Over two weeks after the ghastly events of 11 September, we remain glued to our television screens while commentators and analysts, now as familiar as old friends, report on the latest developments. And every once in a while, the image of a jet plane slamming into the World Trade Centre returns like a recurring nightmare.

But while most of the coverage is instantly forgettable, some footage remains etched in our memory. One such documentary was called "Behind the veil" aired recently by CNN. Featuring a young Afghan woman brought up in the United States who returns to her native country, it was a searing experience as it revealed what the Taliban had reduced their own people to. The narrator smuggles a concealed video camera into Afghanistan to film women trying to survive in a brutally misogynist society. The daily suffering of ordinary Afghans, the massacre of opponents, and the deliberate erasure of joy and colour are depicted with pain and passion.

An unblinking expose of one of the most tyrannical regimes of our times, it should be required viewing for anybody who seeks to defend the Taliban. In particular, those demonstrating in the streets protesting the impending attack on these barbarians should be forced to watch it several times a day. While no sane person wants to see ordinary Afghans suffer any more than they already have, "Behind the veil" makes it clear that if their nightmare is to end, the evil that is the Taliban has to be removed forever. And if it takes a short, sharp military campaign to rid us of them, so be it.

Although it is clear that the Taliban will soon be consigned to the dustbin of history, the post-Taliban scenario is a troubling one. We tend to overlook the fact that before they swept into power (courtesy the Pakistan government, let us not forget), Afghanistan had been wracked by a vicious civil war. Kabul was reduced to rubble by warlords fighting over the capital, and not by the present Taliban government. So bringing back the Dostams, the Hikmatyars and the Rabbanis is not necessarily a formula for peace and good governance. In their own way, they are thugs who have contributed heavily to our neighbour's distress.

When our foreign minister warned the Americans to avoid taking sides in Afghanistan, he conveniently forgot that for years, successive governments in Islamabad have been doing just that. In an attempt to install a pliant regime in Kabul, the ISI funnelled 60% of all the cash and arms that flowed in from the US, Saudi Arabia and sundry others during the Soviet occupation to Hikmatyar. The assassinated Tajik leader Ahmad Shah Masood, one of the most effective and charismatic leaders of the resistance, was starved of help. Even now, thousands of Pakistanis are in Afghanistan fighting the Northern Alliance under the Taliban banner. But all these efforts at controlling events and decisions in Kabul have backfired time and again.

The tribal, ethnic and sectarian mosaic that is Afghanistan admits of no easy answers or quick fixes. One real concern is that after the Americans have appeased their understandable desire for revenge by arresting or killing bin Laden and pounding the Taliban, their coalition will either get bored or move on to a new target and the media circus will go with them. Pakistan, however, will be stuck with another flood of refugees, large groups of armed and dangerous religious militias on its own soil, and a powder keg with a smouldering fuse next door.

In short, what is to prevent the Americans from walking away just as they did once the Soviets left Afghanistan? The post-Taliban scenario calls for patience, subtlety, and the will to exert pressure and apply power over an extended period of time. Our newly rediscovered American allies are not famous for any of these qualities. In addition, the Afghan terrain and temperament are notoriously treacherous.

But despite all these doubts and caveats, General Musharraf's decision to support the Americans in their war against terror is the right one, if only because the alternative is even more unattractive. So far, the protests have been more pro-Taliban and anti-American than they have been anti-Musharraf.

However, once the cruise missiles and the B-52s start inflicting heavy casualties, the mood in the streets of Karachi and Peshawar could well change. The major components in these demos have been Pakistani and Afghan Pushtun tribesmen and militants of some pro-Taliban religious parties. The average, middle-of-the-road Pakistani continues to support the government, and the lifting of sanctions will firm up this support even further.

Actually, this sudden crisis can benefit Pakistan in some unexpected ways. Quite apart from the lifting of economic and military sanctions, this conflict can roll back the creeping Talibanization that had threatened to tear this country apart. A number of us had been warning of the baneful effects of the insane policy of encouraging extremist elements to further the agenda of successive governments in Afghanistan and Kashmir. There will now be huge international pressure to rein in such groups, and hopefully, their power and influence - out of all proportion to their numbers - will decline.

In this admittedly optimistic scenario, the government will be able to initiate the tough steps against jihadi groups General Musharraf had promised but was unable to take a few weeks before the attacks in the United States. In Kashmir, he will find it difficult to continue supporting armed militancy while joining the anti-terrorism chorus in other parts of the world. In many ways, this crisis has crystallized the contradictions in our internal and external policies, and will hopefully lead to their review and revision.

While President Bush has pledged to fight and eradicate terrorism around the world, Pakistanis do not have to look very far to tackle this menace. Over the last two decades, we have become so used to random violence and terrorist attacks that we assign them the same level of personal and police attention that we do to common acts of criminality. It now takes a cataclysmic event like the terror bombing of the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon to shake us out of our torpor and force us to act.

Now that we are poised to emerge from our largely self-inflicted isolation, we need to remind ourselves that peace and prosperity are incompatible with fundamentalism and extremism. Whenever we forget this basic rule, we should watch "Behind the veil" again.