But the Taliban and bin Laden are not Afghanistan. They're not even the government of Afghanistan.

The Taliban is a cult of ignorant psychotics. Bin Laden is a political criminal with a plan. When you think Taliban, think Nazis. When you think bin Laden, think Hitler. When you think "the people of Afghanistan" think "the Jews in the concentration camps".

It's not only that the Afghan people had nothing to do with this atrocity: they were the first victims of the perpetrators. The people would exult if someone went in there, took out the Taliban and cleared out the rat's nest of international thugs holed up in their country.

Why don't the Afghans rise up and overthrow the Taliban? The answer is, they're starved, exhausted, hurt, incapacitated.

A few years ago, the UN estimated there were 500,000 disabled orphans. There are millions of widows, the soil is littered with land mines and the farms were destroyed by the Soviets.

We come now to the question of bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age. Trouble is, that's been done. The Soviets took care of it already. Make the Afghans suffer? They're already suffering. Level their houses? Done. Turn their schools into piles of rubble? Done. Eradicate their hospitals? Done. Destroy their infrastructure? Cut them off from medicine and healthcare? Too late. Someone already did all that. New bombs would only stir the rubble of earlier bombs.

Would they at least get the Taliban? Not likely. In today's Afghanistan, only the Taliban eat, only they have the means to move around. They'd slip away and hide. Maybe the bombs would get some of those disabled orphans; they don't move too fast, they don't even have wheelchairs. But flying over Kabul and dropping bombs wouldn't really be a strike against the criminals who did this horrific thing. Actually it would only be making common cause with the Taliban – by raping once again the people they've been raping all this time.

What can be done, then? Let me now speak with fear and trembling. The only way to get bin Laden is with ground troops. When people speak of "having the belly to do what needs to be done", they're thinking of having the belly to kill as many as needed, to overcome any moral qualms about killing innocent people.

But let's pull our heads out of the sand. What's actually on the table is Americans dying. Not just because some would die fighting their way through to bin Laden's hideout. It's much bigger than that, folks.

To get troops to Afghanistan, we'd have to go through Pakistan. Would they let us? Not likely. The conquest of Pakistan would have to be first. Will other Muslim nations just stand by? You see where I'm going. We're flirting with a world war between Islam and the West.

Guess what: that's bin Laden's program. That's exactly what he wants. That's why he did this.

Read his speeches and statements. It's all right there. He really believes Islam would beat the West. It might seem ridiculous, but he figures if he can polarise the world into Islam and the West, he's got a billion soldiers. If the West wreaks a holocaust in those lands, that's a billion people with nothing left to lose; that's even better from bin Laden's point of view.

He's probably wrong. In the end the West would win, whatever that would mean. But the war would last for years and millions would die, not just theirs but ours. Who has the belly for that? Bin Laden does. Anyone else?

Salon.