It is money that makes the world go around. No where is this clear publicly than in the United States, and now Iraq. It is so in other parts of the world, but the world is told it is more important in these two countries. The publicity surrounding the release of Jill Caroll, a Christian Science Monitor reporter, from a Iraqi group, was a piece of good news for the United States in an otherwise bleak Iraq. Both the US government and the Christian Science Monitor was emphatic that no ranson was paid. We are told to believe it, when we know any problem they have is solved by money. Journalists, especially American, are prime candidates for kidnap in Iraq, as it is in Afghanistan, even Pakistan. This is why they stay in their hotel rooms in Iraq, or in the so-called Green Zone, where the US and its allies are coccooned in apparent safety. To show that Iraq is in control, people like the US secretary of state Condileeza Rice and British foreign secretary Jack Straw visit Iraq often to show that all is well.

The Americans have rushed in like bulls in china shop, especially after it invaded neighbouring Afghanistan. It has arrested for years without trial Afghans and Pathans in Guantano Bay. The Americans put a gloss over it telling how they taught English to some who have been released. But their presence is no different than the Russians. The Russians had their Najibullah, the Americans have their Hamid Karzai. Both had lived overseas before they were made President, Najibullah was torn to bits by an Afghan crowd. The Americans can just hope that this fate would not be Hamid Karzai's. The same fate awaited the Iraqi prime minister under British overlordship, when he was torn to bits while trying to escape in a women's veiled dress. Would that fate also be the American-installed Iraqi leaders?

But Al-Qaeda is an American creation. It was used to get the Soviet Union out of Afghanisation so that it could get into the mess there. It forgot, or did not realise, that Al-Qaeda members were Islamic fundamentalists, who accepted American money and training to eventually overthrow them as well. To it, the Soviet Union, now Russia, and the United States were foreigners out to rule Afghanistan, and that it would not allow. The US knows a lot of about Al-Qaeda – its operations, its senior operatives. that it is built like an American organisation – but Al-Qaeda is successful because it gives its leaders in the field the freedom to operate within a set of rules given it. Washington pokes holes in what it sees as Al-Qaeda's operations, but it says them so that the Americans are not unduly frightened. Al-Qaeda taunts the United States with frequent video and audo tapes to keep the Americans frightened. It came into Iraq after the US invaded the country. Most of its fighters are foreign, now in about the same proportion of the US-led coalition. For all this interest in seeing Osama bin Laden dead, it is a fact that if he is, the Americans would in time leave Iraq with their tails behind their back. It took only seven years after Ho Chi Minh's death for the Americans to leave South Vietnam in defeat.

ASEAN as a body is of no interest now. There is much discussion of what the East Asian Sumiit is or would be in papers of the West. But that is also a dead letter, because the Australians and New Zealand is brought in. This makes it impossible for those countries that has an independent point of view from making it known when a Westerner is present. Nothing serious would now be discussed by either body, but it would further draw a wedge between the rulers and the ruled in all the member countries. There was an excessive secrecy about this conference in Malaysia. Pak Lah will meet the correspondents Malaysia invited to a question-and-answer session today. But this will not hide the fact that ASEAN is now a dead letter. The fate of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi is important, but is that of 4 million Thai Malays. But Daw Aung San Suu Kyi is not leading the only opposition in Myanmar. Malaysia should hark back to the past, when she recognised the Afghanistan government when Gulbudeen Hikmatiyar was prime minister in circumstances that made it impossible to recognise any other government in that country.

The South Asian earthquake hit Pakistan badly. But the news reports failed to mention that most of those who suffered were near the Himalayas and supported the Muslim rebels. The area is left to its own devises at the best of times. The earthquake could have weaned them over. But the government did not. It blamed the weather, the difficulty in getting aid across, blamed those who gave the aid. It ignored the people affected by lthe earthquake after some time. The rebels waited for the government effort to fail, and stepped in. Will the people thank the government for given them bread and blankets up to a point, or the rebels who came to their aid when they needed it most? The Pakistan government failed. That will be used as a yard stick to support the rebels, who after all are the people of the region. Pakistan is divided as never before. General Pervez Musharraf needs the United States to help rule his divided country. The killing of an al-Qaeda operative will not change the situation. How he died is not important. The people the Government could not help where the earthquake struck will join the war on terror on the side of the Muslims. The Government chap I saw frequently that I saw in the area frequently was the chap who accompanied me. That was in 1973. But I met Gulbudeen Hikmatiyar, the Afghan rebel leader but then a university student. The Pathans, both Hindus and Muslims, live by a simple code, and will be an intractable enemy if that is broken. It does not matter if the code breaker is a government or individual. The US does not understand this. Its supporters in Pakistan and Afghanistan believe they do not have to if they have the United States on their side.

