UN is racist. Look at how the UN quietly stepped aside and raised no voice when the US bombing of Afghanistan began, and then rush in after all was over with high minded policies and action.

So, like the United States, Malaysia is confused on what it should do. Washington, in a replay of the Soviet occupation, outdid even Moscow in its devastation of Afghanistan. And justify its action as Moscow did, putting the screws on in the name of democracy as Moscow did in the name of communism. Washington is also careful to say that all this is not to denigrate Islam, but to protect it from the rascals who give it a bad name. Dr Mahathir uses the same argument, insisting he is the Islamic Goliath as Washington insists it is the Christian Goliath. Each country isolates what they term Islamic fundamentalists in their own country to rein in political debate and dissent. Once the common denominator was communism. Today it is Islam.

Mr Bin Laden forced the United States to attack Afghanistan to remove its government more lethally, though the methods used are the same, as the Soviet Union, raining bombs and anti-personnel sleeper bombs, as in Cambodia, for the killings to go on years after peace comes. He led the US and Great Britain into a quagmire in Afghanistan, in which the new government is aligned not to Washington but to Moscow; only the interim head is pro-Washington. Nothing changed internally but that, as Robert Fisk graphically notes, one set of murderers and warlords represented by the Taliban is replaced by another from the Northern Alliance. The euphoric statements out of Afghanistan these days equalled the euphoric reportage in the Soviet Press in Moscow's presence in Afghanistan two decades earlier.

For Afghanistan and the United States, the quagmire begins anew

Mrs Arroyo's choice is as convoluted and impossible. She would not, as Dr Mahathir, admit Mr Misuari is linked to the Philippines' claim to the Malaysian state of Sabah. But he is. Malaysia's, and the Philippines's, quiet support to destabilise the other over Sabah continues, desultorily, since her father, President Diasdado Macapagal, laid formal claim four decades earlier. The International Court of Justice in the Hague would not allow the Philippines to intervene in Malaysia's dispute with Indonesia over two islets off Sabah. Neither can blame the United States, intent on breaking the Bin Laden connexion in Mindanao. As the war in Afghanistan heads for a stalemate, despite Washington's overwhelming aerial supremacy, it must prove that its global coalition against terror works by proxy in distant lands. Mr Misuari is one enemy of that proxy war. But he is one that Kuala Lumpur and Manila would rather not have to deal with. But they must.

President George W Bush's worldwide crusade against terror is as skewered as Mr Osama bin Laden's call for an Islamic jihad. When Mr Bush narrowed his crusade to one man, Mr Osama, and bombed Afghanistan to force the Taliban government to give him up, he turned it, with unwise remarks and general threats, into an attack on Muslims. Mr Osama called on Muslims the world over to revolt against Washington and its satraps. Afghanistan is but the killing fields that would not end when the bombing does. Mr Osama's death or capture would not contain the forces unleashed when the four airplanes crashed into the World Trade Centre, the Pentagon and the fields in Pennsylvania on September 11.

Issues of any significance are conveniently sidelined. The world can be on fire, but the Malaysian parliament would do nothing. The government does not consult it on matters that should it should: The new administrative capital of Putra Jaya is built by one of its off budget agencies, Petronas, and therefore out of its purview. Billions or ringgit for development are announced without reference to Parliament. Requiests for information are cavalierly ignored. The opposition parties try to make it a debating chamber but with a Speaker unprepared to take his role seriously, the effort is stillborn. Afghanistan is not discussed in Parliament: it does not interfere in other country's problem; the government would take care of it, and MPs have no business in what is not theirs. The House must exist as a rubber stamp for the government, not as a sounding board of the Malaysian people.

For all the support the United States mustered against the bombing of Afghanistan, curiously only Britain and its colonial staff-sergeant, Australia, committed troops.

For all the support the United States mustered against the bombing of Afghanistan, curiously only Britain and its colonial staff-sergeant, Australia, committed troops.

The PAP, which wields power in authoratian governance and unbending, often harsh, legal perfection, is right to worry, despite the neutered opposition, that it could lose control when, not if, the voters decide enough is enough. That is not about to happen. The PAP would romp home this time, with a fistful of MPs, at best, ranged against it. Singapore is in crisis, the economy in recession, the September 11 events in the United States complicating it, the Osama bin Laden affair and the invasion of Afghanistan adding to an visceral hatred for Islam, not talked about but clearly there. Mr Lee all but taunts the Muslim Singapore to go and fight with the Taliban for all he cared.

