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As allied forces narrow their hunt for Osama bin Laden, the broader mission is creating a stable, secure Afghanistan. That will take time and resources, but President Bush can start now by drawing on one of .the most effective, cost-efficient weapons in the fight against poverty: Providing very small business loans to the poorest people -- especially women --through microlending.

Fortune 500 companies may not be lining up to do business in war-ravaged Afghanistan, but there is still businesses to be done. Like much of the developing world, Afghanistan has a well-established, yet informal, economy of street vendors, neighborhood shops and cottage industries. Small loans go a long way. Just $50, for example, could buy a used refrigerator to keep a vendor’s produce fresh, a used sewing machine to make stitches go faster or a bicycle to deliver goods. Tiny transactions like these are part of a proven strategy of poverty reduction. Across the globe, 25 million microentrepreneurs are using loans of very small amounts to increase their incomes and lift their communities.

Microfinance has worked well in war-torn areas. Within nine months of the start of a microlending effort in Kosovo's hardest-hit areas, 1,500 mlcroentrepreneurs were in business and paying their loans back on time at an incredible rate of 99 percent. In El Salvador, recovering from the effects of civil war and then devastating hurricanes, microfinance institutions are now making more business loans than commercial banks.

Microfinancing serves both men and women, but all around the world, it focuses especially on women’s business development, because helping women helps children. One group that can benefit greatly in Afghanistan, for example, is the many women who have become the sole support of their children after years of war. Afghan women and men need the access to microfinance to build something better.

While I served at the Small Business Administration, our own domestic microenterprise initiative grew to a permanent program. With average loans of $10,000, Americans with ideas and initiative but no credit history have been able to start thousands of businesses providing services from day care to gardening to travel arrangements. As small businesses were established, poor communities were strengthened.

Worldwide, the demand for microcro-credit keeps growing far faster than the funds available for it. Despite increased microlending support in recent years, the World Bank estimates nearly half a billion microentrepreners have no ability to get financial accesss. Many are forced to turn to loan sharks, who may charge interest of as much as 10 percent a day.

Microfinance is clearly good development policy, but it is also good security policy. Microenterprise assistance won’t end the threat of terrorism, but it is a down payment on building stronger economies and more stable societies..

As Congress considers legislation to renew international microcredit assistance, the president should raise our investment to $500 million in annual aid from the current $150 million. Unlike other foreign aid, this is a renewable resource; as one family repays a loan, another receives one, multiplying the impact thousands of times over.

The World Bank should also do more. Today less than one penny out of every World Bank dollar is devoted to microlending. The bank should reform its charter to allow it to provide direct financing to microfinance institutions. The United States should also urge other wealthy nations to increase their contributions and include microfinance on the agenda of upcoming meetings of the G-7 group of industrial nations and the World Trade Organization.

We need to update our thinking about helping the world’s poor. Everyone knows the adage that says, "If you teach a person to fish. . ." But in Afghanistan and throughout the developing world, people already know how to fish and farm and make and sell all kinds of goods and services. They need capita1 to invest in what they know. And that investment will pay dividends for us all.

The day that the Secretary of Defense left for the Middle East and Central Asia, I spent a morning with John McWethy. One of the senior reporters on the Pentagon beat, McWethy, fifty-four, works out of a windowless cubicle that he shares with Barbara Starr, anABC News producer who does radio. The office measures approximately eight feet by eight feet, the size of the cage at a parking garage, which it greatly resembles, with the addition of the dark institutional carpet that runs up the walls. Stuffed with books, papers, television monitors, and broadcast equipment, the office gives the two of them just enough room to work at their desks while sitting back-to-back. Fluorescent light pours into the room from a boxlike plastic fixture. It’s government-issue light, the kind you might see inside a big-city courtroom in the middle of December.

[Samuels asks McWethy for an assessment of Secretary Rumsfeld]

"He’s so absolutely . . . I don’t know how to say this," McWethy says, when I ask him about Rumsfeld. He pauses. "He has a passion for secrecy," he finally says, "and he is absolutely unforgiving and unrelenting on this issue." Not only has Rumsfeld threatened sources with legal prosecution, from the Briefing Room podium, on national television, he notes, but the Pentagon also refuses to confirm or deny much of the information that reporters do manage to find out, thus ensuring that the news that does reach the public is often riddled with guesswork and error.

