One way to describe it is War on Terrorism Part Two. Historically speaking, it is not. The Israeli bombing of Palestinian targets, which Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has called "a war against terrorism", is a variation, albeit smaller in size, of the Afghan war-a necessary war. For, what happened over the past weekend in Israel was a variation of what happened on September 11 in America. Though the Hamas suicide bombings killing innocent Israelis are bin Ladenism's most nihilistic expression after 9/11, unlike the US, Israel has been living through Palestinian terror since the birth of the Jewish state. Every time Israel, a nation that is a living lesson in surviving amid enemies who deny it the very right to exist, retaliates, there is that outpouring of angst from the moral majority.

But the world changed on September 11. The terror of radical Islamism is no longer an American discovery or an Israeli way of life or an Indian reality. The New Evil is the civilised world's most abiding fear, and it deserves the strongest rejoinder. And it is 9/11 that has influenced the global, particularly American, response to Israeli bombings in the West Bank and Gaza. This time no dire warnings, no immediate advice of restraint, for the truth is too stark: Yasser Arafat, a master of half-measures, has no control over terrorist groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Asking Arafat to declare war on Hamas is like asking Pervez Musharraf to strike against the Lashkar-e-Toiba.

The job has to be done by the victims of terror themselves. Extraterritorial defence in the name of national well-being is no longer an arrogance of the powerful. In an age where the enemy is borderless and faceless, the war has to be against the landlords of terror, as the war against the Taliban whose tenant is bin Laden. There is an international consensus on this defence of the victims, and one country that is still not taking advantage of this situation is India, whose agony is not lesser than Israel's, but whose response to crossborder terrorism is famously passive. Afghanistan has proved that the enemy is not invincible, what you need is the national determination to strike. And the General across the Indian border is in an Arafat-like situation: a master of half-measures who is fast losing control over the forces of radical Islamism. Israel knows how to deal with Arafat. Does India know how to deal with its tormentor?