And as I write this, over five years later, we are still fighting the Taliban (and still using the wrong weapons), the main cash crop in Afghanistan is still heroin (the source of supply for most addicts in the UK), the poverty and lack of education is still endemic, and Osama bin Laden has still not been caught. But then, we've all been distracted by the catastrophe in Iraq of late. So let's see if I can remember - what were we doing in Afghanistan?

It seems that the Taliban consider the current military strikes to be not just on Afghanistan, but upon the whole muslim world, so what’s it like, this muslim world that they claim for me? It’s a world that turns its back on the present, no cameras or TV’s (apart from when it suits the ruling elite), no education to speak of (and certainly not if you are female), a heroin supported economy awash with weaponry and corruption, but no music, and no tolerance of disagreement. And all somehow in the name of a return to some glorious Muslim past, when the Islamic world was pure and simple and united under one Caliph.

Well, quite apart from their mythical universal Caliph, who actually never existed, the golden age of Islam displayed all the attributes of muslim civilisation so patently lacking in the Taleban world. In the golden age, Europeans were awestruck by the glittering and cultured muslim cities, with their civic water systems, public and personal hygiene, great hospitals allied to universities at the forefront of scientific advance, and all clustered around the mosques, where intellectual imagination and a global search for knowledge was integrated with the concepts at the basis of the Islamic faith. In fact, the decline of muslim power in recent centuries can be clearly traced to a turning away from integrating Islam with its time and place towards a more backward looking introverted way of thinking, that in the end brought economic, military and cultural colonisation.

Now, many muslims might feel that much injustice in the world is due to the dominant systems of world trade and global finance, or to resources spent on high tech superpower weaponry, as would many non-muslims. But few have so blinkered a view of the world that they feel a few thousand people are expendable to make a point. Anyone who claims to speak for the muslim world needs more than a few simplistic words to establish their credentials. A jihad requires justice in its methods as well as its objectives. Tyranny and injustice are neither jihad nor Islam.