"Our" Afghanistan is committed to human rights, wants a democratic government based on it, but is prevented by the Taliban, says the Northern Alliance's embassy in Kuala Lumpur. The Northern Alliance is known here as the Islamic state of Afghanistan, and its embassy does, as the need arises to show it exists, tell the world, if not Malaysia, how wonderful things are in its bailliwick, and how the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, more widely known as the Taliban, makes short shrift of all those wonderful ideas Thomas Jefferson and his colleagues made it a requirement for good governance. "Our ideology is unlike the Talibans," it said, and the Islamic state's "broad-based and multi-ethnic character" is proof of this commitment.

Anthrax and the war in Afghanistan

And so the United States and Britain march merrily, with trumpets blowing, into the quagmire of Afghanistan: For Washington, yet another folly in Asia after Korea and Vietnam; for Britain, her fourth Afghan war.

The New Straits Times, in a comment yesterday (12 Oct 2001, p2) by Ashraf Abdullah, insists that "the content of anything that sells itself as journalism should be free of any motive other than informing its readers". To drive the point home, he adds: "It should not be influenced by anything else." The Associated Press did not get the nuance right on what the Prime Minister said in Malay in Parliament about the Osama affair, and an emphasis other than he intended went through. As usual, the Prime Minister's press handlers did not release a translation, as they should have, for anything as newsy as his comment on the current war to pulverise Afghanistan is. Even Bernama takes its time to release the "proper" version of what he said. Why is it so difficult to have an English translation of what was said in Parliament available for important statements like these?

When Christian nations -- I take it as read that the United States and Great Britain are that -- bomb an already war-ravaged nation into more untold misery, and assuage their conscience by mixing the bombs with food parcels, it is acceptable, so long as the victims are Muslim. That when President Bush and Mr Blair sent in the armada of weapons for testing it on live targets in Afghanistan, they fulfil a Christian duty they would not allow their Muslim targets theirs? Because all I have read and seen in how clean the bombing raids were, that they were to punish a man who destroyed the United States' equanimity by bringing a war in which they have been at the receiving end for decades into the perpatrator's frontyard, that they were done clinically and surgically, that the pilots find it all gungho and very arcade-game like, and the surgical precision with which the strikes take place. We are also told to accept at face value Washington's and London's war aims as told through a propaganda prism.

The earlier column I had written for my column in Harakah, and posted on Sangkancil, was overtaken by events when the aerial bombardment of Afghanistan began. A version of that appeared in my Chiaroscuro column on malaysiakini (www.malaysiakini.com) earlier.

Fellow Muslim, did I say? No, how could I, when Washington says the worldwide coalition to bomb Afghanistan is not an anti-Islam move. Terrorists did not have any religion, only freedom fighters have that. After all, was it not an American war hero in the US war against its Indian natives who said that "the only good Indian is a dead Indian"? So, even if Afghans are bad Muslims alive, they would be, Washington expects, good Muslims once this adventure is over.

The DAP had no choice. The World Trade Centre and Pentagon bombings, helped by anti-Muslim rhetoric on CNN, amidst the Sarawak state assembly elections, alienated Chinese and Indians from Islam, fanned with great effect by UMNO and National Front (BN - Barisan Nasional) campaigners. PAS's ambivalent response worsened it. When the Talibans decided to destroy the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan, PAS kept quiet, although at the same time, PAS encouraged the building of the world's largest sitting Buddha and the world's third largest reclining Buddha. PAS is tongue-tied on how to respond to the World Trade Centre and Pentagon attacks.

The Prime Minister has disappeared from public view in the past ten days. He wanted to link the Kumpulan Militan Malaysia aka Kumpulan Mujahideen Malaysia (as the United States has had to rename its 'Operation Infinite Justice' to a yet unreavealed name because, as the US defence secretary, Mr Donald H. Rumsfeld discovered, in Islam only Allah, not the United States, dispenses infinite justice) with the terrorist attack that shook the foundations of United States financial, military and political power. RTM and TV3 juxtaposed the television footage of the attack on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon with insinuated attacks on the KMM. There were few takers, if only because Malaysia herself is targetted in the public hysteria in the United States that stands for reasoned debate over Osama bin Laden, that master terrorist so demonized to ready American public opinion for Washington to bomb Afghanistan from the Iron Age it now is back into the Stone Age for allowing him to stay there.

Every CNN, CNBC and other TV news programmes on Astro targetted Osman Bin Laden. There was no doubt in my mind -- as there was none in 1991 in Washington's demonising of its former ally, President Saddam Hussein -- the US is ready to strike him down, Rambo-like, at his lair in the mountains of Afghanistan.

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