Dialogue: When freedom calls, all doors swing open

By JOHN ROUGHAN

Well I'll be damned; the people of Kabul seem pleased to see us.

By "us" I don't mean the rugged troopers of the Northern Alliance necessarily, nor even the BBC reporters who went in with them and sent back unforgettable pictures and personal accounts of the reception.

The residents of Kabul seemed pleased to see the return of the life we share. Women were allowed to show their faces and men could shave again. Little things. Freedom.

There were telling incidents, such as the man cheering as a soldier climbed a tree to remove the sign outside the Committee for the Prevention of Vice and the Preservation of Virtue. The fellow had been imprisoned there for three days when his beard was shorter than regulation length.

The reports mentioned the lifting of a ban on women working or studying and the return of music to Kabul radio.

It is mildly infuriating that the joy on those faces came as a revelation to me. The curse of a liberal outlook has been the obligation in logic to concede the possibility that liberties are not necessarily a universal human desire.

There is a tendency when you live in a country like this, taking for granted the power of speaking, spending and voting, to assume that one way or another every regime survives by the will of the governed.

When intelligent people said that democracy, human rights and free markets were merely a Western cultural construct, damn it, I half-believed it.

The contrarians have always been particularly dismissive of "Western" liberties whenever the United States promotes them or, heaven forbid, fights for them. The dust of the World Trade Center had not settled before they were blaming the victim.

In September a professor at the London School of Economics, John Gray, a noted critic of globalisation, declared: "The world's richest states have acted on the assumption that people everywhere want to live as they do.

"As a result, they failed to recognise the deadly mixture of emotions - cultural resentment, the sense of injustice and genuine rejection of western modernity - that lies behind the attacks on New York and Washington ... The idea of a universal civilisation is a recipe for unending conflict, and it is time it was given up."

I wonder what he was thinking as he watched television on Tuesday. Seeing the delight on those faces, did he suffer a niggle in his convictions? Perhaps he was consoled by the fact that the long-suffering citizens of Kabul had similarly greeted the Taleban five years ago when it displaced the fractious mujahideen, many of whom have returned in the Northern Alliance.

And the mujahideen had received the same welcome when the Soviet puppet government fell. Maybe it is just one of those quaint cultural practices. Or maybe, hope springs eternal.

Probably Professor Gray and his ilk were more interested this week in events in Doha, the Gulf city hosting the World Trade Organisation's second attempt to start another round of global trade liberalisation.

To their undoubted chagrin it succeeded, helped considerably by the shock delivered to the world on September 11. Not only that. The terrorists sheltered by the Taleban have, with one stroke, revived the case for free trade, forced a new and unconvincing American President to face his global obligations and made Russia this week his disarming buddy.

Not a bad achievement for that "deadly mixture of cultural resentment, sense of injustice and genuine rejection of western modernity".

Gray was at least closer to the truth about the Taleban and the terrorists, I think, than most of those who have ascribed their favourite cause to them.

The striking thing about Osama bin Laden's home videos was how familiar he seemed. The smooth skin and delicate movements did not look like those of a hardened guerilla. He reminded me for all the world of any comfortable, crazy malcontent you can meet on the outlying fringe of politics anywhere. Their sense of alienation is their sustenance.

The more rich and privileged their opportunities, the more deadly their resentment. We read that bin Laden, like the suicide pilots of September 11, was not poor. They came from the Arab middle class. He went to Europe, studied, travelled and developed an abiding resentment of the world's attitude to himself and his beliefs.

He regards the Taleban as the one true Islamic regime, but it is now obvious that not many Afghans are as enamoured of it.

Most people, like George W. Bush, probably never imagined the folk living under the Taleban were much different from themselves, and had no difficulty imagining their discontent. But I confess I did.

In fact there were times during the past six weeks of bombing when I wondered why the Taleban did not simply invite in the hordes of frustrated film crews who could not get closer than Pakistan. The consequences of the odd stray missile would have been transmitted in agonising detail, feeding the outrage of those who deny any moral distinction between unintended "collateral" death and the deliberate murder of non-combatants.

The junior partner in our governing coalition would have started to flake on the war long before last weekend.

It is obvious now why the Taleban could not have the international media wandering about Kabul. They would have discovered a seriously repressed population.

And some of us would have realised sooner that when it comes to freedom and pleasure people are not so very different after all.