THE MESS IN IRAQ today would not have happened if the United States had planned before Iraq was invaded. Their plans were of quislings, who were not given positions in the Iraqi government unless they held Western citizenship. In Australia, its citizens could not be in politics if they held dual citizenships. In Iraq, that was a necessity. Iraq had a working government, but that was destroyed for no reason than no planning. No one could be in the new government who held a Baathist Party membership. That restriction threw the experienced Sunnis out of the new Iraq. It was a precipe for disaster. The United States and those who followed it depended on quislings who had an agenda of their own, and who told lies without batting an eyelid. The United States was sucked into a quagmire. The Sunnis created an insurgency, knowing it would not be ruling power, and had no interest in a new Iraq. It got fighters from the Middle East, those who could not go back to their countries after fighting for the United States in Afghanistan against Russia. Osama bin Laden. a wealthy Saudi Arabian who is not allowed back, was, after all, once a CIA agent. So was Saddam Hussein, whose trial makes him a great figure in the Middle East each time the trial fumbles. And it has fumbled more often than not. The United States wants to hang him for what he did as a head of state. All his arguments are waved aside. They created a law that did not exist when he ordered the killing as head of state. The United States had, after all, supported Augustino Pinochet as president of Chile, and turned a blind eye when he allegedly committed the offenses for which he is now found guilty. The killings were done with United States connivance, in Iraq and Chile. The new circumstance in Iraq meant he would have to be killed.

But in this information war, the enemy is stupid, reacts to what the Americans do, and cannot think or act on their own. But they are not. The Americans thought Ho Chi Minh stupid. But and his advisers, one of whose books on guerilla warfare is taught in military schools in France and the United States. They blame them for not fighting set piece battles. But they will not. In guerila warfare, they fight when the enemy is not looking. Any damage it causes is victory for them. Ho Chi Minh wrote poetry in his free time while he was leading the guerilla warfare or as President of North Vietnam or as President of Vietnam. Osama bin Laden was a Saudi Arabian son of privilege who exchange a cave for a big house, and riches for poverty. He is obviously a strategist. The Americans recruited him to drive the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan, and gave him weapons and everything needed. But Osama had a different aim. And that aim he is perfecting. The more the West particularly the Americans blame him for their difficulty in Iraq or in the Middle East, the more his support grows. He remains intractibly opposed to the West, has touched base with the poor Muslims around the world in which the Muslim leaders are supportive of American global war on terrorism. Malaysia's rather harsh words on the bombing of Amman is a case in point.

The United States had the information war in its favour in Vietnam in the early stages. But it was the Vietcong and Vietminh who won. There was also discussion in Washington over whether the Vietminh controlled the Vietcong. It did not matter. Both were on the same side fighting the Americans and their cohorts. It was the only fight by proxies when the two giants of the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union, got involved in a fight. But the United States was not satisfied with proxy fighting, it wanted to, and got involved, in the fighting. South Vietnam was lost to North Vietnam. The Americans claim they won because they do business with Vietnam. But if business was the aim, they could have done it without losing a war. They have treated the war in Afghanistan as another war on terror. But it is bogged down there, as the Soviet Union was and the British before that. They happen to be Muslims, and so it is a war of terror. Whatever it says, it is bogged down in Afghanistan. To leave would be as dangerous as staying. The advisers in Washington have seen Iraq as similar to Afghanistan because Islam is the dominant religion. But as the Pakistani civil servant would tell you, it cannot rule the North West Frontier and the remote areas it look when it set the line of control in the dispute over Kashmir. There are periods when a strong government in Islamabad can estabish control in these areas, as President Ayub Khan, himself a Pathan from the North West Frontier, could. The Pathans have ruled in Afghanistan for about 150 years, and there is relative calm now because a Pathan is the West's blued eye boy President. But he still cannot leave his official residence without an escort, or leave Kabul by road. The Pathans – the Taliban (literally, the student) are from this group – will be an opposition if any group that it likes comes into power. The Taliban came to power in Afghanistan because the people it disliked, who were traditionally gardeners and cooks, came to power. Hamid Karzai is not only a Pathan, but from the ruling class, of the Populzai tribe. The United States probably did not chose him for his tribal connections, but the country is peaceful for who he is.