"You’ve already seen disinformation created by this policy," he says, referring to rumors of a deployment of F-15 fighter planes to the Middle East, which turned out to be false. Refusing to answer reporters’ questions, he says, is hardly compelled by a desire to protect the lives of American troops.

"I think it’s nonsense," he says flatly. In recent off-the-record meetings with the Secretary, he adds, reporters aired their concerns about the effects of the department’s policy for the second or third time this month. "I think he was delighted to hear the effect of his edicts," he says. In the talks that McWethy gives at the Naval Academy, he adds, he has noticed how often the cadets make reference to "the Vietnam effect," a phrase that implies, in so many words, that the press was responsible for losing that war.

"What they seem not to understand is that we were being lied to at the highest levels of government," McWethy continues. "This terrible breach of trust . . ."

***

The effect of this attitude on the psyches of even the most experienced reporters is easy to spot. In the middle of the afternoon, on the fourth day of the American bombing campaign in Afghanistan, David Martin, fifty-eight, the correspondent for CBS, is sitting alone in the dark. His office is larger than McWethy’s, and it has a window: the sun is blocked out by a plastic shade.

It makes sense that Martin might be depressed. The job he does now is no longer the same as the job he was hired to do. Like McWethy, Martin belongs to an older generation of reporters who imagined that television would provide them with a way to reach tens of millions of people with stories that shed real and necessary light on the actions of their government. (The evidence of the nineties suggests that the networks are no longer interested in reporting the news. By cutting news budgets year after year, and by eliminating investigative and foreign reporting in favor of the serial dramas of 0. J. Simpson, Jon-Benet Ramsey, and Monica Lewinsky, the networks have succeeded in transforming "news" into yet another shabby subdivision of the Magic Kingdom. The networks now have little choice but to treat the war as a dramatic entertainment, rather than as an occasion for asking the larger and subtler questions that need to be asked.)

***

I talk to CNN’s regular Pentagon team, Jamie McIntyre and Christopher Plante, whose sunny, capacious surroundings say all one needs to know about the relative importance of the networks and instant news: the total square footage of the CNN office is roughly equal to that of ABC, NBC, and CBS combined.

"The first ‘N’ stands for ‘news," says Plante, gesturing toward the network logo with his thumb, "as opposed to the domestic entertainment networks down the hall."

Plante is shooting down a rumor that originated on debka.com, a website that offers actual reporting on troop movements, intelligence agencies, and the motivations for actions by foreign governments. "Major portions of this story," he remarks, "will be impossible to verify and impossible to report." Still, he adds, he is quite satisfied with the product that CNN is putting on the air.

"The guys down the hail do one show a night," he explains. "They do one small package. They know what we have, because they’re watching us all day long. Our mission is to leave them with nothing at the end of each and every day."

There’s plenty of nothing at the Pentagon. As the sun sinks below the highway, Charlie Aldinger is sitting in the press room, talking to the Reuters Washington desk. "When in doubt, fudge," he says. "You got that?" The rank of senior Pentagon correspondent is not without its privileges; his cubicle adjoins a large window.

"The man was in a lot of trouble before the war came along," he says, using his pointer finger to indicate the man upstairs. "He staked it all on missile defense, then the tax cut eliminated the surplus." Back then, he says, Rumsfeld’s relationship with the press was poor.

"There was the sense that he didn’t have time for the press and that he didn’t give a rat’s ass about the press," he explains. His conclusion is simple:

"The war saved the man."

But what about the press?

***

[Samuels talks with the "oldest living reporter at the Pentagon" -- ninety-one year old Raymond Cromley.] The hour is getting late, so I ask him if he can sum up all that he has learned in a few simple sentences. He is happy to oblige.

Down the Corridor, the Fox News guys are preparing for their seven o’clock hit.

A line of black-boxed videotapes marches west on a shelf across the far wall. They are the visuals, perhaps several miles’ worth of Pentagon-approved operational footage of destroyers and aircraft carriers, bombers, fighters, and other weapons systems in action, produced in concert with the defense contractors who profit from their manufacture and who would love nothing more than to gain additional appropriations from Congress based on cool-looking footage. In the meantime, the footage stands in for the reality of a war that is impossible to see, hear, or touch.

