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.

An organisation must reorient itself to make it relevant. The United Nations is dead, ever since the United States took it as an extension of its foreign policy when it liked, and attacked when it did not coincide. It is regarded around the world as an organisation of substance, but it has failed perhaps for 40 years. The Non-Aligned Nations, which Pak Lah is the current president, lost its importance once the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union ended. It should have revitalised itself into a third force, but it did not. It was once important. The prime movers of the body was President Gamel Abdel Nasser of Egypt, President Sukarno of Indonesia, President Tito of Yugoslavia in Djakarta in 1955. Hovering in the wings was Prime Minister Jawaharlal of India, Prime Minister Kwama Nkrumah of Ghana, Prime Minister Ahmed Ben Bella of Algeria, President Haib Bourghiba of Tunusia, and others. The deaths of the founders did not cease its relevance. But the leaders of non- alighnment when the Soviet Union cracked up did not reorient the Non- Alignment Movement, and it now is of no importance. And so it is with ASEAN.

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 US wants to spread its influence in the Middle East. It gains that influence by talking of, for example, democracy at home and corruption at the target country which can take many forms. It bribed the senior advisers of the Shah of Iran with residences in the US and with money, but when the crunch came, even the Shah was not allowed in the United States. Iran is now an Islamic state, Shi'ite, and one of the countries the Americans want to control. It was the time of the Cold War, and it wanted countries on its side in the Great Battle with the hated Soviet Union. So all this was fair game. And it sang its praises by favourable press notices. The conduit was news organisations, mostly Western but Third World as well. The information war was won by the US because it had the most resources. A continuing gripe in the 1960s of US foreign service officers was the growing influence in the region of Agence France Presse, the French news agency. Now that the Cold War is over, its new enemy is Islam. But it and the West uses Cold War officers to fight the battle, and fall flat. The difference is education. The farmers children in the Third World are educated. Those who were educated in the Soviet Union were derided in the Free World and those educated in the best universities of the Free World were given pride of place. But they got education, and they learned to think. Some found that the United States was superior to the others, while others thought that all foreign imperialisms were a menace to their countries. In the Cold War, there was the cushion for either the United States or the Soviet Union of the Non-Aligned bloc. But post-Cold War, there is no cushion. In the Cold War period, a meeting with the Soviet Union and the United States ambassadors at a neutral country can affect the war in Vietnam. Not now. Not yet. The Muslims all over the world are angry. And the enemy to the West comes from every where not just in the Middle East. So the war in Iraq has its effect in southern Thailand or Mindanao. The governments of Thailand and the Philippines have to take up the cudgels to prevent the Islamic insurgency from boiling over.

Vietnam was a proxy war of the Cold War giants, the United States and the Soviet Union. To Washington it was a civilising mission, as in Iraq now, and made mistakes galore to a military end it cannot win. The United States is in Iraq for the geostrategic control of oil and its geopolitical control of the Middle East. In Vietnam, it was to best Moscow and keep South Vietnam firmly in the hands of what was touted then as the free world. If you look deep into it, the underlying raison d'etre for the two wars are based on the belief that nations which do not imbibe the Judea-Christian civilisation, especially if they are not Caucasian by anthropological definition, have no place in this new world.

But if a foreign government out of the pale, say in the Middle East or Afghanistan or an enemy in the ubiquitous US-UK war on terror, or before the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989, were to announce election results as Pak Lah's, it would have been subject to global sanctions, with smug and self-serving editorials, even in the New Straits Times and the Star, of how this electoral atrocity is proof the systems it represents is hell.

POLITICIANS THE WORLD OVER are firm on the idea of democracy as an ideal, but not the messy elections that could give them nasty surprises. It does not matter where they are from: the United States, the United Kingdom, Iraq, Iran, the Soviet Union, Malaysia, Singapore, Zimbabwe, India. They spout the same slogans and political beliefs. twist the law and language to their advantage, and sulk when the result is not what they bargained for.

But nuclear peace will come when more countries have nuclear weapons so that it would not be used unilaterally. Let us not forget the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Japan, not Germany, to tell the Soviet Union it has the atom bomb. Would it have used it if the Soviet Union had it too at the time? I doubt it. So now. The US can use depleted uranium cased shells in Iraq, because Iraq and its backers do not have the wherewithal to create problems for US troops in other hotspots. Why should Malaysia then be defensive about its interest in acquiring nuclear technology? The difficulty is that Malaysia went into it piece-meal, piggybacking on others in secret, denying it when found out, and surrounds itself in confusion. When there is only hegemon, all countries shiver when Washington targets it. No one stands up to question it. One who did was Tun Mahathir Mohamed. But he is retired. And he did not leave his thoughts behind as policy. So Pak Lah is left clueless and caught even more flatfooted because his son's company is involved. Malaysia is caught in this conundrum because it looks to the US to act the Islamic fundamentalists in the country so the National Front (BN) government can continue in power. It runs with the hounds and, sometimes, with the hares.

Let us look at the state of play in South Asia at the turn of the millennium. Washington shifted its support from Islamabad to New Delhi, forcing Pakistan leaders to justify what it was once taken for granted. Afghanistan was firmly in Western hands, the last victory of the Cold War, the Taliban, supported no doubt at Washington's request but which it continued after the war. The rise of the Muslim parties threw Washington's goodwill in Islamabad at risk. The destruction of the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon in 2001 changed the confrontational world view from the Soviet Union and communism to Islam and Osama bin Laden. But on the basis of what is known, or rather published, it does appear that Dr Khan's activities could not have gone the way it did if it was not approved. The Pakistan armed forces is in control of its nuclear weapons programme. It would not allow a rogue scientist of even national acclaim to do what Dr Khan did. It did not. He was forced to take the blame, but for one who, if the charges against him are true, is guilty of treason is let off with a light slap on his wrist. There is more to it than meets the eye. Dr Khan could not have sold his wares to North Korea without official authority, even if it is for the money it would bring in.

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.

It is like no other Washington has faced. Except perhaps in its fight for independence against the British in the 18th century. it ignored one important principle: that one would fight to the death for one's country even if it is ruled by a tyrant. In the Second World War, when Germany attacked the Soviet Union, the people, who had no love lost for its tyrant, Josef Stalin, nevertheless fought to throw out the invader. Washington can rant and rail for all it likes, but the Iraqi is not about to give it an easy ride. The defiance and the obvious disarray in Washinton has energised the Muslim not only in the Muslim world but worldwide, already smarting President Bush's war on terror. The most sophisticated society in the Middle East is now turned into a religious battleground to oust an occupation force. He knows Washington is on the run, and piles on the pressure.

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