The U.S. has been considering, for at least the past five years, a ³smash and grab² raid to seize the 43 year-old bin Laden, whose stated principle aim is to drive 6,000 US military personnel from the country of his birth, home to Islam¹s two most sacred sites. If the Americans regard him as the foremost "terrorist" in the world, as they clearly seem to—then, as he has said, "if liberating my land is called terrorism, this is a great honour for me."

Osama bin Laden's face radiates from every television news broadcast. He is the icon and chanted hero of Islamic extremists across Asia. Disturbingly he threatens to become a legend among many Muslims who would regard themselves as moderate. The West has constructed a bin Laden figure synonymous with Satan, the embodiment of all terrorist evil. In some parts of the Muslim world‹not all parts but enough to be chilling—he is being accorded the status of a saint, the personification of resistance to Imperialist power. What these appellations suggest is a testimony to his power. The West has unwisely colluded in this adulation.

Unfortunately what the American alliance longs for at this moment, even above retribution, are more friends and fewer enemies. However, what this alliance is storing up for itself is yet more enemies; because, after all the bribes, threats and promises that have patched together this fragile coalition, it is not possible to prevent another suicide bomber being born each time a misdirected missile wipes out an innocent village, and nobody can resolve this devil's cycle of despair, hatred and—yet again—revenge.

The problem is that just as this war against bin Laden's terrorism is unlike any other, so the eventual "victory" will be unlike any other. There is not the luxury of achieving an unconditional surrender. Bin Laden is probably correct to prophesy that if he is assassinated, more bin Ladens will spring up to take his place. Attacking the Taliban destroyed a key training centre for international terror, but it is not the only one. Others in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Sudan and Libya remain, and they are altogether more difficult to destroy. Moreover, the cells of the al-Qaeda network are to be found, according to reports, in 60 countries. If this is true, a purely military definition of victory cannot be claimed. Terror can be contained but it cannot be eliminated.

Essentially, the very existence of these questions reveals the fundamental conundrum military strategists have faced since September 11. Their armies—with all their Predator drones, cruise missiles, guided bombs, planes, tanks and ships—are designed for fighting other armies, attached to states. Yet the new enemy does not wear a uniform and belongs to no state; it lives in 60 countries and its troops are civilians who can use Stanley knives to bring a superpower to its knees. To confront this enemy with B52's and Cruise missiles is as ludicrous as sending cavalry horses in to defeat tanks.

It is not possible to displace anxiety, to tame an uncharted future into predictability by jamming it into a familiar historical paradigm. This is not a re-run of the Cold War. The Soviet Union, unlike al-Qaeda and its fraternal networks, was identifiable on the map, not hiding dispersed in numerous countries. It didn¹t send four bombs to wreak mass destruction on New York and Washington. It didn¹t have a corps of kamikaze operatives. It was possessed by a godless ideology, not the committed faith that it was acting righteously with blessing. What, in part, makes bin Laden¹s TV appearances unnerving is its reminding the viewer how little he resembles Khrushchev and Castro. It is not possible to tell where or when he records his videos, let alone his location. Whatever message he sends to the Islamic world, the un-coded one he delivers to Americans is that the war on terrorism is not the cold war but, what everyone most fears, a leap into the unknown.

The mightiest hi-tech military machine in the world is just not suitable for this type of war. The Americans have the most sophisticated hardware imaginable, but the missing ingredient is human intelligence. A satellite picture can illustrate the finest detail, but it cannot tell you who is under that keffiyeh. The US will now have to master a modus operandi, which it has long been backward. They will have to infiltrate hostile movements and learn to understand them. Generals will have to give up relying on armour and take on "police-work." It will mean a whole new kind of army: one that does not wear khaki or is located on a base, but comes dressed in plain clothes and is incognito. You can counter terrorism only by following its methods.

Osama bin Laden sat in his gold-fringed robe guarded by the loyal Arab mujahedin who fought alongside him in Afghanistan. Bearded, taciturn figures—unarmed, but never more than a few yards from the man who recruited them, trained them and dispatched them to destroy the Soviet Army. With his high cheekbones, narrow eyes and long brown nose, bin Laden looks every inch the mountain warrior of mujahadin legend. -- Robert Fisk

The stylised television footage and photographs of bin Laden suggest a man of homo-erotic narcissism. Posing with his Kalishnikov, attending a wedding or consulting a sacred text, he shines with every self-conscious gesture with an actor¹s awareness of the lens. He has height, beauty, grace, intelligence and magnetism.

