For Afghanistan and the United States, the quagmire begins anew

The immediate reaction is to isolate Muslims in Muslim and non-Muslim countries alike. Leaders pushed to the wall, as the Malaysian prime minister, Dato' Seri Mahathir Mohamed, reacted in panache to isolate the Islamic political constituency backing the opposition Parti Islam Malaysia (PAS) and those backing it into an unacceptable corner. The jailed former deputy prime minister, Dato' Seri Anwar Ibrahim, is isolated from his supporters in the United States, after the US government swung support to Dr Mahathir.

The Malaysian government is ecstatic the United States at last heeds its advise that only third-degree methods under the most odious and unconstitutional of laws could fight terror. This is what we are told to explain away Malaysia's closeness to the United States in recent months, especially since September 11.

The Malaysian government is ecstatic the United States at last heeds its advise that only third-degree methods under the most odious and unconstitutional of laws could fight terror. This is what we are told to explain away Malaysia's closeness to the United States in recent months, especially since September 11.

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 defence minister, and the man the Prime Minister would rather have as his successor, Dato' Seri Najib Tun Razak, made a curious announcement shortly after the Lima defence show was over this month: Malaysia would buy main military tanks. It was not explained what this meant, nor why, nor what it cost, nor even if they were suitable for the tropical forests in which they would operate. But the main battle tanks he talks about are heavy-duty and heavy tanks for offence for use in a terrain Malaysia does not have. The United States have the A-1 M-1 Abrams tanks and the Russians the T-72. Neither can stand up to the rigours of the tropical jungles in Malaysia. So, why is Malaysia interested in main battle tanks that is of no use? Tanks are offensive weapons, for attack than defence. Who is then the enemy? Is it Singapore or Thailand? And how was the decision arrived at?

The news these days from the United States is the war in Afghanistan and the anthrax scare that forces even Congress to shut down. One feeds on the other, with Washington not unhappy.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The United States could not destroy Fidel Castro, Saddam Hussein, Ho Chi Minh; it had better Osama Bin Laden if it wants its reputation in the Middle East to be other than as a staunch ally of Israel.

The focus shifts in the United States from the carnage and horror of the terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington DC to what should now be done. It is more of less accepted as an article of faith that it was Osama ben Ladin who perpetrated this horror, the US Congress and Senate now look to see how he could be snared without loss of American life.

How President Bush reacts to the Pentagon and World Trade Centre terrorist attacks is how President Saddam Hussein did when the president's father, George Bush, Sr. attacked Iraq ten years earlier. Then it was the United States which gloated and the Arabs cried. But it was tit for tat. Now it is the other way around.

Four planes hijacked by unknown terrorists yesterday crashed into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York's financial disctrict in Lower Manhattan and the Pentagon in Washington DC; the fourth, heading for Washington, crashed in Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania, apparently shot down. More serious than the deaths and injured is the brilliant organisation that went into it, taking the United States by surprise and hurt pride. Several hundreds are killed, but the death toll could eventually be in the thousands.

So, Dato' Seri Anwar Ibrahim is investigated but not ..., oh well, never mind. Long years in office encourages corruption, especially if it is in the same ministry. The late Tun Sardon Jubir, an UMNO stalwart who after years in the cabinet went on to be Malaysian ambassador to the United Nations and United States and governor of Penang, once told me he retired when his UMNO division in Johore wanted him to resign because he was preventing others in his division from making money. It is the march of the times. Corruption is more insidious now than it ever was. But no one, not even the Prime Minister, would address it as he should. Politics is turned upside down that if a high ranking official is charged or investigated for corruption, it is a sign he is no longer in political odour with the UMNO president. His former deputy would give you chapter and worse on that.

So, it raises an interesting conundrum. Are the detentions to show the United States it is firm about fundamentalist Islam if it rears its head in Malaysia? Or to show that while it must, for political reasons, move towards a clear Islamic presence in his administration, it has no truck with fundamentalist Islam? Or are the detentions to cock a snook at Western Europe and the United States to declare that it would do as it pleased, come hell or high water.

The Indian Prime Minister, Mr Atal Bihari Vajpayee, left Kuala Lumpur after a four-day official visit with a mixed bag of results. He did not get what he wanted, the inherent suspicions of New Delhi as potent as it ever was, despite exchanging its "role as the Soviet pointman in Asia to that of a United States satrap", a senior Malaysian diplomat said. In bilateral discussions, nothing much of significance emerged. Numerous MOUs (memoranda of understanding) were signed between Indian and Malaysian companies, but they mean nothing: it is an unenforceable agreement to talk about future business.

The Indian Prime Minister, Mr Atal Bihari Vajpayee, left Kuala Lumpur after a four-day official visit with a mixed bag of results. He did not get what he wanted, the inherent suspicions of New Delhi as potent as it ever was, despite exchanging its "role as the Soviet pointman in Asia to that of a United States satrap", a senior Malaysian diplomat said. In bilateral discussions, nothing much of significance emerged. Numerous MOUs (memoranda of understanding) were signed between Indian and Malaysian companies, but they mean nothing: it is an unenforceable agreement to talk about future business.

At one time, UMNO and the National Front had the political support to force their way through. Not any more. A generation had grown up in the slumps, know no other life, and the bright light outside their doorstep unconsciously builds up internal resentment. When they are also ignored, not given basic amenities, it adds up. Malaysians are quick to blame the United States when race riots break out. But what happens there is what has happened in Petaling Jaya. The blacks live in slums and generally they are as bad and as worse as the worst of them in Malaysia. The same frame that caused the riots there cause it here as well. Neglect breeds contempt and anger. And all it needs is a spark to make nonsense of multiracial unity and diversity.

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