Chambers Street, New York, 11 September 2001. David Farquhar/Flickr. Some rights reserved.These weekly analyses started immediately after the attacks in New York and Washington on 11 September 2001, and as this is the seven-hundred-and-fiftieth column it is perhaps appropriate to reflect on developments in what was soon called the 'war on terror'.
In the wake of 9/11 there was widespread support across western governments for strong military action against al-Qaida and its Taliban hosts in Afghanistan, although from the start there were voices expressing another view. The first column in this series warned that the atrocities should be seen as a provocation by al-Qaida to drag the west into a long drawn-out war in central Asia. Oxford Research Group published a longer report along the same lines (see "The United States, Europe and the majority world after 11 September", ORG, September 2001).
The scholar-activist Walden Bello, taking an even wider view, condemned the attacks but went on presciently to argue:
