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 DEPUTY INTERNAL SECURITY minister, Dato, Noh Omar, goes about with state secrets in his pocket (The Star, 14 October 2004, Nation, p27). He has the full run of secrets in his ministry, but he is a bit lost because Malaysians do not understand his role in keeping this nation safe from the likes of Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, Jemaah Islamiyah, Party SeIslam Malaysia (PAS), Democratic Action Party (DAP), Parti Keadilan Rakyat (KeADILan), Dato' Seri Anwar Ibrahim, corrupt police men. He is the point man in this eternal battle; his minister doubles up as prime minister and finance minister, and is otherwise involved in other issues. There is therefore no one left to mind the internal security store. Yet UMNO and Malaysia are ungrateful, and do not recognise his talents.

But the Malay ground is also divided over the Islamic state: the BN and PAS has its own view of it, although it turns out it is not in the essentials but in how fast it would be implemented that divides the two. This divide is fierce enough. To this must be added the political divide this general election caused. There is an unmentioned presumption: for BN and Pak Lah to survive in the larger world outside, as a footsoldier in the war on terror, they must firmly and irrevocably consign PAS and its presumed Taliban objectives firmly into the political void. That he has. With a little help from Uncle Sam. Pakistan is firmly in the US orbit as a quid pro quo to Pervez Musharraf being off the hook for not prosecuting, and persecuting, its national hero, Dr A.Q. Khan, for his role in exporting nuclear technology to Muslim countries. Is there a similar plan in place for Malaysia and Pak Lah over one digit in that larger Khan plan, his son's SCOMI plant in Shah Alam which built centrifuge parts to Dr Khan's design?

These polls, on hindsight, suggests only that it was part of the larger plan to hijack the four Malay states. Should international opposition to what happen surface, Malaysia now has "independent" polls, in a format the Westerners can understand, to divert criticism. That criticism would not come now: the Opposition PAS, in the worldview of those on the side of might and right, is more closely alighned to the Taliban than democracy. So, it is all right to defeat them by fair means and foul.

The 1998 Anwar affair revealed a stark truth. The opposition to BN would, from now on, come not from the Chinese-based and ideologically different political parties, but from the Malay political parties and organisations that disagrees with its worldview. This is reflected in those detained under the Internal Security Act: all, but for a handful, are Malays regarded in Putra Jaya as on the wrong side of the fence. The BN government is caught in a vice about them: several are on a hunger strike, sustained only with water, but it is so serious that they are forcibly removed to hospital to be force-fed. Little is reported in the mainstream media it controls, especially during the election campaign. But it is a live issue, like the Anwar affair, in the Malay heartland. The issue is their detention for alleged links with the Taliban and other far-right Muslim groups, especially after the son of the prime minister, Dato' Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, is cleared of all wrong doing in making centrifuge parts for nuclear weapons in a company he controlled. What is sauce for the goose should be sauce for the gander. But not in Malaysia. Here Napolean, as in George Orwell's Animal Farm, will always be better treated than Snowball.

The Malaysian police is critical of Mr Tahir's involvement, but insists he is not in its custody, and that he is in Kuala Lumpur. His wife, the daughter of a retired Malaysian diplomat, does not know where he is. Pak Lah last week even pooh-poohed the foreign reports that he is in detention. He is not, he averred. If he is not, he ought to be. In matters of national security, and this is clearly one, the principle of strict liability applies. This is looked at in the global war on terror. There is no difference in law between what Mr Kamaluddin and Mr Tahir did and what the Kelantan mentri besar, Tok Guru Nik Aziz Nik Mat's son, and several others detained under the Internal Security Act for alleged involvement with the Taliban during their period of study in Pakistan. Both compromise national security if the charges against them are true. One is treated with kid gloves, and the other not. Why? If the centrifuge parts were made by an unknown company and without the knowledge of the government, several would by now be detained under the ISA.

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.

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.

If anything undermined Western confidence in the past two decades, it is the Iran revolution, the Afghanistan regime under the Taliban, the Iraq regime under President Saddam Hussein, the isolationist North Korean regime. Add to this the attacks on the Pentagon and the Twin Towers in New York, and the rise of virulent Islamic groups, and for the first time in centuries there is a deliberate and systematic challenge to Western hegemony. It is run as a collective hurt, one the West does not understand, and which it insists on cataloguing, often irrelevantly, into easily digestible intellectual pigeonholes. But the United States can forget about pulling its troops in Iraq for, let us say, Christmas, ten years hence. It begins to make the mistakes it made aplenty in Vietnam. It does not begin to understand what makes Iraq tick, that democracy cannot be imposed in chaos. Afghanistan, for all its hype, is led by an American citizen and forced upon the people. So would Iraq if the Pentagon had its way.

That had, in other words, to destroy Iraq in order to save it. It had done that twice in the past: in Japan and in Afghanistan. In Japan, the United States wisely worked with the existing regime, the changes made acceptabed because of the ingrained Buddhist belief in bowing down to the victor. That helped the US along but that is changing. The Japan today is more confident and assertive now because the policy makers, born after the San Francisco Treaty in 1953, which formally ended the war with Japan, have no mental baggage of Buddhist subservience to the United States. In Afghanistan, it went in to destroy the government led by its proteges, the Taliban, bombed the country with such bombs that decades after, children would be destroyed by it, put a puppet administration in place, and left. In Iraq, it would have to stay, whether it likes to or not, and face constant antagonism from the people.

When one side decides civilians from the enemy is far game, one should not be surprised if the enemy pays back in the same coin. If the terrorists are as brutal and cavalier, those they target are no less brutal and cavalier. So, when Washington, and now Australia, decides it will strike its neighbours at will for harbouring terrorists and terrorist gangs, with Mr Howard making the horrifying suggestion the UN Charter be amended to allow it, all it guarantees is more terror in retaliation. For Washington and its satraps look upon terror they now fight as a well-organised irregular movement, when in reality they are so different in outlook or aims, and are linked not to a global idea but for their local agendas. However brilliant and murderous the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka, it has nothing in common with this global war on terror. Nor the guerrillas of Kashmir. Nor even the Talibans in Afghanistan. But an effort is made to link them, and there is where it all comes unstuck. The Bali and Mombassa bombings were quickly blamed on Mr Osama bin Laden, but up to now, only suppositions and the questionable deductions of anti-terror experts are the only proof we have.

Canberra and Kuala Lumpur react in panic, find the Islamic agenda to turn South east Asia into one large contiguous Islamic ummah (community), which both after a fashion backed, now comes to haunt them. Both supported radical Muslim organisations in Southeast Asia and Washington's agenda of using fundamentalist Muslim clerics as the Taliban to destroy the Russian occupation of Afghanistan and the massive modernisation it had put in place there. The United States is in charge in Afghanistan, and forces through the same modernisation that Moscow put in place, and faces opposition from the very groups it once backed. And it gets worse as Washington takes its battle to the world, insisting Muslims are the enemy. Likewise, its satraps around the world, as Dr Mahathir in Kuala Lumpur and Mr John Howard in Australia, are only too quick to turn their venom on those they once nurtured and cultivated. And run into heavy opposition.

The world's solitary global superpower believes only in behaving like one, and is peeved when it is second guessed, be it from France, Iraq or North Korea. What Washington set out to do in this war on terror, it failed miserably. It could caputre neither Osama bin Laden nor Mullah Omar. It does not matter if either is alive or dead, but what they left behind, the Al Qaeda network and the Taliban, are very much alive to give the Washington superhawks insomnia. Russia, on the other hand, decides on a scorched earth policy to rein in the Chechen rebels in a dispute that is 150 years old over a national homeland. But because the Chechens and Chechnya are Muslim, it is conveniently linked to this global war on terror as, for example, Kashmir is. But both, like Northern Ireland, are not religious wars but for a homeland in which religion -- Islam in Kashmir and Chechnya, Roman Catholicism in Northern Irealand -- but when Muslims irredentists are involved, what caused the problem is ignored.

The Prime Minister, Dato' Seri Mahathir Mohamed, said in New Delhi on 18 October 2002, Malaysia could be the next target following bombings in Bali and the Philippines. He has reason to worry. And he cannot rein in journalists overseas as he can in Malaysia, and he has to answer questiolns lobbed at him. Malaysia supports the United States in the latter's global war against terror, and Al Qaeda. She targets Malaysian groups whom she accuses of having trained in Afghanistan when it was ruled by the Taliban. He does not mention his government once encouraged to do so. He told a news conference during a lightning visit to the Indian capital that "terrorists respect no borders. They can operate in any country. Even the countries least involved might find themselves targets of terrorist attacks."