***

The gap between what the correspondents say in private and what they can say on the air is one of the most familiar features of the American corporate news business. The arrangement is fair to everyone—unless, of course, you are one of the 11.4 million viewers who watched tonight’s broadcast of ABC news. In that case it appears that you were robbed.

Two USAF C-17s Globemaster III from Charleston AFB, SC perform high altitude humanitarian airdrops into Afghanastan using the TRIAD (Tri-wall Airdrop) system to deliver Humanitarian Daily Rations (HDR’s) to fleeing refugees, I read. The text is a precise description of the footage I have just seen on television. I wonder, idly, when "fleeing refugees" might gain its own acronym. This mission, the handout continues, with pride, was the first Combat Airdrop for the C-17 aircraft, the first operational test of the TRIAD system with the C-17, and the first high-altitude airdrop of its kind for the C-17. The footage serves as a plausible facsimile of the war as defined by the Pentagon; it tells viewers nothing about the origins and nature of an enemy that Republicans and Democrats alike have been ignoring for the last ten years, out of deference to the demands of Big Oil and in the hope that a world of six billion people might wake up one morning, consider the odds, and start bowing to Bill Gates, Michael Jordan, and the Goddess of Democracy.

Somehow, it seems, the Pentagon has got the lessons of Vietnam exactly wrong. In a great democracy, a policy of honesty and openness with the public and the press is probably the only way to win the war on terrorism. It is important for reporters to ask difficult, even unpardonable questions of people in authority, in order to keep themselves and the rest of us informed. We should all know the answers to the questions that are not being asked, or are not being asked often enough. Otherwise, it is difficult to imagine any other result than another long, expensive, frustrating, fruitless, and divisive war.

According to Tony Blair and George Bush respectively, 'world opinion' and the 'collective will of the world' supported the attack on Afghanistan. Yet analysis of international opinion polls shows that with only three exceptions majorities in all countries polled have opposed the policy of the US and UK governments. Furthermore there have been consistent majorities against the current action in the UK and sizeable numbers of the US population had reservations about the bombing.

World opinion

The biggest poll of world opinion was carried out by Gallup International in 37 countries in late September (Gallup International 2001). It found that apart from the US, Israel and India a majority of people in every country surveyed preferred extradition and trial of suspects to a US attack. Clear and sizeable majorities were recorded in the UK (75%) and across Western Europe from 67% in France to 87% in Switzerland. Between 64% (Czech Republic) and 83 % (Lithuania)of Eastern Europeans concurred as did varying majorities in Korea, Pakistan, South Africa and Zimbabwe. An even more emphatic answer obtained in Latin America where between 80% (Panama) and 94% (Mexico) favoured extradition. The poll also found that majorities in the US and Israel (both 56%) did not favour attacks on civilians. Yet such polls have been ignored by the media and by many of the polling companies. After the bombing started opposition seems to have grown in Europe. As only the Mirror has reported, by early November 65 per cent in Germany and 69 per cent in Spain wanted the US attacks to end (Yates, 2001). Meanwhile in Russia polls before and after the bombing show majorities opposed to the attacks. One slogan which reportedly commanded majority support doing the rounds in Moscow at the end of September was 'World War III - Without Russia' (Agency WPS 2001). After the bombing started Interfax reported a Gallup International poll showing a majority of Moscow residents against the US military action (BBC Worldwide Monitoring 2001)

Polling companies.

The questions asked by a number of polling companies such as MORI, Gallup and ICM have been seriously inadequate. They have failed to give respondents a range of possible options in relation to the war. When polling companies do ask about alternatives, support for war falls away quite markedly. In the UK prior to the bombing all except one poll, which asked the question, showed a majority against bombing if it caused civilian casualties. After the bombing started UK polling companies stopped asking about concern for civilians. From the start of the bombing to the fall of Kabul on 13 November there were only four polls on British opinion (by ICM (2001a, 2001b) and MORI (2001a, 2001b)) compared with 7 between the 11 September and the start of the bombing on October 7. None has asked adequate questions about alternatives to bombing. ICM did ask one alternative questions about whether bombing should stop to allow aid into Afghanistan and 54% said it should (Guardian October 30). Where questions about aid or alternatives to bombing are asked the results have been consistent: Clear and sometimes massive majorities against the bombing. In an ignored poll, the Scottish Sunday Mail found that fully 69% of Scots favoured sanctions, diplomacy or bringing Bin Laden to trial. Only 17% favoured his execution and a minuscule 5% supported bombing (21 October). The Herald in Glasgow also found only 6% favoured the then current policy of bombing alone (3 November). It is well known that Scottish opinion tends to be to the left of UK opinion, but not by more than a few points on average. Although the Press Association picked up on the Herald poll it was not reported in the British national press. Between the start of the bombing and the fall of Kabul, (with the exception of the single question in the Guardian poll showing 54% in favour of a pause in bombing) not a single polling company asked the British public any questions about alternatives to war.

