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I would have given dire warnings about the 'Alliance' (i.e. the Yanks plus a British Army mobile laundry unit) taking on the Taleban. I was predicting a long and bloody conflict with bin Laden's herberts fighting fanatically from valley to valley and George Dubya finding himself in another Vietnam, Somalia, whatever you like.

Well, that didn't happen, so laugh away. I'm prepared to concede that the CIA knew more about it than I did. But it's not over yet. And there is still plenty wrong with the way this is being dealt with.

Almost all the Taleban, apart from the 400 or so who were shot while trying to escape (which can happen), are still with us. The fact that many of them have 'changed sides' is no great comfort; that is, of course, nothing to do with a reassessment of the application of Islam to an ever-changing world and everything to do with saving your arse.

I dare say it is already as difficult to find a pro-Taleban Afghan as it quickly became to find a supporter of Apartheid in South Africa.

All well and good. But a fundamental unease about Western and, in particular, American society, which manifests itself in ways ranging from intellectual criticism to homicidal detestation, does not disappear with the handing over of a Kalashnikov; and nor should we expect it to.

I spent a year living and working in Saudi Arabia. Not living in a Western enclave, as many expats do, but in a middle-market block of flats five minutes away from the soukh in one direction and the place of public execution in the other. This, I realise, does not make me T. E. Lawrence but I think I know a bit more than a lot of people who are shaping events or forming opinions.

The majority of people I met and worked with were, naturally, Muslims. Most were pretty decent, some weren't. So it was very much like anywhere. But some animals live in water and some in air. Neither type is right or wrong to do so; that's just the way it is. And however much the one tries to put itself in the other's place, it can never quite do it. The West doesn't get Islam, and because it doesn't, it is going to make a Town Halls of it.

Let's go back to the beginning. Despite the fact that the USA has sometimes sent its young people to die in worthy causes for the benefit of people it needn't really have bothered about, its record in this area is not 100% altruistic.

It has not been slow to tamper with governments and regimes which are not to its liking. That is to say when it has had an economic or idealistic reason to do so. You don't need me to give you the examples.

So when Americans use the domestic excesses of the Taleban as part of their justification for the action in Afghanistan, I can't help but wonder why they weren't as eager to replace Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Bokassa, Pinochet, and all the rest.

Well, these were sovereign states, you see. So the West, including Britain, did nothing except congratulate Tanzania when it went and sorted out Amin (who still, I think I'm right in saying, lives agreeably amongst our Saudi Arabian allies) and impose sanctions on Vietnam for having the temerity to stop the Khmer Rouge lunatics murdering their fellow countrymen by the million. It makes having to wear a burkah seem rather less like the end of the world. But then again, perhaps America is self-sufficient in yams and lemon grass.

The point is this: when Bush and Blair, even allowing for the verbal blunders along the way, declared that this is not a war between civilizations, many affable and reasonable Muslims, never mind the more excitable ones, thought it was a bit rich.

They could be forgiven for thinking that just such a war had been going on for some time, and being waged on a number of fronts. There is the propensity of the USA to decide which governments it will and will not tolerate and to use its wealth and power to make or break them if its own interests are thereby served; there is the denouncement of some regimes alongside the support for others which are at least as unsavoury, and in the eyes of many Muslims that includes Israel. More of that in a mo...

There is the economic imperialism which now operates mainly out of America though still, to some extent, from its original European base, and which is just as coercive as physical imperialism. In other words, the West is everything you don't like about someone. It is the loud, self-assured, rich man in the restaurant, surrounded by pretty girls, who gets the best service and makes the blokes at the other tables mumble with resentment.

And, of course, it so happens that that divide is almost exactly mirrored by the religio-cultural one. By and large, the Christians are the haves and the Muslims the have-nots. On the whole, bearing in mind that it is by Western standards that these things are judged, once you disregard a few oil billionaires, for 'Islamic' read 'Third World'.

What part the respective faiths have played in bringing about and perpetuating that unfortunate truth has been much discussed, and I'm not going to do it all again, but all this is in the mix. It is what led to September 11th, as we now call it.

(Just to digress for a moment; perhaps the most remarkable thing of all is that the truly 21st Century skill of being able to come up with a snappy, evocative expression for any concept or occurrence seems to have deserted us. No-one has come up with a phrase which says it all. We don't call the Second World War 'the events of September 3rd 1939 to May 8th 1945 inclusive', and not merely because the Poles, the Czechs, the French, the Italians, the Russians, the Americans, the Chindits, the Japanese, and practically everyone who got involved would want to use different dates. We say 'Dunkirk' or 'Pearl Harbor' and everybody knows what we mean. We can coin expressions like 'a water-cooler movie' and create an instant mental picture. But we can't find a better way of saying 'the events of September 11th'. It's like saying 'November the Fifth' and feeling embarrassed at the same time. There was a naval battle between the British and the French which took place so far from any landmark that they couldn't call it anything, so they called it 'The Glorious First of June'. At least we did. I shouldn't imagine the French did.)

