Afghanistan! Senator Hatch's Proud Achievement.

The terror plots thwarted in the United Kingdom attempting to cause "unimaginable mass casualties" was a victory for all peace-loving individuals worldwide. We were prevented from waking up with hundreds, maybe thousands, of bodies strewn over England and floating in the Atlantic Ocean.

This signals a great, short-term success because either a member of this operation gave Scotland Yard information or Scotland Yard has highly effective intelligence sources. It also signals that perhaps Al-Qaeda is leaking more secrets than it knows which may, in turn, lead to a complete disruption in all European cells. All good news.

And now the failures. But bear with me for a minute to make sure we're on the same page.

It is now an undisputed fact that, during the 1980s, our C.I.A. operatives were training Osama Bin Laden and the mujahideen (Afghan 'freedom fighters') to destroy the Soviet Union using camps known in Washington as "terrorist universities". Tom Carew, a former British SAS soldier who fought for the mujahideen in an August 13th interview to the British Observer said, "The Americans were keen to teach the Afghans the techniques of urban terrorism - car bombing and so on..." What they also taught the mujahideen was to hijack commercial airliners and fly them into civilian Soviet targets.

Once the Soviets were driven from Afghanistan resulting in the Taliban take over, the American troops settled into the Muslim holy land of Saudi Arabia. Osama Bin Laden stated his opposition to this sacriligious invasion and called for the overthrow of the client Middle East regimes (Iraq being one of them) and vowed to turn the United States into a "wasteland". Senator Orrin Hatch, a senior member of the Senate Intelligence Committee which openly approved U.S. operations with the mujahideen, said he would "make the same call again". Unfortunately, that thoughtless quote came after the September 11th attacks.

And there, my readers, is the first major failure. We have Senators such as Orrin Hatch who think nothing of training mass murderers to kill civilians. Who believe that their ideology somehow excludes them from decency both in war and in peace and, who believe, that the death of 3,000 innocent civilians on American soil is worth setting up a failed and dangerous fundamentalist Islamic state in Central Asia. Maybe you agree with this too. If so, perhaps you should travel to Afghanistan and see how well Senator Hatch's policies have worked. Bring some Kevlar.

The second major failure is this: How many terrorists are we training today? In our "war on terrorism" (a war in which we presumably win when everyone loves us?) who are we training to kill who will then kill us? Or maybe the next wave of terror will come from those we've tortured, or the families of the disappeared? After all, can you imagine someone you love being tortured for years on end without hope of release? In treating the world as an enemy, we become nothing but a target. Our successes should be celebrated, but our failures should be remedied. And soon.