It is not altogether clear whether the lack of options given to poll respondents is due to the media or the polling companies. Certainly both UK and US polling companies have been guilty of misrepresenting their own data almost without exception overemphasising support for the war. For example Mori claimed that their polling in late October had 'extinguished any lingering doubt' that support was 'fading' (Mortimore 2001). Of course this completely ignores all the poll data which would give an alternative view and the fact that the polling questions have been inadequate. Furthermore, according to Bob Worcester of MORI, (in an address to an London School of Economics meeting on the media and the war on 15 November) the text of press reports on their polls are 'approved' by MORI itself before they are published. This is clearly a matter of good practice and should be applauded. But the benefit is fairly marginal, if MORI are content for the press to distort the level of opposition by concentrating on the 'overwhelming' support for the war and relegating opposition to the war to the end of reports.

Media reporting

It comes as a surprise to many in the UK and US to discover that opinion is so markedly opposed to or ambivalent about the current action. One key reason is that the polls have been systematically misreported in the media. Both television and the press in the US and UK have continued to insist that massive majorities support the bombing. Senior BBC journalists have expressed surprise and disbelief when shown the evidence from the opinion polls. One told me that she didn't believe that the polling companies were corrupt and that she thought it unlikely that the Guardian would minimise the opposition to the war. This was days after the Guardian published a poll purporting to show that 74% supported the bombing (Travis 2001, 12 October). What the BBC journalist hadn't noticed was that the Guardian's polls had asked only very limited questions and failed to give respondents the option of saying they would prefer diplomatic solutions. In the poll on 12 October one question was asked but only if people thought enough had been done diplomatically. Given that the government and the media had been of the opinion that enough had been done and alternative voices were marginalised, it is surprising that as many as 37% said that enough had not been done.

Furthermore the Guardian's editorial position has offered (qualified) support for the war and it did not cover the demonstrations in London and Glasgow on 13 October. As a result of a 'flurry' of protests this was raised by the readers' editor at the Guardian's editorial meeting on 14 October and the editor agreed that this had been a 'mistake'. But, the readers editor revealed that it is the papers 'general policy' not to cover marches (Mayes 2001), thus condemning dissent to the margins of the news agenda and leaving the field open for those with the resources to stage 'proper' news events.

Elsewhere in the media, almost every poll has been interpreted to indicate popular support for the war. Where that interpretation is extremely difficult journalists have tried to squeeze the figures to fit. One Scottish newspaper was so concerned at the low numbers supporting bombing that they phoned me to ask how best to interpret the findings. Another paper, the Sunday Mail showed only 5% support for bombing and 69% favouring conflict resolution. Nevertheless the closest they got to this in their headline was that Scots were 'split' on bombing (21 October 2001).

TV news reporters have routinely covered demonstrations in Britain and the US as if they represent only a small minority of opinion. The underlying assumption is that demonstrators only represent themselves rather than seeing them as an expression of a larger constituency of dissent. Thus BBC reporters claim that 'the opinion polls say that a majority of UK public opinion backs the war' (BBC1 Panorama, 14 October 2001) or in reporting the demonstrations in London that 'Despite the strength of feelings here today those opposed to military action are still very much in the minority' (BBC1 News 13 October 2001 21.50). These reports are at best naïve, at worst mendacious, and a clear violation of the legal requirement of the BBC to be balanced.

