TIME magazine, fanned by jingoism in its backyard, decided "the person who most affect our lives, for good or ill" is not who is but who cleaned up after him. So, not Mr Osama Bin Laden, the alleged mastermind of the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington on 30 Sept 2001, but Mr Rudoph Giuliani, the mayor of New York, is its Man of the Year. And broke faith with the world. In the pantheon of Western catalogue of rogues -- or evil men, in President George Bush's view -- of the past century, Mr Bin Laden would join the likes of Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, King Leopold of the Belgians, not for the evil ascribed to them, but to what they spawned. The world was never the same after they died; nor is after Mr Osama Bin Laden's.

The Great Game is alive and well, with Afghanistan still the pawn. The Taliban, and Mr Osama Bin Laden, once had no stronger backer than the United States, but she shifted her loyalties to the Northern Alliance when she could not have its way and after four jetliners caused so much havoc in the United States three months ago. Now she mounts an Anglo-Saxon war machine, with an arm-twisted international coalition behind her, causes even more disruption, damage and deaths, insists she alone is right, and her cause just.

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.

Last week, this table became an issue. The former chairman of the National Front backbenchers' club, Dato' Ruhanie Ahmad, accused the NST of being an opposition backer. This is like calling Osama Bin Laden a strong backer of the United States. The NST, noted for its deaden coverage of issues, in which anything of interest is rigorously scrubbed out, took issue, and for two days defended itself in the fawning way it is noted for when it takes issue with National Front MPs.

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.

The NA is not involved in hosting terror groups, the Taliban is. Because the Taliban, with armed forces like Mr Osama Bin Laden and his Al-Qaeda group, the Pakistan "occupying force", and receive "orders and instructions" from Pakistan "fanatics". The Taliban, therefore, are "criminals in accordance with the provisions of the Afghan criminal code (1974). Further, "they have committed high treason and they would be tried and punished "in due process of law inside Afghanistan." At least, Malaysia at least knows why the Anglo-American aerial bombardment goes on relentlessly: it is to ensure the Taliban is brought to justice under the AFghan criminal code. Why then is the Pentagon and Whitehall briefings ignore this important fact in their daily briefings? What are Washington and London so queasy of bringing into power these paragons of human rights and justice as the Islamic state of Afghanistan claims it is?

The usual suspects are offered: Iraq, Syria, Libya, Osama Bin Laden and his Al-Qaeda network, anyone who could feed the official frenzy of the war against terrorism.

The line they drew on the rugged hills of Afghanistan to force the Taleban to vomit Osama Bin Laden into the American lap is as unworkable as Mr Durand's more than a century ago which separated Afghanistan from British India.

So, when Mr Osama Bin Laden delivered the tape to the Al Jazeera television correspondent in Kabul, the element of surprise Washington had thought it had disappeared. And when he had his uninterrupted view in the Middle East of what he thought of all this Christian madness, the battle was lost. Now, no matter what is achieved in this precision bombing -- official post-Gulf War investigations by the Pentagon showed that 70 per cent of the super-secret, super-accurate Patriot missiles could not stop the Scud missiles that Iraq lobbed at Israel; we must assume that the weapons used now would be as claimed and with the same effectiveness -- the battle for the hearts and minds of the Middle East is lost. The bombardment of Afghanistan, with the additional misery and wretchedness this brought about, would be another bone of contention in this millennial Crusade.

AND SO THE predicted, expected, hoped-for air war over Afghanistan has begun. President Bush had raised the ante since the 11 September attack on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, demanding that Afghanistan give up the suspected mastermind, Mr Osama Bin Laden, in a televised show of force which no self-respecting group could obey. President George Bush, Sr, wanted Iraq to cave in to US demands humiliatingly; he did not, and Iraq was engulfed in the Gulf War in which the United States could not bomb it into submission. Nato, with US support, wanted Serbia to cave in; when she refused, she was bombed. And now Afghanistan.

Why, they ask, should Muslims in Indonesia threaten jihad when Washington threatens to invade Afghanistan to capture the man now widely believed, still without proof, to be the mastermind, Osama Bin Laden? They do not want to know the whys and the wherefores of the terrorist attacks, only that it is Islam, in its terrifying fury, putting the world on notice. Why is Islam responding in fury? PAS did not help. It kept quiet at first, before a tepid response which suggests internal dissension on how to deal with this worldwide focus on Islam that shows its downside than its strengths. However moderate its public posture, its dark side emerges when Islam is perceived to be under attack. So, does an Islamic state also mean constant dislocation when Islam is perceived to be in danger in countries far removed from Malaysia?

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.

One letter was so sure that the Crusades was over and that in this modern world, different conditions apply. No doubt this is why President Bush called his pseudo "At War" declaration a Crusade, and go after the enemy as the Crusades did Muslims. Another questioned my reference to Osama Bin Laden as an American target.

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