No one asks why the Bali bombings happened. But all are quick to link it with the global enemy of choice: Osama and his ubiquitous Al Qaeda. But people are arrested today for their involvement with Osama bin Laden and his network at a time when they were bankrolled by Washington and the CIA. As recently as 1999, the State Department, in a Congressional hearing, described the Taliban not as fundamentalist Muslims but as conservative Muslims it could deal with. Yet two years later they had to be destroyed as Washington perfected its 'regime change' model. In the 1980s, the US backed Osama bin Laden and his fundamentalist crusade so they could be unleashed on the Russians in Afghanistan. When he and his organisation turned their fundamentalism on the US, they became the ultimate evil. But as you sow, so you reap. Suddenly, the officially-encouraged activities that led many a Malaysian Muslim to cavort with the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan at the time when Washington approved it, to detention under the Internal Security Act when they became the enemy. As others elsewhere in the region.

The US went to war with terror when it bombed Afghanistan a year ago. It is still there, mired deeply into a quagmire as surely as the British and the Soviet Union before it. The Taliban and Al Qaida remain potent threats to Afghanistan, Pakistan and US interests. The Pakistan elections over the weekend put all three on notice. How else could the strong showing of the fundamentalist Muslim parties be looked at?

In Malaysia, Dr Mahathir is reduced to intrude his prejudice about beards into his sanity, and act promptly, more in fear and political expediency, so his governance continues to be unchallenged. Yet his phobia for beards is of recent vintage: as a medical officer in Langkawi in the 1950s, he sported a beard which would have made the Taliban supreme leader, Mullah Omar, proud. That many of his political opponents, in PAS and Keadilan and even DAP, -- and some critics too: I sport a full flowing now white beard! -- could account for his aversion ...

So, Malaysia is praised for its regular elections, the citizen knows what happens should he voice an opinion critical of the government. The ubiquitous Internal Security Act ensures it. It is used often capriciously to warn the citizen of the dangers of talking out of turn or espousing a view the government finds unnerving. Now the focus is on the Taliban clones in Malaysian politics, diverting the issue from Malaysia's own involvement with the Al-Qaeda network to internal groups wanting to overturn the government by force. The aim of the BN is to remain in power at whatever cost. Its commitment to democracy is so it can be in power on its own terms. What unsettles in Malaysia is that the opposition is better organised and prepared to challenge the BN on its terms. And the BN finds it unnerving.

The news out of Afghanistan now reminds one of news out of Moscow of its adventure in this blessed land: the supreme confidence and belief it turned the corner enroute to civilisation for these 'barbarians'. But this confidence and belief is inverse to ground reality. The Afghan regards the United States as it once did the Soviet Union and, lest we forget, the United Kingdom: a foreign power who should be made to pay for daring to colonise it. There is, in Afghan eyes, no difference between the Moscow-protected Babrak Karmal or Dr Najibullah and the Washington-protected Hamid Karzai. When Washington recently took over the security of its protege, Mr Karzai, the battle is lost. All Afghans now only need do is to force the United States into a never-ending quagmire, as they Britain during the Great Game in the 19th and 20th centuries. The recent attempt on Mr Karzai's life in Kandahar is but the first salvo. There would be more. And a new enemy. With Mullah Omar and his Taliban disappearing into their tribal heartlands, the new enemy is its old friend, Gulbudeen Hekmatyar, building a new crusade against the new invader.

Haji Qadir's death could not have come at a worse time. The US-dominated Western alliance in Afghanistan is blotting its copybook by the day. Indiscriminate bombing and gunship attacks on isolated villages, on faulty intelligence and justifying what happened, puts pressure on the Hamid Karzai administration. It makes inevitable an internecine civil war when the international peace keeping force is withdrawn, as it must. Like the British and the Russians, the United States intervened in a local conflict, Washington by siding with the Tajib-Uzbek coalition called the Northern Alliance against the Pathan-dominated Taliban regime.

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