Anti-Americanism has taken the world by storm

The US has an ideological enemy harder to defeat than militant Islam

Salman Rushdie Wednesday February 6, 2002 The Guardian

They told us it would be a long, ugly struggle, and so it is. America's war against terror has entered its second phase, a phase characterised by the storm over the condition, status and human rights of the prisoners held at Camp X-Ray, and by the frustrating failure of the US to find Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar.

Additionally, if America now attacks other countries suspected of harbouring terrorists, it will almost certainly do so alone, without the backing of the coalition that supported the action in Afghanistan. The reason is that America finds itself facing an ideological enemy that may turn out to be harder to defeat than militant Islam: that is to say, anti-Americanism, which is presently taking the world by storm.

The good news is that these post-Taliban days are bad times for Islamist fanatics. Dead or alive, Bin Laden and Omar look like yesterday's men, unholy warriors who forced martyrdom on others while running for the hills themselves. Also, if the persistent rumours are to be believed, the fall of the terrorist axis in Afghanistan may well have prevented an Islamist coup against President Musharraf in Pakistan, led by the more Taliban-like elements in the armed forces and intelligence services - people like the terrifying General Hamid Gul.

And Musharraf, no angel himself, has been pushed into arresting the leaders of the Kashmiri terrorist groups he used to encourage. (It's just two and a quarter years since he unleashed the same groups against India and engineered the last Kashmir crisis.)

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