The war in Afghanistan should in my view not be discussed primarily in moral terms, balancing the claims of the parties involved against each other, but in material terms. The question that has to be posed, then, is what drives the West, or as I would call it, the 'Lockean heartland' configured around the English-speaking world, in this 'crusade'.
My answer to this is that George Bush Jr. for once accurately used an English phrase here. What we are looking at is indeed a crusade. It developed in response to momentous challenges to the system which built up in the 1960s and early 70s. At the time, the capitalist ruling class was on the defensive across the globe, and its managerial cadre was drifting away from capitalist discipline and making concessions to the metropolitan working classes, to the ruling elites of the Soviet bloc, to aspiring Third World state classes, and even to liberation movements in the imperialist periphery.
Detente, as well as various schemes for a New International Economic Order (including such projects as raw material price stability and codes of conduct for multinational corporations) were increasingly limiting the freedom of manoeuvre of capital. At the same time, the increased power of the metropolitan working classes in the Fordist mass production economy which was showing signs of exhaustion, coupled to the youth revolt of May 1968, seemed to herald the coming of a new era. True, in hindsight, some of these shifts may appear limited and contradictory, and others, such as the hedonistic counterculture, could even lay the foundations for a new round of capital accumulation. But at the time OPEC, the unprecedented US withdrawal from Vietnam, and the going over to the 'socialist camp' of Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau after the collapse of Portuguese colonialism caused severe concern. In Portugal, Leninist insurrectionism could still be thwarted, but the more circumspect yet apparently inexorable advance of French and especially, Italian communism by 1976-'77, only added to fears about a world apparently moving into a stage of transition away from capitalism, to a mixture of enhanced democracy, a negotiated international economic structure, and indeed a mixed economy on a global scale.
The collapse of the USSR, the transformation in China, and the virtual breakdown of the state-led model of economic growth in much of the former Third World, are all just moments in the crusade’s unfolding. What they register is the advance, on a world scale, of neoliberal- minded ruling classes who are striving off their national commitments and displacing their loyalty to the sovereignty of capital on a world scale. The visible aspect of this global unification is the meeting of minds which takes place annually in the World Economic Forum in Davos (prepared and assisted by much more frequent regional meetings), and in all the other planning networks in which the active ruling class and its top managerial cadre regularly assemble.
Certainly the collapse of the USSR and much of the (state-) socialist heritage that went down with it, also marks an important turning point itself, in that the Western counteroffensive has become unfocused and paradoxically, become even more high-pitched ideologically, this time against 'terrorism'. But as Mark Duffield has shown, there was a clear trend already to recast the whole 'development' ideology in terms of remaking the world in the West's image; militancy on the part of leaders not part of the Western consensus was increasingly re-defined as criminal, greed-driven pathology. Adding 'genocide' to the indictment of Serbian president Milosevic is not so much a triumph for justice as it is a sign to what length the West is willing to go in order to obtain the show-trials by which it wants to bring home the message that, as Sussex historian Angus Calder has put it, 'murdering Gaels, or foreigners, or Red Indians, as part of a royal army or with royal approval, was patriotic, heroic, and just, whereas to defend yourself and your way of life against the advancing forces of English-speaking empire showed human nature at its worst and most bestial'.
On the other side of the divide, the opponents of Western capitalism and the Lockean configuration of state and society which allows the transnational unification of the ruling class, those resisting its discipline have also been confined to a new universe. The defeat of socialism, Dick Boer argued briefly after the USSR's collapse, implies the disappearance of a countermovement against capitalism which yet was part of 'modernity'--in the sense that it did not reject the insights and achievements of Enlightenment but rather their perversion in late-bourgeois society. Socialism confronted capitalism with its own programme: freedom, equality, and fraternity. Gorbachev's final attempt to reach out to the West and achieve a historic compromise between capitalism and socialism in light of the threat to humanity's survival on the planet, Boer notes, failed because for the West, confident of its power relative to a weakened adversary, there was no need to accept such a compromise.
“Since for the actual countermovement, an appeal to the ideals of the Enlightenment itself has become a totally frustrated enterprise, terrorism is the 'solution' to which the 'free world', claiming all reason for itself, compels. The opponents of the inhumanity of our 'free world' turn into the barbarians we have made of them: the irrationality of our rationality drives them to madness. And this barbarity is then ascribed to them as their 'essence'.”

The suicide attacks on New York and Washington and the ensuing war in Afghanistan have brought the prior crusade and its remaining targets together in a single historical drama. But they also expose the limits of the neoliberal project. They highlight to what extent the aggressive forward push of Western capital and the heartland states into the periphery, and the processes of transnational class formation with which it interacts, has become bogged down in an area where their precepts are entirely inappropriate, and the doctrine of individual human rights is as exotic as jacuzzi bathrooms or sitcom TV. Indeed one effect of the neoliberal counterrevolution launched originally by Reagan and Thatcher, is the near-complete destruction of the redistributive effects of states relative to their own economy, and of international bargaining between states relative to the world economy. Inequalities across the globe as a result have dramatically increased. The insustainability of the intensified exploitation of society and nature by neoliberal capitalism, is now becoming apparent in endemic violence that faces the capitalist heartland as a terrorist threat of which it fails to recognise, let alone tackle, the deeper sources.
Even so, we should not feel that terrorism is the solution to anything, or the only remaining form of effective resistance. In the last few years, resistance on the contrary has produced new forms, such as an 'anti-globalisation' movement which unifies, in a loose fashion, a wide range of local forms of peasant, worker, and youth resistance. Increasingly, this planetary grid of resistance against an exhaustive capitalist discipline is acquiring its own organisational infrastructure and recruiting organic intellectuals and allies from disaffected managerial cadre, in states, international organisations, NGOs, and elsewhere. This development, rather than the attacks on the US and the war of revenge launched against Afghanistan, marks what I see as the real limit to neoliberal globalisation.