Cornered
The Taliban is neither new nor scary.

By Victor Davis Hanson, author most recently of Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power.
September 19, 2001 8:40 a.m.

ithin the last several hours the Taliban in Afghanistan have been variously reported as in hiding, preparing their forces for a border war, denying bin Laden was in their custody, offering to let a "neutral" Islamic "court" adjudicate his future, calling for a jihad against the United States, and threatening Muslim neighbors who ally themselves with the United States. It would be a grave mistake to listen seriously to any of this prattle, worse still to think their apparently contradictory and inexplicable behavior represents real power or danger.

In fact, their passive-aggressive bluster is typical of the usual last howls of all cornered thugs and dictators. Goebbels continued to broadcast doom to the allies hours before he blew his brains out. As American armies raced through the carcass of Germany, Admiral Dönitz in the last minutes of Nazism still issued threats and demands to the Allies concerning the conditions of German capitulation. Japanese fanatics under General Anami promised to overthrow the brokered surrender and lead Japan to eternal victory amid the ashes of Hiroshima — shortly before committing suicide as the American fleet made ready to sail into Tokyo Bay.

In the past, we scoffed at all these desperate attempts of murderous and illegitimate governments to salvage their eroding power. So too we must with the Taliban, who possess neither the skill nor terror of those whom we obliterated in World War II. The only difference is that they have panicked even before we have fired a shot.

The empty rhetoric of the Taliban offers even greater lessons still. In the months to come we must not delude ourselves that the "new" enemy of Islamic fundamentalism has suddenly arisen to change entirely the rules of war. Their terrorism, fanaticism, and even suicide bombers are not novel. They find parallels throughout history from the conquest of Mexico to the siege of Cyprus in 1571 to the Kamikaze attacks on the American fleet off Okinawa.

Instead, we must remember in this present crisis that military precedent and behavior, based as they are on the unchanging nature of man, always endure. In this case they teach us that all illegitimate and murderous regimes, when they are last stripped of their terror and the illusion of power, threaten even as they broker to save their own skins. The Taliban will do the same until the last bullet finally puts an end to their evil.

As Afghanistan's neighbors — untrustworthy states like Iran and Pakistan, who until days ago harbored terrorists but now are themselves in deadly fear of U.S. bombs — seal their borders, the threats of the cornered Taliban will become even more surreal as they are empty. This is a good sign that they recognize, as we do, that their end is near.

We are witnessing a great change in the balance of the power in the world. Formidable states like India and Russia, both secular democracies with historical ties to Europe, will gravitate to us even as the Arab world — with ruined economies and without a single elected government — finds itself weakening by the day. The United States has awoken from its moral slumber and found itself not feeble, but fearsome beyond its wildest imagination.

We have suffered a grave defeat — more dead than on Iwo Jima — not because we were intrinsically weak, but rather because we, like the Greeks on the eve of Thermopylae, were naïve and unprepared. Western republics and democracies anger slowly, but the wages of their wrath — 60,000 dead at Salamis, 80,000 at Lepanto, 100,000 in the streets of Tokyo — are often catastrophic for any who wrongly dismissed them as soft and decadent. The Taliban sound ferocious, but that is because the most dangerous place in the world in the next few weeks will be Kabul not Manhattan.