Everywhere you can see we are preparing for war. We have given blood for the wounded. We have begun signing up at army recruitment offices. We have declared the attacks acts of war and written the President a $2 billion blank check to fight World War III.

Since no one has taken responsibility for the attack, we have begun the speedy process of assigning blame.

Right now the finger seems to point to Osama bin Laden harbored in Afghanistan by the Taliban government. Bin Laden has long been a worthy target for arrest, capture and trial, for planning and carrying out terrorist attacks. Afghanistan has long been a Cold War battleground upon which America and the Soviet Union maneuvered.

Bush spoke Wednesday about punishing not just those involved in the attacks, but also the countries who tolerated the presence of terrorists on their soil. The unstated reference was to Afghanistan. Already the voices in Congress have been retributive and angry. Rep. Zell Miller (D-Ga.) said on Wednesday that the U.S. should simply, “bomb the hell out of [Afghanistan].”

Afghanistan is not a photogenic country. Four years of famine, 22 years of war and a repressive, uneducated, fundamentalist regime has not improved its face to the world. It has no oil, and its strategic value was mostly lost after the end of the Cold War. Oil companies would still love to build a pipeline through Afghanistan, but other than a corridor between the Middle East and Russia or China, it has little international value. The Taliban’s actions, such as destroying ancient Buddhist statues, have not endeared them to the Islamic world any more than to the western. The only country that recognizes the Taliban government is Pakistan, the country where many of the Taliban leaders were first indoctrinated in refugee camps they fled to as children during the protracted civil war.