In the US dissent has been markedly harder to find in the news media (Solomon 2001). The pictures of dead children featured in the rest of the world press been hard to find (Lucas 2001) and the debate on the use of cluster bombs and the 'daisy cutter' bombs (a weapon of mass destruction) which were debated in the mainstream UK media in late October were almost non existent on the television news in the US. * CNN continued to report under the heading 'America Strikes back' which is of itself a woefully partial version of what was happening. Polling companies in the US have given their respondents little choice of policy options. Where they have asked a variety of questions answers opposing US policy have been downplayed in media reports. The New York Times reported on 25 September that 92% of respondents agreed that the US should take military action against whoever is responsible for the attacks'. But the text of the report belied the 'support for war' headline indicating that fully 78% felt that the US should wait until it was certain who is responsible', before responding. As Edward Herman, leading critic of US foreign Policy has written of the inadequacy of polls which do not ask about extradition, civilian casualties, or whether they would support action which breaches international law (Herman 2001). One little reported poll for Newsweek in early October showed that '58 percent of respondents said the U.S. government's support for Israel may have been the cause' of the attacks, thus indicating that America may have struck first rather that simply striking back as CNN would have it.

Furthermore there is evidence that dissent in the US is being underrepresented in responses to opinion polls. In a Gallup poll 31% agreed that the attacks on the US had made them 'less likely to say things that might be unpopular?' (http://www.gallup.com/poll/releases/pr011008c.asp). And opposition to the war is pretty unpopular in media coverage of the war. When Bill Maher, host of the Politically Incorrect chat show criticised remarks by Bush describing the WTC attackers as 'cowards', the White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said: 'There are reminders to all Americans that they need to watch what they do, and this is not a time for remarks like that' (Usborne 2001). His show lost advertisers and was dropped by some networks.

Conclusion

The most fundamental problem with the polls is that they assume the public has perfect information. But, notwithstanding some dissent in the press, the media in the UK, and even more emphatically in the US, have been distorting what is happening in Afghanistan especially on civilian casualties and alternatives to war. To ask about approval of what is happening assumes that people actually know what is happening. But given that a large proportion of the population receives little but misinformation and propaganda (especially on TV news which is most peoples main source of information) then it is less surprising that some should approve of what they are told is happening - that the US and UK are doing their best to avoid civilian casualties, that Blair exercises a moderating influence on Bush. When they are asked their own preferences about what should happen (rather than approval questions about what is happening) then there is much less support, even in the US. In other words there is no world support for the attack on Afghanistan and public opinion in the US and UK is at best dubious and at worst flatly opposed to what is happening. If Bush and Blair were really democrats, they would never have started the bombing.

David Miller is a member of the Stirling Media Research Institute.

http://staff.stir.ac.uk/david.miller

*Author's observation. The author spent 10 days in the US between 26th October and 4th November and compared the news in the US with the debates taking place in the media in the UK.

References

Agency WPS (2001) 'What the papers say. Part I', October 1, 2001, Monday 'RUSSIANS WON'T SUPPORT PUTIN IF HE INVOLVES RUSSIA IN RETALIATION' Zavtra, September 27, 2001, p. 1

BBC Worldwide Monitoring (2001) 'Public poll sees threat to Russia from US military action' Interfax news agency, Moscow, in English 1137 gmt 9 Oct 01. October 9, 2001, Tuesday,

Gallup International (2001) 'Gallup International Poll on terrorism in the US', http://www.gallup-international.com/surveys.htm

ICM (2001a) ' ICM RESEARCH / GUARDIAN POLL OCTOBER 2001', published in the Guardian, 12 October. http://www.icmresearch.co.uk/reviews/2001/guardian-afghan-poll-oct-2001.htm

ICM (2001b) ' ICM RESEARCH / THE GUARDIAN AFGHAN POLL - OCTOBER 2001', published in the Guardian, 30 October. http://www.icmresearch.co.uk/reviews/2001/guardian-afghan2-poll-oct-2001.htm

Herman, E. (2001) 'Nuggets from a nuthouse', Z Magazine, November.

Lucas, S. (2001) 'How a free press censors itself', New Statesman, 12 November, 14-15.

Mayes, I. (2001) 'Leading lights', The Guardian, Saturday review, 20 October: 7.

MORI (2001a) 'First poll on the Afghanistan War: Britons fully support Blair but fear retaliatory Strikes' Poll for Tonight with Trevor McDonald, 11 October, 10.20pm, ITV. http://www.mori.com/polls/granada.shtml

MORI (2001b) 'War of Afghanistan Poll' for the Mail on Sunday, 4 November 2001

http://www.mori.com/polls/2001/ms011104.shtml

Mortimore, R. (2001) 'Commentary: Britain at war' 26 October, http://www.mori.com/digest/2001/c011026.shtml

Solomon, N. (2001 'TV news: a militarised zone', Znet, 9 October, http://www.zmag.org/solomonzone.htm

Usborne, D. (2001) 'Jokers and peaceniks face patriotic wrath', Independent on Sunday, 30 September: 7.

