Dover Soul

Everyone knows that the "Taliban" - Islamically ultraconservative Pashtun nationalists, with no existence apart from the Pashtun as a whole and no desire to run anywhere beyond Afghanistan and Pakistan - will return to government, and sooner rather than later. They just won't be the only people in government this time, that's all. At least they didn't legalise rape within marriage. Nor did they launch the 9/11 attacks. "Saudi Arabia"? Did someone say "Saudi Arabia"?

Those who owe an apology to the victims of 9/11 are those who are waging a war against a country which had nothing to do with it, having previously installed a President of the United States so embroiled in Saudi affairs as to call it forth in the first place. Of course Bush is too stupid to have staged it. But he was still the reason why it happened.

Just as there are no Taliban distinct from the Pashtun as a whole, so there is no "al-Qaeda" at all. It is not an organisation. It is an idea, and thus vastly more difficult to defeat. The roots and heartland of that idea are in the country whose rulers bankroll the Bushes and the Clintons. The "al-Qaeda" idea defines itself against those rulers. Seeing another of those rulers' hired help in the White House, those who hold that idea hit out. Not one of them was from Afghanistan. Not a single one.

But all that they did was give Bush a previously inconceivable second term, and the excuse to launch all the wars abroad and assaults on liberty at home that the people behind him had had in mind all along.