Frontline Volume 18 - Issue 22, Oct. 27 - Nov. 09, 2001
Re-mapping the globe
By Aijaz Ahmad
As I begin drafting this essay on 18 October, on the twelfth day of the war on Afghanistan, it has become quite clear that the real strategic aim is not so much a change of regime in Afghanistan but to obtain re-alignments of power across the globe. The destruction of the World Trade Centre was by any reckoning an act of a group of desperados with so few resources that even after twelve days of bombings which have brought the main cities of Afghanistan-Mazaar-e-Sharif, Herat and even Kabul and Kanadhar-close to collapse, the so-called "terror with a global reach" has not been able to retaliate even in one place in the entire world. Yet, the event has been cited by the U.S. time and again as the one that authorises it to make overt and covert wars wherever and whenever it so desires, in all corners of the globe.
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