Yates, N. (2001) 'War on Terror: the World questions America', The Mirror, 9 November.

It is the broadest move in American history to sweep aside constitutional protections. Yet President Bush’s order creating military tribunals to try those suspected of links to terrorism has aroused little public uproar. Why? Because, I am convinced, people do not understand the order’s dangerous breadth — and its defenders have done their best to conceal its true character.

The order is described as if it is aimed only at Osama bin Laden and other terrorist leaders. A former deputy attorney general, George J. Terwilliger III, said the master-minds of the Sept. 11 attacks "don’t deserve constitutional protection."

But the Bush order covers all non-citizens, and there are about 20 million of them in the United States —immigrants working toward citizenship, visitors and the like. Not one or 100 or 1,000 but 20 million.

And the order is not directed only at those who mastermind or participate in acts of terrorism. In the vaguest terms, it covers such things as "harboring" anyone who has ever aided acts of terrorism that might have had "adverse effects" on the U.S. economy or foreign policy. Many onetime terrorists — Menachem Begin, Nelson Mandela, Gerry Adams — regarded at the time as adverse to U.S. interests, have been "harbored" by Americans.

Apologists have also argued that the Bush military tribunals will give defendants enough rights. A State Department spokeswoman, Jo-Anne Prokopowicz, said that they would have rights "similar to those" found in the Hague war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.

To the contrary, Hague defendants like Slobodan Milosevic are entitled to public trials before independent judges, and to lawyers of their choice. The Bush military trials are unlike the Hague defendants, they may be executed.

The SixthAmendment provides: "In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury."

That covers citizens and noncitizens in this country alike. On a few occasions in the past, acts of war have been treated as outside Sixth Amendment protection. Franklin Roosevelt set up a military tribunal to try Nazi saboteurs landed on our shores in World War II. But that example — a tribunal for a particular occasion, limited in time and scope — shows the very danger of the Bush order. It is unlimited, in a fight against terrorism that could go on for years.

"It’s worth remembering that the order applies only to noncitizens," a Wall Street Journal editorial said in its defense. I hope The Journal’s editors, who are usually supportive of immigrants and their role in building this country, will consider the pall of fear this order may put on millions of noncitizens.

And the Bush order could easily be extended to citizens, under the administration’s legal theory. Since the Sixth Amendment makes no distinction between citizens and aliens, the claim of war exigency could sweep its protections aside for anyone in this country who might fit the vague def initions of aiding terrorism.

But George W. Bush would never let his order be abused, one of its defenders said the other day. It was a profoundly un-American comment. From the beginning, Americans have refused to rely on the graciousness of our leaders. We rely on legal rules. That is what John Adams meant when he said we have "a government of laws, and not of men."

The Framers of our Constitution thought its great protection against tyranny was the separation of the federal government’s powers into three departments: executive, legislative, judicial. Each, they reasoned, would check abuse by the others.

There is the greatest danger of the Bush order. It was an act of executive fiat, imposed without even consulting Congress. And it seeks to exclude the courts entirely from a process that may fundamentally affect life and liberty. The order says that defendants may not appeal to any court.

I do not doubt that leaders of Al Qaeda could properly be tried by a military tribunal. But the Bush order cries out for redrafting in narrower, more careful terms. Under the Constitution, that is the duty of Congress. Its leaders have so far been afraid to challenge anything labeled antiterrorist, however dangerous. It is time they showed some courage, on behalf of our constitutional system.

Throughout the month of October the fire continued to burn in the ruin of lower Manhattan, and the numerous politicians who came to look upon the face of apocalyptic destruction never failed to see, somewhere behind the veil of rancid and still-drifting smoke, an American phoenix rising from the ashes…. Almost as soon as they had said that America never again would be the same, they began to talk about the restoration of the familiar and heroic past, making good the losses of September 11 with quicker witted intelligence agents, heavier artillery, more patriotic displays of consumer confidence in all the nation’s better stores….

