On September 9, 2001 in the northern province of Takhar, Ahmed Shah Masood, an important commander in the anti-Taliban alliance in Afghanistan was wounded in a suicidal bomb attack. Two days later on September 11th suicide bombers attacked the U.S. Pentagon and destroyed the World Trade Center in New York. Coincidence? On September 12th Masood became an obituary, and the most important leader of the Afghan resistance in opposition to the Taliban vanished into history. On September 13th the Taliban government invoked an entreaty for restraint by the United States, appealing on behalf of its suffering people.

Terrorism is a war carried out by hijacked planes, collapsed buildings and sundry antagonists. Time will never overtake its remorseless misery and searing horror. Muslims in Arab countries are circumspect in their opinion (because it could be dangerous). America, powerful but vulnerable, asks why the assassins would kill themselves and others-"Isn't it un-Islamic to kill innocent people?" Most citizens of the United States know their government indirectly helped arm the Afghan rebels to fight against the Taliban. And where Afghan freedom from fear now bows to totalitarianism, the ruling party's bigotry of all things American is equaled only to their intolerance of all other religious faiths…a vision out of focus with any worldview.

Afghanistan, described as a "land of nothing," is landlocked by Iran along its western border and Pakistan to the east. A mountainous country that never proceeded far enough from the Stone Age is ruled by a government which cannot adequately feed its people and yet hosts a multi-millionaire, Osama bin Laden. Like "the man who came to dinner," bin Laden has stayed to preside over the poor, paying the government millions for hospitality shown while drawing the wrath of "the great Satan" upon this brittle land.

Inspired by the current cataclysm-that no new ethos shall obtain-the Taliban enforces Afghani social behavior by strict adherence to Islam. Then by some oxymoron, well outside any ideological motive, condones bin Laden's practice of killing innocent people.
But the FBI and others will carry out a confident investigation before frisking this ironically fragile yet rugged country for a millionaire who prefers to prevail among withered men and vast ruins.

The rulers of Afghanistan adduce that we should trust them. But trust, like truth, is a casualty of war, sending a dusty population on a desperate flight from American reprisal to the Iranian and Pakistani borders. The Taliban argues for restraint from the US on behalf of the aggrieved Afghanis, but makes no such appeal to its honored guest, bin Laden the aggressor. To plea for restraint from the victim, without insisting upon self-control by the victimizer, is not the wisest response.

By Frederick Louis Richardson

September 20, 2001