THE TELEVISION NETWORKS AND newspapers are all about the South Asian earthquake, a disaster engineered by nature. There is little talk now of the man-made disaster in Iraq. When it is all over, the man-made disasters will have killed more people than nature's. As it would be in Iraq and Afghanistan than in Pakistan. Those who are glued to television, as many Malaysians are these days, are shocked at the paucity of services in an emergency. But they say not a word about Iraq, where more people are dead or worse off than in South Asia, and the bombs have reduced to rubble what used to be pastiche of an European city in a way no natural disaster has. Imagine what would happen to Kuala Lumpur should it be reduced to rubble, either by nature or by man. The South Asian earthquake, the tragedy at New Orleons, the Guatemala earthquake show that if man continues to test nature, then the forces of nature would demand a catastrophic price. Man-made wars, as in Iraq, is to reduce potentially growing nations into rubble. The reasons may be justified, but the end result is the same. It is a question of power. Do we expect BBC or CNN to cover the ordinary people in Iraq who are made homeless, or cannot get a modicum of medical treatment? No, we don't. We expect either or both networks to show the power of the countries they represent. So it is Fallujah reduced to rubble, and no mention is made of the people made homeless in that town. We do not hear of the people forced to leave the town while CNN or BBC reports of another attack on the attacked town. But human beings are the same the world over. The refugee from Fallujah is no different from New Orleons or Balkot. The attention given to the South Asian earthquake and news elsewhere, particularly 'democratic' developments elsewhere, is due to difficulties the Americans face in Iraq over the referendum this weekend (October 15).

MGG Pillai, political commentator: I don't think it is. What has happened is that foreign countries have been involved in the development of Madrassas, especially since 1973 when the oil wealth gave many countries in the Middle East a lot of money, which they could throw around, and they bought support that way. At that time the western governments kept quiet about it. When the problem came in Afghanistan the government actively encouraged these Madrassas, not in the form of turning them around but in the form of doing exactly what they're doing. But these Madrassas had a very clear aim in what they wanted to do, and later on it turned round and bit the US on the hand, as you saw in Afghanistan and as we'll see in Iraq. Now the western government is trying to resolve the problem, but the problem is going to be very difficult to resolve because it comes with an agenda. And I don't think that is going to be acceptable, certainly not in Malaysia.

When this theory runs aground, as in Iraq and Afghanistan, it flounders to a degree that frightens the Orientalist. Osama bin Laden is criticised as a Muslim extremist, and his actions are poured on Islam. But is he not an extremist fighting to secure his space who happened to be a Muslim? Is it not strange that when Catholicism rears its ugly head in Northern Ireland, it is the Catholic extremists, not the Catholic religion, that is blamed. Could it not be so in Islam, or Hinduism, or Buddhism, or whatever?

The full story on it is not told yet. But in this west-dominated globalised world, only those who control information can make its voice heard. It decides on the spin, how it would be released, how the rest of the world would decide how and why the attack on Washington should be viewed. To buttress it, Afghanistan was first attacked, then Iraq, with Iran now in its sights. There is one common link with the trio: oil, with Afghanistan where a pipeline is to be installed to carry Central Asian oil to the warm waters of the Arabian sea in Pakistan; and Iran and Iraq are oil producers.

The Prime Minister, Dato' Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, and the Foreign Minister, Dato' Seri Syed Hamid Albar, insist there is no torture of ISA detainees. The deputy Internal Security Minister, Dato' Noh Omar, says he has visited the detainees, and they all told him that they have repented, and want nothing more than be reunited with their families. He says the recent allegation by suspected Islamic terrorists of torture is a desperate attempt to link their plight with those in Iraq and Afghanistan subject to brutal torture.

But that these photographs pose a political problem for the US adminstration is only to be expected. Washington conducts itself in wars as diverse as Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq with tremendous firepower and technological superiority that it comes to accept that this alone would freeze the enemy in its tracks. It does not. The America of the 21st century fights wars as kids play computer war games. Massive destruction is all they see, not the human tragedies that surrounds it: women, children, the aged and other non combatants killed in this orgy of destruction. But it forgot to factor in the human spirit. When the US destruction creates the havoc it does, those who live would take on the US soldiers on the ground. It happened in Vietnam, in Afghanistan, in every war of resistance, the retaliatory response as fearsome, it is one sign the US loses ground, the political and military if not the moral.

In this background, the violent riots and its aftermath is not unexpected. What is is how they are forcibly fit into the worldwide campaign on terror. We do not know if this is so, but it is now accepted, in the light of Iraq and Afghanistan, as yet another example of Muslim perfidy. What is curious is that neither Kuala Lumpur nor Bangkok thinks it is. The details of what happened is still obscure. Different spokesmen in Bangkok and in the four provinces give conflicting and contradictory accounts. What can be got is that the first clash between the Thai military and the Muslims happened when a soldier was shot dead in January. But there was a truce of sorts as leaders aligned to Bangkok and the Muslim community brought some measure of peace. And so it continued until last month, when a night club, just across the Golok River that separates the Malay states of southern Thailand and the Malaysian state of Kelantan. was set afire.