By the accepted "rules" of terrorist engagement this war is already long lost. Lost by the West. What victory can possibly be achieved that match the already suffered defeats of September 11, let alone the defeats that lie ahead?

Terror is theatre.

Because we're giving way to terror, to news of terror, to tape recorders and cameras, to radios, to bombs stashed in radios. News of disaster is the only narrative people need. The darker the news, the grander the narrative. News is the last addiction before—what? (Don DeLillo - Mao 11)

Bin Laden has baffled those who assumed that an accused murderer deserves pariah status throughout the Muslim world. The mistake was to think him an unsophisticated zealot. The opposite is true. Nobody anticipated the extent of his evil brilliance. If only Western tacticians had grasped this earlier, it would have been obvious that this was a ³mousetrap² war. The atrocities of September 11 were the bait. For bin Laden to build a support base depended on provoking the sort of American, and British, reaction, that would disturb even Arab moderates. Afghanistan endured constant bombing. Each day, reports of civilian casualties grew and so did Muslim unrest. How bin Laden must glory in the folly of a West that moves to the danse macabre that he has choreographed.

It does not worry us what the Americans think. What worries us is pleasing Allah. (Osama bin Laden)

It is enlightening to read the full text of what bin Laden demanded in his post-World Trade Centre attack videotape. He said in Arabic, in a section largely excised in English translations, "our (Muslim) nation has undergone more than 80 years of humiliation... " And referred to "when the sword reached America after 80 years." Bin Laden may be cruel, wicked, ruthless or evil personified, but he is very intelligent. Probably he was referring specifically to the 1920 Treaty of Sevres, written by the victorious allied powers, which broke the Ottoman Empire and did away -- after 600 years of sultanates and caliphates' with the last dream of Arab unity. Additionally bin Laden's lieutenant, Ayman Zawahri—shouting into a video recorder from his Afghan cave shortly afterwards—stated that the al-Quaeda movement "will not tolerate a recurrence of the Andalusia tragedy in Palestine." The debacle of Andalusia marked the end of Muslim rule in Spain in 1492.

The problem, fundamentally, is that without any sense of history, the West does not understand injustice. The injustice is only compounded, after years of indolence, when it is attempted to bribe would-be allies with promises of immense historical importance—a resolution to Palestine, Kashmir, an arms-free Middle East, Arab independence, an economic Nirvana. While the West may sprinkle quick-fix promises around, the people of the Middle East have longer memories.

The true defences against bin Laden and terrorist groups will not be military, but political and diplomatic.

The essential problem is that the victors of the cold war now run a global world order that has no perceived legitimacy among billions of human beings, especially those in the Islamic world. The Imperialists of the 19^th century did not care whether they were legitimate to those they ruled. But a global order that validates itself in terms of human rights, justice and widening economic opportunity risks dying by these promises unless they are made real. To make them real requires enormous vision and, above all, moral consistency: to stop remaining silent when Arab states oppress their citizens; to commit to help re-building failed states such as Afghanistan; to stop pretending that the present level of foreign aid budgets is sufficient; to stop crippling developing countries with terms of trade and terms of indebtedness that make it impossible for them to grow; to stop believing that we are helpless before an aids epidemic that is without doubt creating yet another enraged population begging to be led by a new generation of apocalyptic nihilists.

September 11 decisively shrunk the distance between the world that benefits from globalisation and the world that has been left behind. September 11 also collapsed the justification for keeping national interests separate from the influence of values. These values require the West to reach out and share the extraordinary bounty of a globalised world with those who have less. If this is not achieved the West will face an unending struggle in which victory will be forever beyond grasp.

Al-Qaeda is not a real hierarchical organisation Apart from the person at the top it¹s rather loosely affiliated. When you bring down one link you don¹t get the whole structure.

