by Arundhati Roy

About the author: Essayist and novelist Arundhati Roy is the author of The God of Small Things, for which she received the Booker Prize.

As darkness deepened over Afghanistan on October 7, 2001, the U.S. government, backed by the International Coalition Against Terror (the new, amenable substitute for the United Nations), launched air strikes against Afghanistan. TV channels lingered on computer-animated images of cruise missiles, stealth bombers, tomahawks and bunker-busting missiles. All over the world, little boys watched goggle-eyed and stopped clamoring for new video games.

The U.N., reduced now to an ineffective acronym, wasn’t even asked to mandate the air strikes. (As Madeleine Albright once said, “The U.S. acts multilaterally when it can, and unilaterally when it must.”) The “evidence” against the terrorists...