It turns out the two chiefs told a right royal fib aka a pack of lies. The Hong Kong seizure caught the Malaysians flatfooted. Why should it if all is above board? The unravelling started immediately. The Royal Malaysia Police's CID director, Dato' Musa Hassan, now confirms the machine guns were from the police armoury, bought half-a-century ago, and sold to a California firm which would sell them to collectors as antique weapons. Who authorised the sale? He does not say. Did the home and internal security ministries approve it? He does not say. Did the cabinet? He does not say. It is possible that the machine guns could have been ordered sold as the police upgraded its gunnery. But there is a problem. The consignment has enough guns to equip an army division. The guns are not antique. A machine gun first used in the Boer War at the turn of the 20th century was captured in Afghanistan in the 1990s. It had seen action in every major war in Europe, the Middle East and Africa before it landed in Afghanistan warlord's armoury. More important, how could the police sell off an armoury of a division without a corresponding purchase to replace it. Was this done? We have no record. Who authorised it? We do not know.

A case is built on British and US paranoia, this fear that Islamic militants and rulers they trained and paid to destroy the Soviet Union, could bite the hand that fed them. So Afghanistan is invaded. Iraq is invaded. The Muslim world is thrown awry. Washington and London seek a common link amongst especially Muslim countries who disagree with their plans to control the world and its oil. All it has done is to put all nations it regards as potential enemies at edge and, under pressure, agree with its global agenda; but with a citizenry hostile to the very idea. Neither Washington nor London understand the enemy they fight, but they are sure they can be contained. They believe that their enemies operate as they do, with computer graphs, long-term plans, detailed war plans, contingency planning, when as tribal societies, they dance to a different beat, linked only by a common enemy and sense of injustice, often working independently and without a central direction. When the dust clears, it could well be while Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda network took the blame for blowing up the World Trade Centre in New York and the Pentagon in Washington in 2001, an offshoot planned and executed it independently. But in the Western mind, that is impossible.

How did Washington get into this mess? Panic set in on the 11 September 2001 attacks on its financial and military nerve centres and - if the fourth plane had hits its target - the political centre, the White House. Every move at the time suggested it did not or could not think through. In confusion and fright, it insisted upon a policy of putting the Muslim in his place. But it did not know how to. It showed. It decided it was the Al-Qaeda network of its once-favourite terrorist, Osama bin Laden, and waged war in Afghanistan to teach him a lesson. It threw out the Taliban government in Kabul, installed an American citizen, Mr Hamid Karzai, as president and worked to turn Afghanistan into an American conclave. it does not understand the dynamics of Afghanistan. The superficial peace one is told Afghanistan is, is the quiet before the storm that must come. So in Iraq. Its first choice as Iraq's new leader, after the fall of Saddam, is another citizen, Mr Ahmad Chalabi. Washington wants to micromanage every aspect of life underf its control, only to lose sight of what it aims for. But at least it is in Afghanistan as an intervener in a local dispute, as in Vietnam, and therefore could bring the international community with it. It could not for its unilateral military invasion of Iraq. When it needs help, it is the enemy which gets it.

With PAS on one side fighting for an Islamic Wahabbi Shafiee state, and UMNO deciding it already is, neither can address the rights of women or modulate the harsh restrictions on women. The Malay cultural mileau gives women a higher role than Islam does, but the move to an Islamic state threatens to reduce that even further. The Taliban movement in Afghanistan is often cited as proof that Malaysian Islam is humane and not extreme. But the Taliban exists in a society where the tribal laws are stricter and harsher. To an Afghan, though not to President Bush or Dr Mahathir, the Taliban are modernists. One has to look at societies not from a Western or academic perspective but in the conditions of how it developed. But the globalisation of religion holds it to an alien standard which rides rough shod over local societies.

Underlying this is this unconscious fear of an international bully which capriciously targets those who do not fit into his blinkered worldview: Iraq, Syria, Iran, North Korea, Afghanistan, Myanmar, China, and any country that has cause to annoy its cosy simplistic solutions. For a variety of reasons, countries react in fear to the bully. The United States ambassador in Malaysia is, to all intents and purposes, a proconsul of that bully, issuing threats and warnings in public forums. Dr Mahathir in his 22 years in office have challenged this and so what caused this change of heart?

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