Beyond the horror of the threat which Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda pose to human life is a threat, at the deepest theoretical level, to the accepted view of western organisational structures, the government agencies, which are tasked with bringing them to justice: a terrorist has found a way to mingle the spontaneity of chaos with the precise efficiency in planning in a way that western hierarchies are incapable of understanding.

The amorphous nature of al-Qaeda not only makes it difficult to hunt down its members and track individuals; it also means it does not necessarily have the same form from day to day, a clear beginning or end. "Self-organising systems," a term derived from complexity science, relates to a system where you have enough structure to keep control of what is going on, but individuals and groups self-organise spontaneously. With al-Qaeda there appears to be a loose network of committed, lifelong terrorists, but what they receive from bin Laden and associates is less specific orders and training than a clear, simple ideology, with which they are expected to go out into the world and put into practice on their own. Trained and sent out with the notion of acting on their own, the terrorists go forth with the ideology of self-sacrifice and killing. They are deeply socialised into the values of their movement, are then put through an ³apprenticeship² during which they must exhibit both technical skill and acceptance of the ideology, and then are set free to operate on their own.

The cultural background of the terrorists is essential to understanding the nature of their organisation. Terrorists who come from traditional societies are able to operate largely without visible, bureaucratic forms of organisation. In traditional societies, authority is based on religious or on other forms of legitimacy. Recent intelligence reports on bin Laden and al-Qaeda's responsibility for the September 11 attacks attempt to portray al-Qaeda as an all-embracing, powerful, tightly knit organisation, evil¹s prime contractor. But while the reports succeed in drawing links between bin Laden and the September 11 attacks underlines the fact that the atrocities are exactly in line with bin Laden¹s wishes, and indicate he knew they were about to happen, they shed little light on the real nature of the ties that bind al-Qaeda members and associates to each other.

Unfortunately, Western theories may be wishful thinking—a desire to see in al-Qaeda the kind of organisation which is defined enough to be liquidated. All the indications suggest that al-Qaeda is not constructed as a hierarchical group. Bin Laden is without doubt significant but not dominant. It is almost a kind of federation of terrorist networks, all with one very broad aim. When you begin to understand this structure you can start to realise how a few people will operate to a great extent on their own, with only fairly loose co-ordination. Only by confronting this deep source of new recruits, and future terrorist leaders, can western governments feel safe. However, there is a reluctance to confront the sources of anger, particularly American support for the corrupt, autocratic oil regimes of the Gulf. If the coalition succeeds in its aims and manages to eliminate the complete bin Laden operation, it will perhaps only be three years before the next similar group emerges.

If the Western administration can look beyond the figure of bin Laden and focus on the grievances which generate new missionaries of death, it may avoid consenting to enter into a new cold war, where it accepts the inevitability of terrorist group after terrorist group. Even if bin Laden were assassinated, the problem would remain. There is any number of lieutenants in the al-Qaeda organisation, and there are any number of other terrorist networks that exist, which may be a potential danger. This seems to point towards a distinctly dispiriting future: an infinite war, against an invisible enemy.

Bin Laden has succeeded in infiltrating his operations worldwide. Authorities say he has constructed an astonishingly complex network in more than 60 countries and has planted safe houses in 20 more—including the United States. Court documents accuse him of maintaining ties to anti-American governments in Iran, Iraq and the Sudan.

The CIA claims that bin Laden was orchestrating the attacks on their troops in Mogadishu in 1993. However, there is only partial evidence that al-Qaeda were significantly involved. During bin Laden¹s stay in Sudan, anti-American incidents happened in many places but none were conducted by his group in the usual sense of an order passed down a chain of command. People who had trained in Afghanistan and had enough anti-American drive conducted them. Bin Laden probably sanctioned them but had no direct involvement.

Like clan leaders around the world, or Mafia godfathers, bin Laden¹s success as a guerrilla leader depends on the close interconnection between an extended family and his terrorist network, which is maintained due to the dedication and loyalty of his supporters. Bin Laden himself has three wives and 13 children. He married his latest bride, the daughter of a prominent Yemeni family, last year, in a move to strengthen his support base among Islamic militants in the country. Abdel Bari Atwan, the Editor-in-Chief of the Arab daily Al-Quads al-Arabi, who spent a week with Bin Laden in Afghanistan in 1996, says that the Saudi-born guerrilla was surrounded by a small, utterly loyal group, often connected by marriage to one another.

