If one is supposed to bomb and invade a country simply because some few people based somewhere in that country get together and secretly plan attacks of their own choosing that are launched on other countries, then virtually every country in Latin America and many in the Middle East and elsewhere would have very strong reasons for bombing and invading the USA right now...because the USA has long served as a covert base for CIA-sponsored and USA-financed wars, assassinations, coups, and many acts of terrorism in a great variety of foreign countries, and the CIA is even an official arm of the American government....while Al Queda was certainly not an official arm of the Taliban. They acted independently, not on behalf of Afghanistan, its government or its people. They were not an instrument of Aghan policy.

There's a much more direct and serious responsibility behind CIA terror tactics than the Taliban can bear for anything that a few people in isolated Al Queda camps in the mountains may or may not have done.

Yet, I do not hear supporters of the Aghan War suggesting that all the countries which have been covertly and overtly attacked in one way or another by the CIA and the US military in the last 60 years get together and launch an anti-terrorist crusade on the USA, bomb it into submission, invade it, and occupy it with their armies. (assuming they had the power to...they don't)

I wonder why we have such a double standard in international ethics? Could it be that it's nothing more than "might makes right"? I think so. What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, you know. But when the gander's a superpower, well, then the gander does what it bloody well pleases, right? And it attacks whom it bloody well pleases. Every superpower in history has done that. And they all act as if their own hands are clean when they do it, but that is not the case.