"People" in this case is Afghans who lived under the Taliban and now appear to welcome it back. Between 1996, when the Taliban took Kabul, and 2001, when the U.S. effected a quick and apparently decisive military victory in reaction to 9/11, the Taliban was in complete control. The nightmare datum in modern times is that people who have had such experiences as living under the Taliban -- where it is all but a capital offense to be born a girl -- should, having been liberated from it, move back in the direction of revived life in pain. It is as if in 1950 the German people had drifted back toward life under Nazism.
President Bush, on July Fourth, spoke of the global challenge we're engaged in "against the followers of a murderous ideology that despises freedom and crushes all dissent. ... Against such an enemy there is only one effective response: We will never back down, we will never give in, and we will never accept anything less than complete victory."
The sentiments merit universal applause. But what as a practical matter do you do, e.g., in Afghanistan, where the people, having voted robustly for a constitutional state and elected a president with fine credentials, go on to intimate a desire to return to barbarism? David Rohde of The New York Times opened his dispatch from Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand: "On a July morning, Taliban gunmen shot dead the province's most powerful cleric as he walked to the main city mosque to lead morning prayers. Five months later, they executed a teacher at a nearby village school as students watched. The following month, they walked into another mosque and gunned down an Afghan engineer working for a foreign aid group, shooting him in the back as he pressed his forehead to the ground and supplicated to God."
God works in mysterious ways, among them His failure to act at all. Mr. Bush acknowledges the complexity of the terrorist problem, but his triumphalist rhetoric is at odds with realities that have us wondering what to do about poppies, let alone devising means of educating 30 million people in the depredations of life under such a regime as is nevertheless making its way back to power and popularity. Sometimes bedevilment shakes its unruly head and says: Give those people the poppies and require them to inject themselves every day with their delirious substance.
All right, all right, one gets carried away. But what can the leader of the free world do, beyond reiterating our homilies?