As construed by the household sophists in the Reagan Administration and endorsed by their successors in the Bush and Clinton administrations, the intellectual foundation for the country’s wealth and happiness rested on four pillars of imperishable wisdom:

1. Big government is by inclination Marxist, by definition wasteful and incompetent, a conspiracy of fools indifferent to the welfare of the common man. The best government is no government. The agencies of big government stand as acronyms for overbearing bureaucracy, as synonyms for poverty, indolence, and disease.

2. Global capitalism is the eighth wonder of the world, a light unto the nations and the answer to everybody’s prayers. Nothing must interfere with its sacred mysteries and omniscient judgment.

3. The art of politics (embarrassingly human and therefore corrupt) is subordinate to the science of economics (reassuringly abstract and therefore perfect).

4. History is at an end. The new world economic order vanquished the last of the skeptics by refuting the fallacy of Soviet Communism. Having reached the final stopping place on the road to ideological perfection, mankind no longer need trouble itself with any new political ideas

All four pillars of imperishable wisdom perished on the morning of September 11, reduced within an hour to the incoherence of the rubble in Liberty Street. By noon even the truest of true believers knew that they had been telling themselves a fairy tale. If not to big government, then where else did the friends of laissez-faire economics look for the rescue of their finances and the saving of their lives; if not the agencies of big government, who then brought the ambulances from as far away as Albany or sent the firemen into the doomed buildings with no promise of a finder’s fee? It wasn’t the free market that hijacked the airplanes and cross-promoted them into bombs, or Adam Smith’s invisible hand that cut the throats of the pilots on what they thought was a flight to Los Angeles. History apparently was still a work in progress, the strange thoughts grown in the basements of Tirana possibly closer to the geopolitical spirit of the times than the familiar platitudes handed around the conference tables at the American Enterprise Institute.…during the weeks since September 11 the rush into the shelters of big government has come to resemble the crowding of sinners into the tent of a prairie evangelist.

By the end of October it had been generally understood that America no longer enjoyed a special arrangement with Providence, preserved by the virtue of its inhabitants and the grace of its geography from the provocations of death, chance, kings, and desperate men. Confronted with determined enemies (many of them still unknown, some of them armed with appalling weapons) the nation stood exposed, like other nations, to the insults of outrageous fortune. The awareness of the predicament (on the part of both the politicians at the microphones and the voters in the streets) conceivably could lead to a reconstitution of the American idea, but the finding of the phoenix in the ashes presupposes a debate rising from an intellectual structure a good deal sturdier than the one lost in the wreckage of the World Trade Center. I imagine the argument falling along the division between the people who would continue the American experiment and those who think that the experiment has gone far enough, and if I can’t frame all the questions that might well be asked, I can think of at least a few:

How high a price do we set on the head of freedom? If we delete another few paragraphs from the Bill of Rights (for our own protection, of courw, in the interest of peace, prosperity, and carefree summer vacations), what do we ask of the state in return for our silence in court? Do we wish to remain citizens of a republic, or do we prefer the forms of participatory fascism in which the genial man on horseback assures us that repression is good for the soul? With what secular faith do we match the zeal of militant Islam and combat the enmity of the impoverished peoples of the earth to whom the choice between war and peace presents itself as a choice of no significance? How define the American democracy as a res publica for which we might willingly give up our lives? Our own lives, not the lives of foreign legions. And of what does the res publica consist?

None of the questions lead to certain answers, but if we don’t ask them of ourselves I don’t know how we can expect to rediscover the American idea in a world unknown to Jefferson. …The barbarism in Washington doesn’t dress itself in the costumes of the Taliban; it wears instead the smooth-shaven smile of Senate resolution sold to the highest bidder—for the drilling of the Arctic oil fields or the lifting from the rich the burden of the capital-gains tax, for bigger defense budgets, reduced medical insurance, enhanced surveillance, grotesque monopoly. If we took more of an interest in the making of our foreign policy, usually for the profit of our corporate overlords rather than for the safety of the American people, maybe we would know why, when bringing the lamp of liberty to the darker places of the earth, the United States invariably chooses for its allies the despots who operate their countries on the model of a prison or a jail.

As was proved by events on the morning of September 11, the laissez-faire theories of government do us an injustice. They don’t speak to the best of our character; neither do they express the cherished ideal embodied in the history of a courageous people. What joins the Americans one to another is not a common nationality, race, or ancestry but their voluntary pledge to a shared work of both the moral and political imagination. My love of country follows from my love of its freedoms, not from pride in its armies or its fleets…. The Constitution serves as the premise for a narrative rather than as the design for a monument or a plan for an invasion.

