Who do you think you are kidding, Mullah Omar...

Anatole Kaletsky has an excellent article in today's Times of London summing up what the collapse of the Taliban means. "Dynamist" Virginia Postrel has the link at her site together with some important addenda. The "war on terrorism" is a war on states that use and support terror. However entrenched they are, however repressive their regimes, they will not be able to stand up to a fraction of the military might that the US-UK alliance will throw at them. The Taliban stand (or rather, fell) as a dreadful lesson to those rulers. If there is decent evidence linking any state to Bin Laden and his gang of thugs, then that state too shall suffer. Dictatorships shall fall until they renounce terror forever. That is the only exit strategy we need from this war.

There will continue to be terrorists without state support, but their reach will be small and the damage they do will not approach the level we saw on September 11.

And all of us, American, Afghan, Pakistani, Briton, Indian, European, Israeli, Jordanian, shall sleep safer in our beds for that.