his father, the last American president to take his country to war (the attack on Yugoslavia during President Clinton’s term was a blip rather than a battle). That thought is not about who is the enemy. Henry Kissinger, the ranking Republican intellectual, has outlined both the enemy and the methodology of the response: “Any government that shelters groups capable of this kind of attack, whether or not they can be shown to have been involved in this attack, must pay an exorbitant price.” That is 29 words meaning Afghanistan. The method? “It is something to do calmly, carefully and inexorably.”

The question in Bush’s mind must surely be not about when to start the war, but when to stop. His father paid a heavy price because he did not know the answer to the second question; he confused the start with victory, with the result that Saddam Hussein is still in charge of Iraq and has 47 countries (including India) doing business with him. What will be Washington’s war aim? Once war starts, its result will be determined by only one reality. Has the Taliban government been replaced in Kabul or not? Osama bin Laden may seem like an attractive trophy, but his capture or elimination is not the answer, as any serious analyst will confirm. A martyr is always more dangerous than a living leader.

America’s real target has to be the movement that was nurtured by Islamabad and has now secured a national base from which a network of disciples and agents can seek and kill across the world. America’s purpose will surely be the restoration of the monarchy that provided Afghanistan years of stability before Moscow’s meddling with the civilian governments under the king destroyed stability for more generations than it had lasted.

Afghanistan understands war. Geography has made it history’s battleground. It has seen war all through recorded history, from Alexander to Chengez Khan (who reached the banks of the Indus and then retreated before the Indian heat) to Nadir Shah and the endless armies that marched and looted and pillaged and raped through the devastations of the second millennium, ending with British rule. The first millennium was serene in comparison. The Afghans have conquered and been subjugated. They have been ruled by Greeks, Persians, Mongols, Central Asians, Indians (Delhi ruled Kabul for two hundred years), British and Russians. The cliche about Afghanistan is that it has been more difficult to get out than to get in. War has returned to Afghanistan, but this time with important variations.

Both the United States and Afghanistan will be defending something larger than self-interest. The United States is fighting for its honour as well as for its leadership of a world it has steadily tried to fashion in its own image, built on the ideals of democracy and prosperity, equality of all citizens and constantly rising levels of material comfort. Afghanistan is in the constant frenzy of a jihad that it has chalked out as its rationale for existence. Kabul will not seek to involve either Muslim countries or their governments to its side. It will seek support from the underprivileged shadows of Muslim communities, from men whose faith leads them to treat death as their gift to a larger cause.

The challenge before America is to separate the Taliban movement from the broad sweep of the Muslim world; the two are neither the same nor interchangeable.