International Community in
Afghanistan comtinues...

If that is so, and to hate us leads them to kill us, then obviously there can be no dialogue. We must simply get them before they get us. Vice President Cheney would later elaborate, “There will be no summit meeting, no negotiations with terrorists. This conflict can only end in their complete and utter destruction.”

But having presented the case for unremitting war, the president acknowledged that the terrorists had certain relatively limited aims: They want to overthrow existing governments in many Muslim countries, such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan. They want to drive Israel out of the Middle East. They want to drive Christians and Jews out of vast regions of Asia and Africa….

With every atrocity they hope that America grows fearful, retreating from the world and forsaking our friends.

That explanation comes closest to what Bin Laden’s ownpronouncements revealed. In 1996, the year of the attack against the Khobar Towers in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, where nineteen American servicemen were killed, Laden had issued a Declaration of War Against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Mosques. In February 1997, Laden had announced the formation of the “World Islamic Front for Jehad Against Jews and Crusaders,” including such groups as the Egyptian Islamic Jehad, to which President Bush specifically referred in his address to Congress as constituting part of the Al-Qaedanetwork. On 23 February 1998, less than six months before theAugust 1998 bombing of the US embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, that left more than 300 dead and 5,000 wounded The Front issued its “fatwa” to all Muslims “to kill the Americans and their allies—civilian and military.” Killing Americans was declared to be “an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it, in order to liberate the Al-Aqsa Mosque [in Jerusalem] and the holy mosque [in Mecca] from their grip, and in order for their armies to move out of all the lands of Islam, defeated and unable to threaten any Muslim.

To be continued...