So a great deal of time and paper has been expended in trying to explain the perceived antipathy of Islam towards the West. You've probably tried to take some of it in. What is evident in all the debates is that if you belong to one culture you cannot truly see things through the eyes of the other.

The West seems to be losing what appeared to be an encouraging grasp of that fact a couple of months ago. An excellent line in one newspaper article struck me more than most. It was along the lines that, whilst all but the most extreme Muslims will deplore the horror and human suffering of September 11th, "many will have been dry-eyed at the sight of those twin symbols of American wealth and power crashing to the ground". I think that's pretty fair.

And for a time it seemed to have sunk in. Some Americans were prepared to ponder their country's image in far-off places and ask themselves if they should be the only ones allowed to make up the rules. And whilst the perpetrators should be brought to justice for an undeniable crime, it was wise of the West to take a good, hard look at itself. They even thought maybe Israel ought to play the game a little more.

What should have happened then (and I still believe this, the rout of the Taleban notwithstanding) was that the whole process should have been done through the United Nations, not by the Americans with a little help from Britain and the nervous backing of a handful of countries whose support, courageous though it may appear, is in fact mostly an exercise in realpolitik.

Yes it would have been slow and frustrating, but the high moral ground is usually an uncomfortable place. The more legitimate the mandate and the more global the endorsement, the fewer grounds for objection by future bin Ladens. This will still look to some like the United States putting things back the way it likes them. George Bush Senior promised a New World Order. That didn't happen. Tony Blair's peace-love-and-happiness speech seems a long time ago now, overshadowed by the more easily achieved and understood military victories.

And then the Palestinian suicide bombers step in and let Israel and the US Government off the hook. As the Australian Minister of Arts and Culture said to Paul Hogan after the premiere of Crocodile Dundee, "Twenty years' hard work down the bloody drain". And there is something else in the air. The radio programme 'Any Questions?' recently came from the USA. There was rather more whooping from the audience than would be the case in Telford Civic Hall, but that's the way it is. There were Hawks and Doves on the panel, and the Hawks got most of the whoops for their largely bellicose and, in my view, silly remarks.

Fair enough. That usually happens. But the tide now seems to be with those who see September 11th not as an atrocity but as an affront; an act not against people but against 'America'. Thus we have senior American politicians declaring, sometimes with a conspiratorial half-smile, that it is their intention to kill someone. We don't hear the expression 'bring to justice' quite as much as we used to. And they quite understand that if Israel knows damn well that someone is up to no good they may want to point out to him the error of his ways with a helicopter gunship.

We aren't going to take any further the matter of the 400 Taleban prisoners apparently killed during an attempted breakout. Four hundred? Wouldn't the last half-dozen have realised that this wasn't working and thrown in the towel? Or, if they're not the surrendering kind, how did they end up behind barbed wire in the first place?

Well, unpleasant things happen in war, said a Foreign Office spokesman. Can you imagine if 400 European prisoners of war had died in the same circumstances? What about civilian casualties? Well, the thing is that they cause them deliberately whilst we try to avoid them. Although we don't always succeed. I can't see it being of much consolation to the bereaved of Afghanistan that the killers of the dear departed didn't have anything against him. It's just that he and his emaciated goat happened to be in the way.

A member of HM Government was so helpful as to point out that the number of people killed in the World Trade Centre far surpassed the number killed in Afghanistan. Well, if you put it like that... what will happen next?

Well, my guess clearly isn't as good as the CIA's. But I do believe this. It is understandable but misguided for the USA to confuse justice and vengeance. It is also counter-productive. A great many in the West, politicians included, cannot quite totally convince themselves that Afghans and the like are real people.

They cannot cross the barrier of language and custom and different types of daft hats which separates us, nor can they (or I, for that matter) get over the fact that these people can manage almost entirely without chairs, and are able to squat or sit on the ground for long periods with no apparent ill-effects, whereas you or I would soon be asking friends to help us up and hobbling about because our legs have gone to sleep.

They come to their views just as we do, through a mixture of reasoning, conditioning, prejudice and all the rest of it. George Dubya and many more have got to remember that. We were promised that this would be a victory over terrorism, however long it took. The more mistakes we make, the more there will be who will make sure it takes a long, long time.

And if it looks as if it's the West's solution of 'more of the same' that will be the biggest mistake of all.

James H Reeve