Any argument about the direction of the American future becomes an argument between the past and present tense. Let us hope that it proves to be both angry and fierce. The friends of the status quo (both houses of Congress, most of the national news media, the Hollywood patriots, and a legion of corporate spokespersons) already have made it clear that they prefer as little discussion as possible. Domestic political dissent they regard as immoral and, in time of war, treasonous. They believe it their duty to invest President Bush not only with the powers of a monarch but also with the attribute of wisdom. Put out more flags, post more guards, distribute the pillows of cant.

Maybe two or three years from now, when all the terrorists have been rounded up and the Trade Center towers replaced with a golden statue of Mammon, the time will come to talk of politics. In the meanwhile, my children, while waiting for that far-off happy day, follow directions, submit to the surveillance, look at the nice pictures brought to you by the Pentagon, know that your rulers are wise.

Alfred North Whitehead once observed that it is the business of the future to be dangerous (not because the future is perverse but because it doesn’t know how to be anything else), and whether we like it or not, the argument now in progress in Moscow and Jerusalem and Islamabad is the same argument that enlivened the annals of republican Rome, built the scaffolds of the Spanish Inquisition, and gave rise to the American Revolution. If we fail to engage it, we do so at our peril. The freedoms of expression present democratic societies with the unwelcome news that they are in trouble, hut because all societies, like most individuals, are always in some kind of trouble, the news doesn’t drive them onto the reefs of destruction. They die instead from the fear of thought and the paralysis that accompanies the wish to believe that only the wicked perish. The climate of anxiety is the cost of doing business, discomfort the state of mind in which the oyster brings forth the pearl. .

KABUL

The only foreigners not sweeping into Kabul so far are those from the American government. Diplomats from other key countries are in town to set up embassies, but American diplomats are conspicuously absent.

The tardiness of the American diplomats is one of several signs that Washington risks repeating its mistake of a decade ago, when it won the war against the Soviet invaders of Afghanistan and then betrayed the Afghans by walking away from them. We point fingers at other countries for allowing Afghanistan to become a terrorist haven, but we were the ones who abandoned the Afghans to the feuding factions whom we had armed and whose fundamentalist Islamic passions we had ignited in the, campaign against the Soviet Union. This terrorist "swamp," as we like to call it, was partly made in America.

"We dumped them when we should have helped them reconstruct," said Thomas E. Gouttierre, one of America’s foremost (and few) experts on Afghanistan, in a view that is almost, universal among Afghan-watchers -- "We’re paying the price now. One week of war would have easily paid the price of reconstructing all of Afghanistan."

Evidently, we have not learned much. President Bush sees his job as defeating the Taliban and Al Qaeda; and then bringing the troops quickly home. He has often expressed revulsion for "nation building," but that is precisely what is needed now. Afghanistan is so fragile that it will need vigorous American leadership to ensure vast aid, a major security presence and brutal diplomacy to force the factions to cooperate.

The United States operates a forward military base in Afghanistan for Marines trying to destroy the Taliban and Al Qaeda, but we don’t have a forward diplomatic base to try to rebuild the country. Our diplomats grapple with Afghanistan, but. long distance from Bonn.

Talk to Afghans, and they inevitably say their greatest need is security. Yet, incredibly, the Bush administration initially not only refused to provide security itself in Kabul but also blocked the Europeans from sending in their own troops. Fortunately, European diplomats out-, maneuvered the Americans at the negotiations in Bonn, and Washington is being forced to acquiesce in a modest number of foreign troops in the Kabul area.

In the north of the country, Afghans are starving because Uzbekistan will not open a bridge for relief supplies to cross, since it is worried about security in the area. Secretary of State Colin Powell will visit Uzbekistan in the next couple of days and ask it to open the bridge, but the United States refuses to provide the needed security. One can’t help thinking that if the Pentagon was asked to bomb the bridge, instead of protect it, there would be no hesitation.

So it’s past time for the Americans to deploy diplomats in Afghanistan as well as troops. In this strange, World of Kabul, what is needed more than anything is for Americans to show leadership not just in destroying, but also in rebuilding.