The recent marriage of his son Mohammed Bin Laden and the daughter of Abu Hafas Al-Masri cemented a close working relationship with Al-Masri, an Egyptian aide who fought with bin Laden during the Afghan war against Soviet forces in the 1980's. Ultimately, thanks to his reputation his close-knit group of Afghan veterans and his family links, bin Laden can be confident that he will not be betrayed.

Bin Laden¹s al-Qaeda cultivates an image of a large, diffuse, and unidentifiable collection of dissenters. This idea of a ubiquitous but undeniable threat is effective in that it allows anyone to consider themselves ³members² and gives the impression to state authorities that the capture of a few individuals would do little to undermine the cause. Al-Quaed¹s tactics are cleverly designed to avoid the spectacularisation and hierarchy characteristic of more orthodox terrorist activities. The dangers of encoding and therefore constraining expressions of dissent and desire are all too real.

In the philosophical writing of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, the imaginative/fleeting and nomadic qualities of such tactics are identified as essentially revolutionary and liberating. In the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, the assemblage we may term the Deleuzo-Guattarian machine introduces a transgressive energy to theories/processes of terrorism. The nomadic and anarchic tactics of guerrilla warfare replace more traditional revolutionary strategies, groupings and alliances to reveal a level of action that operates ³wildly² in an unsystematised multitude of disconnected moments and shifting components. Rejecting status and resisting the authority of codification and order, the nomad¹s deterritorialization of the world interrupts every attempt to stabilize and encode it. The ³nomadic terrorist² subverts all claims to notions of identity and cohesion wherever they assert themselves

The activities of Bin Laden's organizations—"moments" of violence, political and cultural contestation—can be theoretically interpreted as embracing a nomadic political strategy that is aligned to Deleuzo-Guattarian functions. Deleuze states that "...the problem for revolutionaries today is to unite within the purpose of the particular struggle without falling into despotic and bureaucratic organisations of the party or state apparatus," a situation to which he opposed freedom of a "deterritorialised" thought parallel to ideas proposed by Nietzsche, whose discourse Deleuze describes as "above all nomadic; its statements can be conceived as the products of a mobile war machine and not the utterances of a rational administrative machinery, whose philosophers would be bureaucrats of pure reason." Therefore, in thought as well as active insurrection, the guerrilla tactics should aim for a deterritorialised, nomadic praxis, which resists codification, settlement, structure and organization. It must operate along "lines of flight" which interrupt and destabilise attempts to isolate and identify closed structures and systems of social organisation/thought.

In ethico-political terms, the Deleuzo-Guattarian "Line of Flight" is privileged because "it is always on a line of flight that one creates." Historically as well as conceptually the nomad has a particular affinity with the Line of Flight, since it is along lines of technological flight that they invent new weapons to oppose the State. Further, "it is along their own lines of flight that the nomads sweep everything before them, finding new weapons which strike dumb the Pharaohs." More generally, the authors suggest, the effectuations on a line of flight require the intervention of a particular type of assemblage: "There is always something like a war-machine which functions on these lines."

The most general determination of the war machine is that which is outside, the Other of the State. It constitutes the opposing pole of the social field, radically different from the State-form and by nature hostile to it. It is via this thesis of radical exteriority in relation to the State-form that the war-machine is described. This exteriority is formal rather than real. It is the matter of an irreducible difference which separates the concept of the war-machine from the State-form. "In every respect, the war-machine is another species, another nature, another origin than the State apparatus."

Deleuze and Guattari suggest that essentially the process of becoming nomad is indistinguishable from the constitution of the war-machine. Hence the conditions of nomadism illustrate the characteristics of the war-machine. "The nomad makes the desert no less than he is made by it. He is a vector of deterritorialization." Nomads are primarily deterriorialized, which is not to say that they have no territory. But it is the special relationship to that territory which renders the nomad deterritorialized; it is a pure surface for mobile existence, without enclosure or fixed patterns of distribution. Movement across it is open-ended and fluid: ³He occupies and holds a smooth space: it is under this aspect that he is determined as a nomad.²

Liberation consists not in the attempt to codify instabilities, but in the pursuit of their proliferations. Difference and singularity must not be resolved, but allowed to flourish, multiply and become even more subversive of the macropolitical world. The new revolutionary direction‹nomadic‹adopts processes/practices impossible to locate on the dominant co-ordinates; they produce their own axes of reference, establish underground transversal connections among themselves, and thus undermine orthodox relationships to production/individual/society.

