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The Northern Alliance has captured Kabul, after the Taliban abandoned the city overnight. In the time between the departure of the Taliban and the arrival of the Northern Alliance, there was a power vaccuum and there was some looting and violenc, but according to the BBC correspondent I heard this morning, the Northern Alliance police forces have restored order to the city. As regular readers know, I had some trepidation about our attacks on Afghanistan when they began, but much of that has evaporated over the past few weeks. Since our bombardment started on October 7, it’s become obvious that Osama bin Laden was more than a guest of the Taliban. The Arab followers of bin Laden who came to Afghanistan for their shot at martyrdom were fighting alongside Taliban troops as regular soldiers, and according to some reports, were the most dependable units in the Taliban military. Furthermore, it’s obvious that the suicide bombers who assassinated Ahmed Shah Massoud on September 10 were part of Al Qaeda as well. Being that Osama bin Laden seems to be a partner of the Taliban in governing Afghanistan, it seems justifiable to me to treat the 9/11 attacks as an act of war against the US by the Taliban and Al Qaeda. As such, I feel our actions thusfar have been legal and justifiable. ...

To find out what the ad industry thought of one of its own being put in charge of “public diplomacy,” I checked out Advertising Age this morning. Sure enough, there’s a commentary from last week by Rance Crain about the ad industry’s role in selling America. Here’s an interesting bit of the article: The job of convincing people around the world that our way of life is best is made more difficult and complex now because of the pervasiveness of our culture. Our movies, music, fashion, consumer brand names such as McDonald’s and Coca-Cola, embody what are widely seen as our crass and overly secular society. ...

Could there be possible signs of hope from Afghanistan? The BBC is reporting that since the Northern Alliance took over Mazar-i-Sharif, people are immediately taking advantage of freedoms that were denied to them under Taliban rule. There are also no reports of massacres that were common under previous takeovers of the city. There were real worries that the Hazaras would slaughter the Pashtuns in the city as soon as the Northern Alliance took control, but that doesn’t appear to have happened. ...

Osama bin Laden gave his first interview since the 9/11 attack to the Pakistani newspaper Ausaf. A translation was run in the paper’s English edition, Dawn. In the interview, bin Laden claims that he has nuclear and chemical weapons, which he is holding as a trump card in case America uses such weapons against him. He also denies the widely reported story that he was in Dubai last year. He states that Afghanistan is the only Islamic country. Muslims should pay attention to that – if bin Laden gets his way, it’s Taliban style rule for everyone. ...

Salon (Premium) has an excellent story today by Trevor Butterworth on the quality of reporting in the British press. I can’t tell you how many utterly fascinating stories I’ve seen on the Web sites of various British papers since the 9/11 attack that I haven’t linked to because they’re poorly sourced and can’t be corroberated in other publications. Butterworth’s article explains that the journalistic standards in the British press are, for the most part, much lower than they are at major US papers and that the journalistic culture there is much different than it is in the US. Here’s one quote that provides some of the gist of the story: ...

Recording industry greedhead Hillary Rosen showed up to make peace with the P2P community at O’Reilly’s P2P conference this week. The fact of the matter is that the recording industry’s problems aren’t with the P2P community, they’re with their customers. The ongoing attempts by the RIAA to stamp out any P2P service that comes along don’t seem to be dissuading people from pirating music like mad. And furthermore, it doesn’t seem like the pirates are in danger of putting the recording industry out of business. The RIAA’s problem is that people don’t see the value in spending their money on recordings when they can pirate them. Obsessing over FastTrack or Napster or Gnutella is just a distraction, and every time a new DRM scheme is cracked it becomes more obvious that DRM isn’t the solution, either. ...

I’ll give the last word on the Oprah - Jonathan Franzen controversy to The Onion. The Economist has a profile of a genuine good guy in Afghanistan – Ismail Khan. He’s an actual political moderate and an accomplished military leader who hails from the western city of Herat. Eclipse Corner is the site for IBM’s new open source project. Speaking of interesting Northern Alliance personalities, the Washington Post has a profile of Haron Amin, the spokesman for the Northern Alliance who appears frequently on the news networks. ...

Palestinian spokeswoman Hanan Mikhail-Ashrawi smacked down Osama bin Laden at a speech before the Commonwealth Club: “Our cause is not up for grabs. You do not have the right to use it for your ends. We have been victims all our lives and we do not condone the victimization of others.” MEMRI’s latest analysis concerns the opinion of Islamic clergymen on whether Muslim soldiers in the US army violate the tenets of Islam by fighting in Afghanistan. Once again, you’ll see that many Muslim leaders blame Israel for the 9/11 attacks, the convenient fantasy which allows them to let Osama bin Laden off the hook. ...

Phil Agre has designed a web filtering application that he’d like somebody to implement. I may mess around with implementing something like that in my copious free time, after I do all the other things that I may do. A reader sent along a link to Vincent Laforet’s home page, where he publishes his photos, including some from his current assignment in Pakistan. Laforet is the photojournalist whose dispatch from Pakistan I mentioned last week. ...

Marc Slemko figured out how to steal people’s credit card numbers stored in Passport by getting them to open a Hotmail message, thanks to browser bugs and problems with Passport’s authentication system. The wallet feature of Passport has been disabled until the problem can be fixed.