A defining feature of the September 11 attacks and their aftermath has been the tumult of opinion: about the perpetrators and their motivation; about appropriate retaliatory action; about whether US foreign policy ought to share any sense of culpability. Whatever your position on these issues, it is clear that the new global climate heralded by these attacks has at its centre a multitude of what Andrew Motion last week called "ideological faultlines". In the past these opposing positions reached us only through the filter of our own media, but now the web gives us direct access to them all.
CNN, the CIA, and the Whitehouse all talk about the US war on terror, with updates on the bombing of Afghanistan and the search for Osama bin Laden. The FBI has a <a href=""Wild West-style wanted poster for Bin Laden online.
But there are different perspectives within the US. www.afghan-web.com is an information site maintained by American-Afghanis. The site, headed "the friendliest country in the world_" condemns terrorism but makes no explicit reference to September 11. Instead there is information on Afghanistan's economy and culture, including contemporary and classical Afghan poetry (Jalaluddin Rumi's Enough Words? is especially pertinent), Mulla Nasruddin jokes, and images of ancient clay pots; all of which combine to make the Afghan people seem more vulnerable than the familiar images of Kalashnikovs imply.
Other sites talk of the rift of opinion within the Muslim community , here and abroad . The Muslim News, a UK Muslim monthly newspaper, has an online section dedicated to the September 11 attacks from a UK Muslim perspective www.muslimnews.co.uk/news.
A research team from Birzeit University in Palestine conducted an opinion poll this month on 1,200 Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, on the Intifada and America's relations with the Arab world - 89% of those questioned thought the US was unjustified in attacking Afghanistan, and 64% said attacking civilians in the US is inconsistent with Islam. You can read the results at http://home.birzeit.edu.
Arab.net has links to contrasting opinion sites from every country in the Arab world and the Muslim Student Association has a range of links to Western and Islamic opinion on Bin Laden and his jihad against America http://msanews.mynet.net/Scholars/Laden.
China, the largest country to share a border with Afghanistan, has been typically soft-spoken on the "war on terrorism". Still, China.org has a series of opinion pieces from Chinese newspapers at www.china.org.cn/english.
Afghanistan's other neighbours, the states of the Caucasus region to the north, are crucial territories for oil reserves and pipeline routes to Europe and Asia. The struggle to control the flow of oil is central to the politics of the region and will inevitably work its way into longer-term discussions about US action in Afghanistan. Caucasus Watch is an excellent resource for understanding the pressures from world powers on the region.
What about Afghanistan itself, and its al-Qaida houseguests? The Wall Street Journal recently reported that Lycos and Yahoo were deleting pro-terrorist content (if you are a WSJ subscriber you can read the piece at http://interactive.wsj.com/archive.
A pro-jihad site, named after a mentor of Bin Laden, www.azzam.com , was recently shut down following requests from the FBI, and US hackers have repeatedly taken out sites such as www.taleban.com , owned by the Afghan Taleban Mission to the UN. Islamic fundamentalist sites less connected to Bin Laden have so far escaped unscathed: Hizballah, the Arabic Islamic struggle movement of the same name, has posted a statement on the attacks at www.hizballah.org/english/ .
Unsurprisingly for a country where the internet is officially banned, there are few online representations of the Afghan people. At www.iranian.com/Opinion/2001/June/Afghan, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, a filmmaker from neighbouring Iran who has produced two films about Afghanistan, paints his own complex view - written before the September tragedy - of a traumatised nation. And a writer for Salon magazine, who visited Pakistan's number two Taliban official last week in his Islamabad home, takes a humanising look at life on the other side of the divide in her article at www.salon.com/news.
As the recent accidental inclusion of Sesame Street's Bert in a pro-Bin Laden banner carried by hundreds of Pakistani Taliban supporters ( www.cnn.com/2001/US/10/11/muppets.binladen ) reminds us, we live in a foreshortened world. The web helps us to remember that this new closeness can be a blessing, as well as a threat.
