Not in weeks or months but now &ndash while they are digging out the dead at Ground

Not in weeks or months but now – while they are digging out the dead at Ground Zero.And there is general acceptance in America that we do have a moral obligation at some stage, to demonstrate that we have identified the right targets, both in Afghanistan and in other rogue states. Of course, a very small minority here are already in contortions to suggest that the outrage at the World Trade Centre is really our fault for polluting the soil of Saudi Arabia, failing to create a new Palestine or leaving Afghanistan in chaos and poverty. They talk as if we were in some kind of negotiation with Switzerland instead of with demented fanatics who don't really care about any of that.The terrorists are not interested in the well-being of the people of Afghanistan. The fouler the swamp, the more they flourish, for theirs is a different agenda. A washing machine in every home, to adapt Herbert Hoover, would not stop them killing. They are intent on exterminating what they hate, not negotiating. It is usually all too easy to make most Americans feel guilty, but not this time.

To most Americans, the evidence is strong enough – bin Laden's own words call for Americans to be murdered whenever possible – to justify immediate seizure, incarceration and indictment. What the worriers worldwide must tell us is what they will do, now that the Taliban has rejected the demands in Mr Bush's ultimatum.Sanctions? Afghanistan is already an outlaw state. And how long are they prepared to wait? Put Kofi Annan on a diplomatic Kissinger-style shuttle? The Pakistanis, who have the most leverage, have tried that. Do the James Bond thing and kidnap him while the Taliban turns the other way? Remember, Jimmy Carter's catastrophic desert rescue of Iran's hostages?Perhaps it is uncharitable, but a whiff of appeasement lingers. The same crowd, philosophically speaking, screamed when John Kennedy riskily confronted Castro and Khrushchev over the missiles, argued for persuasion or sanctions against Saddam, rather than force, and said the Royal Navy would get lost on the way to the Falklands.

The point of this swift rehearsal of possibilities in Afghanistan is not to overlook the imperatives of ostracising the rogue states, concerting a durable coalition for intelligence, security, sanctions, making it clear that it is war on terrorism, not Islam. All that should be pressed with sophistication and urgency – always an awkward marriage.But bin Laden cannot wait while the left conducts some endless seminar on the relationship of terror to poverty, to Israel policy and American tourism. In hours of conversation with ordinary citizens, public figures and military and foreign policy specialists, I have found nobody here, nobody, who pretends that either bombing or invasion is a great idea. Indiscriminate terror is what we are resisting, and that is what bombing comes down to.Invasion, then? Forming an alliance with the enemies of the Taliban inside the country? It sounds horribly reminiscent of Vietnam, and it would be very hard The bones of British and Russian occupiers testify to that. Yet invasion has worked before with some semblance of success.

When Pakistan's army went in for genocide in East Pakistan, India invaded and created Bangladesh. Maybe an effective invasion can be mounted from the territory controlled by the Northern Alliance I know such options are difficult to countenance. It is precisely because the options are so tough that Bush talked just the way he did. He had it exactly right in what he said, and the way in which he said it It was not rhetoric of St Crispin's Day. It was a set of business-like demands of terror-states states – Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, to name names.You can't negotiate with a stateless terror network, but you can with the body that serves as host President Bush had three audiences.