Deleuze and Guattari¹s theories certainly testify to the contention that ³lines of flight² continually arise to interrupt and contest an apparently stable society, suggesting that at the molecular level there is a continuous flow of desire and energies which can never be definitely contained.

How al-Qaeda operates was detailed during the recent New York trial of Rashed Daoud Al-Owhali and Khalfan Khamis Mohamed, Bin laden associates convicted of bombing the US Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

At the apex of the organization is bin Laden and beneath him are groups of about 12 trusted aides experienced in jihads or holy wars. Then there are committees: the military arm responsible for training and buying weapons; the Islamic study division to rule on religious law; the finance wing, overseeing corporate holdings and a travel office; and the media body, headed by a man nicknamed Reuter, publishing the newspaper Nashrat al Akhbar. A series of companies supports al-Qaeda¹s activities: Wasi al Agip, the umbrella firm operating in Sudan; Taba Investment, trading in currencies; Laden International, an import-export company; Hijra Construction, building roads and bridges; and Themar al Mubaraka, growing sesame seeds, peanuts and white corn on a farm in Sudan used also for weapons and explosives training.

Bin Laden's strategy involves a perpetual motion‹al-Qaeda keeps constituting and reconstituting itself, ³deterritorializing² and "reterritorializing", decodifying and recodifying in an endless play of forces and energies—a fluid dynamism of nomadic practice.

One of the key components of bin Laden's forces is the elite "055 brigade" of Arab mercenaries. The brigade is a small unit of highly trained guerrilla fighters set up by bin Laden shortly after he arrived in Afghanistan five years ago. The 005 brigade numbers about 500 men. It has been based and trained at Rishikor, a former Afghan army base outside Kabul. US defense officials regard them as the most effective and disciplined foreign contingent. The 055 fighters are the elite of the 3,000 Arabs believed to have sought sanctuary in Afghanistan. They are extremely loyal to bin Laden and they are willing to die. The Arab fighters are not organised along traditional army structures, and borrow brigade names from the old Afghan army. They have an informal set-up and their tactics are informal too.

During the 1980s war against the Soviet occupation more than 25,000 Arab volunteers went to Afghanistan to join the mujahedin resistance. The other section of the "Arab-Afghans" included men from Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Chad, Mauritania, Somalia and Yemen, and Uyghurs from western China. Some came from Sudan, where bin Laden set up training camps before he returned to Afghanistan, while others are believed to have come from Indonesia. All were regarded as more ruthless than the mujahedin. After the war they dispersed across the world to join insurrections, some going to the Groupe Islamique armee in Algeria, others to fight in Kashmir, Somalia, Yemen, Azerbaijan, Bosnia, Chechnya and the Philippines.

When bin Laden sought sanctuary in Afghanistan in 1996 other Arab-Afghans joined him. The small 055 force was set up as a foreign legion to drive ahead with the vision shared by bin Laden and the regime of a global Islamist revolution.

The force has close contacts with militant groups fighting against Indian security forces in Kashmir, and with Islamist organisations trying to ferment revolt in central Asia, particularly the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. Additionally there have been reports in the period before the September 11 attacks that Juma Namangani, the movement¹s reclusive leader, had been appointed as one of the top commanders in the 055 brigade.

We declared jihad against the US government, because the US government is unjust, criminal and tyrannical. It has committed acts that are extremely unjust, hideous and criminal whether directly or through its support of the Israeli occupation of the Prophet¹s Night Travel Land (Palestine). And we believe the US is directly responsible for those who were killed in Palestine, Lebanon and Iraq. The mention of the US reminds us before everything else of those innocent children who were dismembered, their heads and arms cut off in the recent explosion that took place in Qana (in Lebanon). This US government abandoned even humanitarian feelings by these hideous crimes. It transgressed all bounds and behaved in a way not witnessed before by any power or any imperialist power in the world. They should have been considerate that the qibla (Mecca) of the Muslims upheaves the emotion of the entire Muslim World. (Osama bin Laden)

For the religious terrorist, violence is principally a sacramental act or divine duty executed in direct response to some theological demand/imperative. Religious terrorists regard themselves not as components of a structured system but as ³outsiders² seeking fundamental changes to an existing order.

