Stardate 20011013.0704 (On Screen): It's no surprise that the Taliban have rejected President Bush's "second chance" offer; it was framed in terms such as to be an offer they could not accept. I think Bush never expected anything else. In a sense, it was an attempt to catch the Taliban in the web of its own lies.
The Taliban have been claiming all along that bin Laden and al Qaeda were not associated with the Taliban in any important way. In actuality, the two are closely intertwined. bin Laden has been giving the Taliban huge amounts of money, and the core of the Taliban army are foreigners (mostly Arabs) who are loyal not to the Taliban but rather to bin Laden himself. Bush's offer would only make sense for the Taliban if reality were as the Taliban had been representing it to be; given that the reality is that bin Laden owns the Taliban, they don't actually have the ability to accept the offer even if they had the desire to do so. But the offer also forced them to cleave to bin Laden even as most of the world acknowledges him as a blood-soaked monster. They continue to try to ameliorate that with lame excuses of "not being given evidence of his guilt" but that is getting less and less effective as time goes on, in most of the world.
Where the propaganda war is really being played out is in the Muslim nations themselves. The Taliban have no chance whatever of convincing the vast majority of people in the US or Europe of their claims, but they've done somewhat better with the populaces of nations like Indonesia and Pakistan. They've been trying to cast this war as being between Christianity and Islam; we have been trying to cast it in terms of Civilization versus Terrorism. So far it's been a draw with maybe a slight edge to us; there have been numerous demonstrations and even some riots in the Muslim nations, but not to the point of being politically significant (i.e. to the point of forcing the governments of those nations to change their foreign policy). It's lead to empty gestures, though, such as the VP of Indonesia publicly asking the US to stop the bombing. That was an easy way for him to show solidarity with the Muslim radicals in his nation, since he knows there is no chance whatever of his request being honored. It has the potential for somewhat defusing their wrath without actually representing a substantive move by the Indonesian government. (discuss)
