What is new in the United States' foreign policy is the declaration that it has the unique right to make war against any government that it considers inimical to its interests, and the notice that has been served upon the world to either support this policy or face retribution.

It has become quite clear that the real strategic aim of the United States (U.S.) is not so much a change of regime in Afghanistan but to obtain realignments of power across the globe. The destruction of the World Trade Centre (WTC) was by any reckoning an act of a group of desperadoes with so few resources that even after 12 days of bombings, which brought the main cities of Afghanistan - Mazaar-e-Sharif, Herat and even Kabul and Kandahar - close to collapse, the so-called "terror with a global reach" had not been able to retaliate even in one place in the entire world. Yet, the event has been cited by the U.S. time and again as the one that authorises it to make overt and covert wars wherever and whenever it so desires, in all corners of the globe.

In his televised address to the joint session of the U.S. Congress a few days after the hijackers' attack, President Bush claimed that there were tens of thousands of terrorists lurking in some 60 countries and the U.S. was going to wage a global, permanent war to weed them out from every nook and corner of the earth. As the pounding of Afghanistan began, John Negroponte, chief U.S. envoy to the United Nations, wrote a letter to the Security Council stating that "we may find that our self-defence requires further action with respect to other organisations and other states". This was undoubtedly the first communication in the history of the U.N. in which a member-state notified the Security Council of its intent to make war against other member-states without naming them, nor even revealing how many of the member-states were to be targeted. At about the same time, Canadian media revealed that soon after the WTC attack a Seattle-based company that makes maps had received instructions from the U.S. government to supply all existing maps of all parts of Afghanistan, and that by the end of the month it had received a similar instruction to forward all possible maps of Sudan and Yemen as well. Were they also to be targeted?

A week into the war on Afghanistan, International Herald Tribune reported that an influential group in the Pentagon, which possibly includes Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, was arguing that the next step in the war should be the ouster of Saddam Hussein by American forces in an operation that might include occupation of a part of Iraq so as to instal a "government" comprised of Iraqi exiles close to the U.S. and even the capture of oil fields near Basra in southern Iraq so as to sell the oil from there to pay the expenses of this puppet regime. This, despite the fact that a whole host of intelligence agencies, from the Israeli to the Jordanian – not to speak of Colin Powell, the U.S. Secretary of State – have said that Saddam had nothing to do with the September 11 attacks. The Defence Policy Board, a prestigious bipartisan board of national security experts that advises the Pentagon, was reported to have met for 19 hours to consider this option, with Henry Kissinger (Nixon's Secretary of State), Harold Brown (Carter's Defence Secretary), James Woolsey (Central Intelligence Agency Director during the Clinton regime), Admiral David Jeremiah (a former Deputy Chairman of the joint Chiefs of Staff), Newt Gingrich (the infamous Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives) and other such luminaries in attendance. In the light of his career as a chief spook, Woolsey was assigned the task of assembling "evidence" that would show Saddam's links to "terror with a global reach" and would then be used to prepare a "legal case" to justify such an operation. By now, the U.S. has even invented a name for this new global policy: "regime replacement". Any regime that is not to the liking of the U.S. may face such "replacement".

In the strict sense, of course, this is not a new policy. The U.S. has a long history of overt and covert interventions around the globe with the explicit aim of overthrowing existing governments. The Islamicist jehad in Afghanistan, which eventually gave rise to the Taliban, was itself product of such a policy, which was aimed at overthrowing the government of the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), and the policy had come into force well before the Soviet Union had intervened to defend that government. In more recent years, such a policy was implemented successfully in Yugoslavia and unsuccessfully in Somalia. What is new is a certain globalisation of this policy, a declaration that the U.S. has the unique right to make war against any and all governments that it considers inimical to its interests, and the notice that has been served upon the world to either support this policy or face retribution. Kofi Annan, who does the U.S. bidding in such matters, has even been awarded a Nobel prize for his efforts.

The internal settlement in Afghanistan, or the well-being of its inhabitants, is an insignificant part of the U.S.' objectives. More crucial is the project to re-draw the geo-strategic and political maps of the world. If the relentless destruction of Iraq has been a project to consolidate the Western alliance and silence the Third World through a decade-long demonstration of what the "sole superpower" can do to a Third World country after the "other superpower" - the Soviet Union - has been dismantled, this so-called "war on terrorism", starting with one of the poorest and long-suffering countries on this earth, is designed to draw the member-countries of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development actively into junior partnerships in warmongering and to tell the Third World that it is not only to be silenced but to actively serve in the imperial project, much as native armies used to be activated for colonial conquest.