The guerrilla fighter is the Jesuit of warfare.

(Che Guevara)

Ultimately it was America that became the focus of bin Laden's attention. "I believe that sooner or later the Americans will leave Saudi Arabia, and the war declared by America against the Saudi people means war against Muslims everywhere. Resistance against America will spread in many, many places in Muslim countries. Our trusted leaders, the ulema, have given us a fatwa that we must drive out the Americans. The solution to this crisis is the withdrawal of American troops— their military presence is an insult to the Saudi people," he said in 1996.

Jean Genet viewed the main object of a revolution as the liberation of man—not the interpretation and application of some transcendental ideology. Genet warned against the intoxication of empty symbols and slogans. "It is better to perform real actions of apparently small scope, than theatrical and futile manifestations." Symbols he believed refer back to actions that have already happened, not to future actions. Whereas every genuine revolutionary action cannot by definition be based on precedents, "All revolutionary acts," Genet stated, "are as fresh as the beginning of the World." In The Balcony and The Screens symbols are seen in a political light: Genet illustrates how revolutionary political movements run out of energy once they adopt the symbolism of the enemy (an army/flag/hierarchy), and are thus recuperated by the establishment.

In 1977 Genet published an article in L'Humanite - "Cathedrale de Chartres - Vue Cavaliere," a half-aesthetic, half-political reflection. Even when writing about this most French of all French monuments, Genet cannot help but contrast it with the Japanese shrine at Nara and speculate whether Arab workers did not contribute in its construction. Additionally, he returns to an idea that he had elaborated in the 1950's—that every human being is worth every other one. Now he generalizes this argument to suggest that every part of the planet, even the most isolated, is worth every other. With remarkable perceptiveness, Genet pinpoints one of the great contemporary paradoxes: at the very moment that all humanity seems to be striving towards one World, the old empires are breaking down into minuscule ethnic homelands. These opposite but equal forces are highly menacing—Genet recognised how they are linguistically overcoded in official terminology. Hypocrisy seemed apparent in the "liberal" acceptance of "the right to be different." Genet regarded that this notion would culminate in thousands left to starve to death. Despite a "mythical" interest in the "differences" of all the peoples of the World, those who belong to the Third World and are hungry bear a curious resemblance to one another. Characteristically, Genet started with the contemplation of a cathedral and ended up with an original political insight.

During the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, United States officials passed billions in funding and training to the mujahedin. The CIA, in particular while under the direction of William Casey—head of the agency during the Reagan administration—was the main manager of these operations. With the Russian withdrawal in 1989, the CIA celebrated a victory. These celebrations, under the presidency of George Bush, senior (himself a former CIA director) were premature. The sophisticated methods taught to the mujahedin, and the thousands of tons of arms supplied to them by the US and Britain, are now tormenting the west in the phenomenon known as ³blowback,² whereby a policy strategy rebounds on its own devisers. The sins of the father, it might well be said, are being heaped on the head of the son.

The U.S. helped train and equip the Afghan mujahedin, gifting them with potent Stringer missiles in their war against the invading Soviets. One of the fighters who benefitted from American largesse during this heady period was an obscure volunteer from Saudi Arabia with close links to its royal family‹Osma bin Laden. In 1986 the CIA even helped him build an underground camp at Khost, where he was to train recruits from across the Islamic world in the revolutionary art of jihad.

Twelve years later the Americans bombed the same camp; 34 people were killed by the attack. Bin Laden had left the camp an hour earlier. 75 American cruise missiles slammed into six training camps in the eastern Afghan hills. Other missiles demolished a medical factory in Sudan. The Muslim world exploded in anger and outrage. Bin laden was launched onto the global stage.

