by the ‘faith that there will be a day in which history of life on this
earth will be transformed totally and irreversibly from the condi-
tion of perpetual strife which we have all experienced to one of
perfect harmony that many dream about’ (Rapoport, 1988: 197). In
the luggage of Mohamed Atta, the US Federal Bureau of
Investigation found a note in Arabic which encapsulated perfectly
a version of the messianic Weltanschauung: ‘Purify your heart and
clean it from all earthly matters... The time of judgment has
arrived...You will be entering paradise. You will be entering the
happiest life, everlasting life... We are of God and to God we
return’ (The Washington Post, 28 September 2001). Bin Laden may
have been more calculating than those he sent to their deaths: lead-
ers of such groups usually are. But he probably had no sense at all
of what would befall him as a result of the 11 September attacks.
His hapless Taliban protectors would have been taken even more
by surprise.
THE OBLITERATION OF THE TALIBAN
The ‘War on Terrorism’
At a memorial service in Washington DC a few days after the 11
September attacks, the congregation sang a song composed during
the Civil War which would have been known to most Americans –
Julia Ward Howe’s stirring anthem The Battle Hymn of the
Republic. One line in particular should have made the Taliban
tremble: ‘He hath loosed the fateful lightning of his terrible swift
sword.’ It is not only religious fundamentalists who can be gripped
by fervour. In the United States, the attacks of September 11 pro-
duced a righteous and awesome wrath which demanded prompt
retaliation. Al-Qaidaand the Taliban were the targets.
The key decision makers in the United States – President
George W. Bush, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, and
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, together with the Chairman of
the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Richard B. Myers – were of
258 The Afghanistan Wars