Under Blair's stewardship, Britain has been drawn actively into a military action which, for that wretched country of colonial nostalgia, serves as something resembling the fourth Afghan War, with success guaranteed by the U.S. this time around. In Germany, where the post-War settlement had restricted the country's military might at home and military operations abroad, Gerhard Schroeder, at the head of the Socialist-led government, announced "unlimited solidarity" with the U.S.' "war on terrorism" and won 71 per cent of public support in the polls. He went on to announce the possibility of German troop involvement abroad, while his coalition partners, the supposedly pacifist Greens who supported the U.S. in the Kosovo invasion, sat gaping. In Japan, equally constrained after the Second World War, a parliamentary panel has already drafted a new law that would enable the country to despatch troops for war operations abroad. China, the most powerful country in the Third World, has abandoned its long-standing policy of opposition to any U.N. role in the internal affairs of member-states, calling upon the U.N. to play an active role in putting together the ruling coalition in Afghanistan after the Americans have succeeded in overthrowing the Taliban regime.

The case of Russia is the most pathetic. Inheriting a land that had been defeated by the U.S. when the latter foisted a bunch of Islamicist murderers upon Afghanistan, the current Russian Duma simply passed a resolution echoing the words of Bush to the effect that not only terrorist organisations but also governments that support terrorism must be punished. Russian President Vladimir Putin briefly balked at the idea that member-states of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) would offer any facilities for the Americans, but then fell in line as other states simply ignored him. Tajikistan, a member of the CIS Collective Security Treaty, offered its airspace; Uzbekistan went further and offered its military bases; Kazakhstan offered air corridors for access to Afghanistan, as did Kyrgyzstan; and Turkmenistan, eying the possibility for a pipeline to take its gas through Afghanistan and thus realigning its oil economy with the U.S. instead of Russia, opened up its airspace as well as territory for military operations. In the process, Uzbekistan became almost as important as Pakistan for the American war on Afghanistan. At length Russia too offered airspace for so-called "humanitarian aid".

These items of piecemeal news in fact signify a historic realignment in maps of global power. For, America's Afghan War, which began in the Soviet period and has now lasted for over two decades, has always had the key dimension of a fight for control over the immense and largely untapped economic resources of the Asian republics of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). The competition for pre-eminence in the region has been fierce between Russia and the U.S. even after the dissolution of the USSR. Even the Taliban was brought in, by the Pakistanis but with American backing, with the calculation that its dependence on Pakistan would facilitate the American and Pakistani economic interests in the region, notably the oil and gas interests in Turkmenistan. Turkey itself was once encouraged to play a forward role in the region on America's behalf, thanks to its historic ties with the region, harking back to the Ottoman period, and if Turkey now agrees to play the gendarme in Afghanistan, it would be with an eye to that role in a region for which Afghanistan is something of an underbelly. What this current phase of the war on Afghanistan has brought about is this re-alignment of the resource-rich Central Asian states with the U.S. at the expense of Russia, in a time when Russia itself has no alternatives.

Iran presents us with an equally important and complex case. Ali Khamenei, heir to the authority of the chief jurisconsult in Iran after the death of Ayatollah Khomeini, has denounced American attack on Afghanistan and the government of President Khatami has dutifully denied the U.S. the use of Iranian airspace for those operations. However, the same government has offered cooperation in rescuing and safeguarding any personnel if a U.S. aircraft were shot down in that airspace and is urging the Northern Alliance to cooperate with the U.S. This paradoxical policy framework is related to the fact that Iran almost went to war with the Taliban in 1998, has always feared for the plight of the Shia sectarian minority under the rabidly Sunni rule of the Taliban, is host to over a million Afghan refugees, and is fearful of the influx of more refugees, narcotics and weapons. It also fears that the war may lead to a north-south division of Afghanistan and a continued civil war as a consequence; or that Pakistan would engineer a government out of its clients, past and present; or that the monarchy would be re-established in Afghanistan. Its official position is that Burhanuddin Rabbani's government, which is recognised by the U.N., should take power after the Taliban has been routed, as an interim step before a broad-based government is assembled. In this context, then, Iran is reported to have intelligence-sharing arrangements with the U.S. and is in active dialogue over the question of the post-Taliban dispensation in Kabul. The U.S. has returned the favour by carrying out a comprehensive policy review so as to prepare a 'tilt' toward Iran against Iraq. Enemies of the recent past are fast becoming strategic allies.

Tests of loyalty have been required globally. Most of the bombing missions have been carried out from offshore aircraft-carriers but troops have been stationed in "countries within striking distance", such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, Tajikistan, Pakistan, as well as Diego Garcia. NATO was reminded early that the U.S. had treaty rights to seek cooperation. Australia has been pressed to promise active military support while Canada is pressed to alter even its own regulations for immigration and border checking. Indonesia has had to pledge support in the face of a popular opposition so threatening that U.S. operatives are already stationed in the country to pick out the more militant elements. Even North Korea has issued a statement that could be construed, and has been so construed in Washington, as a declaration of support for the U.S.