At this point, U.S. policy had come full circle. The cold war over, a new generation of mujahedin leaders emerged‹the Taliban. Bin Laden¹s jihad against communism was transformed into a war against ³the West² in general and America in particular. Having played Frankenstein, the West is now chasing after its very own monster.

Self-laceration may seem the last thing the US needs at the present moment. However, the lesson from these episodes is that only by facing up to its dark past will a beleaguered country be able to create a future in which terrorist attacks on the scale of The World Trade Centre can be avoided. The whole issue of the American ³creation² of bin Laden in the Frankenstein¹s laboratory of Afghanistan during the 1980s is generally avoided by government sources.

The accession in the US of President George W. Bush may shed fresh light on at least two central mysteries of the Taliban. The first is the extent to which the administration of Bill Clinton actively encouraged its former cold-war allies, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, to finance a tribal military force to end the misrule of the mujahedin in the post-Soviet years. The second—of greater sensitivity‹is to provide a coherent explanation for the studied incompetence of the FBI and CIA and other American intelligence agencies in addressing the alleged threats posed to the US by Osama bin Laden and his network. Appalling as they are, the events of September 11 may yet begin to force some dark secrets out into the light.

And when this war is over, it won¹t be over. The shadowy armies of bin Laden, in the emotional aftermath of his ³destruction,² will gather in numbers rather than wither away.

Bin Laden is a tall, slim man and towers over his companions. He has narrow, dark eyes, which stare hard as he speaks of his hatred of Western corruption. As you watch this image, you realise that, for many millions of Arabs in the Middle East, this represents a very powerful message. You didn¹t need instructions from bin Laden to form your own group of followers, to decide on your own individual actions. Bin Laden would not have to plan bombings or overthrow regimes. You only had to listen to the thousands of cassette tapes of his voice circulated clandestinely around the Middle East. Which is why the question arise‹always supposing bin Laden is directly responsible for the crime against humanity committed in the United States‹iwhether it would even be necessary to command a paramilitary organisation for such acts to happen. Arabs are angry enough at the injustices that they blame on America without needing orders from Afghanistan. Inspiration might just be enough.

An artistic, scientific or "ideological" movement may be a potential war machine precisely to the extent that it traces a plane of consistence, a creative line of flight, a smooth space in which to move, in relation to a phylum. It is not the nomad which defines this set of characteristics, but this set of characteristics which defines the nomad, at the same time as it does the essence of the war machine.

(Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari)

Things never occur in their pure form: in principle as well as reality, the relationship between opposing figures, as well as the relationship between these and the processes which embody them, is much more complex. It is this complexity which is vital in transforming the type of question it becomes useful or possible to ask, and which prevents Deleuzian metaphysics from remaining at the level of a simple axiological opposition. This complexity is illustrated by the interrelations between the war-machine and the State, and the manner in which these combine and draw upon one another, which prevent the war-machine from functioning as a simple model for practices of opposition to State forces.

In the first place, real processes or events can combine elements of opposing assemblages: for example, when a religious group/movement opposes tyranny and imperialism, on one hand, while re-imposing archaic forms of capture, on the other. In the second, the capacities of one assemblage may be co-opted by another, its powers being subordinated to those of the other. This occurs when a military was-machine is appropriated by the State. The nature of the war-machine is transformed since it takes war as its principle objective, being a line of destruction/death, rather than a creative line.

Nomadology does not essentially offer a political programme. Nor does it provide any straightforward political morality, in the sense of imperatives addressed to subjects. The recommedations which may be derived are always qualified, if only because of the dangers, or the alternative possibilities inherent in a line of flight or war machine. Nevertheless, Deleuze and Guattari suggest that while outcomes cannot be predicted, there are criteria.

The practical significance of the enterprise resides in the criteria it provides for the evaluation of processes, individual as well as social, which constitute our lives and projects. Evaluation, that is, not in any moralistic manner, but that of assessment/surveying: the question is never simply one of good or bad, but of specificity in each case. It is a matter of assessing the qualities present in a given situation, or the correct/valid nature of a given process: is it a creative or destructive line? A truly nomadic, or a perverted, war-machine?

Lines of flight are important because ³it is on them that the struggle changes, is displaced, and life reconstitutes its stakes, confronts new obstacles, invents new manners, modifies its adversaries.²

Three thousand people are dead in America. The greatest power in the world is angry and frightened. It is searching for one man. There is much unfinished business. Even as new countries are targeted (Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, the Philippines, also Uzbekistan, Paraguay and Uruguay) and war plans drawn up, there is an unsettling question over the war's direction so far. The Taliban did not attack New York. Al-Qaeda did. And they are still at large. Osama bin Laden has not been caught and the US do not seem to know where he is.

It is dusk, somewhere in the arid mountains of the Afghan border with Pakistan; a small group of men face the setting sun and kneel. As is customary, the most senior and respected among them takes a step forward and leads the group in prayer. Osama bin Laden gives thanks to Allah.

Would it matter if bin Laden were caught or killed? For all that the US hi-tech war machine has changed and adapted, so too has the enemy it faces. Bin Laden is already a hero to millions of young and disaffected Muslims around the world. His face has become an icon. If he is martyred—as seems inevitable‹others will almost certainly rise. Al-Qaeda itself, while shattered and broken in Afghanistan, is designed to withstand the weapons that the US has thrown against it. The US investigation has run into problems. Despite more than 1,000 arrests, the hunt for the network that planned the September 11 attacks has come to a stop, FBI officials privately admit. The focus of the investigation is switching to Western Europe. More globally, the FBI has moved for the first time to station agents in India and China. Terrorism has gone global and so has the hunt for the terrorists.

The US has also cracked down on sources of cash for al-Qaeda, seizing assets and winding up businesses worldwide. But despite constraints put on its financial networks, there is probably no shortage of funds available to its operatives. Even if a cash crisis did hit al-Qaeda, operatives could still raise their own money through crime. Each al-Qaeda cell can work independently; it does not need instructions from a centre point. Each member knows the type of target he should identify. This is leaderless resistance at its most refined. It is an organisation that is almost impossible to infiltrate.

In attacking the Taliban, the US has not come close to dealing al-Qaeda a mortal blow. US hi-tech weapons are new and innovative, but the enemy is spectral. Al-Qaeda does not require tanks or artillery, or planes or missiles. It does not seek to capture territory or invade America. As much as the Predator drones, the al-Qaeda fighter also has revolutionized the complexion of war. This is a whole New World.

The terrorist hunters face extensive difficulties. In the slums of Asian cities, in the refugee camps of Palestine and the madrassas of the Arab world, al-Qaeda is fighting battles in the minds of its converts. That is not an enemy that can be defeated by bombs and rockets, no matter how well targeted. As the suicidal pilots of September 11 showed, al-Qaeda¹s main weapon is the will to attack. And that will is not in short supply.

Beckett is the last writer to shape the way we think and see. After him, the major work involves midair explosions and crumbled buildings. This is the new tragic narrative...

(Don DeLillo - Mao 11)

Ernesto Che Guevara, "La guerra de guerrillas," in Guevara, Escritos y discursos.

See Jorge Castaneda, Companero, The Life and Death of Che Guevara, Trans. Maria Castaneda. Bloomsbury, London, 1988.

Robert Fisk - Independent 06.12.1996.

"Nomad Thought" - David B Allinson (Ed) The New Nietzsche - Contemporary Styles of Interpretation, Cambridge, Mass. MIT 1985

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia VolII (Trans. Brian Massumi), The Athlone Press, London, 1988

Peter Arnott, CNN Interview with Osama bin Laden, March 1998.

Interview with Jean Genet by Michele Manceaux. See Edmund White, Genet, Picador, London, 1993..

"Genet's Commencement Discourse," a preface by Allen Ginsberg to May Day Speech by Jean Genet, City Lights Books, San Francisco, 1970.

Jean Genet, "Cathedrale de Chartres - Vue cavaliere," L¹Humanite, 30^th June, 1977.

John Cooley, Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism, Pluto press.

Simon Reeves, The New Jackals: Ramiz Yousef, Osama bin Laden and the Future of Terrorism. Deutsche.

Michael Griffin, Reaping the Whirlwind: The Taliban Movement in Afghanistan. Pluto press.

Ahmed Rashid, Taliban: Islam, Oil and the New Great Game in Central Asia, Yale University Press.