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The toppled towers of the World Trade Center have left behind dark shadows of fear, apprehension and uncertainty in our minds. There are strong cries for war and vengeance. Our Congress has reacted by vesting additional powers in the hands of the President and by giving even more billions of dollars to the military. But traditional military force cannot prevail against this enemy. Military forces cannot wage war against an unseen and perhaps unlocatable enemy.

Our first priority should be to protect the American people from future terrorist attacks. We must ask why our intelligence services failed so badly, even when the warnings were abundant.

Our second priority must be to deeply examine our policies that give rise to such hatred. We must not be afraid to look at the grief and suffering in the world, particularly in the Middle East, that we have contributed to by our policies. President Bush thinks we are hated for our freedom and democracy, but many in other parts of the world believe we are hated for the arrogant manner in which we have used our economic and military might. We may have freedom and democracy at home, but our policies abroad have supported and upheld despotic regimes throughout the world and our CIA has trained and supported extremists like Osama bin Laden.

Our third priority must be to bring the perpetrators of these terrible crimes to justice. The terrorists have committed crimes against humanity in taking the lives of citizens of some 80 countries. To apprehend the criminals behind these crimes and bring them to justice will require a global effort and should be done multilaterally with the sanction of the United Nations. The criminals should be tried in a special International Tribunal created for this purpose.

We live in a time when there is a confluence between arrogance, hatred, vulnerability and violence. This was true before September 11th and remains true today. Our vulnerability cannot be substantially lessened. It is endemic in our technological societies. The ability to do violence is also endemic. What can be changed are our policies that lead to hatred and our own violence. It will not be easy for Americans to be introspective and to consider the manner in which our policies and our violence have caused others to suffer and die, but unless we do so we will not be able to stop future terrorism directed against us.

As bad as the terrorist attacks were on September 11th, damage in the future could be much worse. Terrorists in possession of biological, chemical, radiological or nuclear weapons could destroy not only buildings but cities. To prevent this, the US must provide leadership to the international community to assure that these weapons do not fall into the hands of terrorists. The only way to do this will be to put the tightest possible global controls on these weapons and the materials to construct them, while moving rapidly to eliminate them from the arsenals of all nations including our own.

How the US responds to this crisis may well determine whether our new century will be even more violent and destructive than the 20th century, or whether we can find a way to serve justice by upholding the dignity of all persons. The future of our nation and of civilization depend upon our willingness to take a hard look at our role in the world and our willingness to change the variables in the equation of terrorism that we can control.

*David Krieger, an attorney and political scientist, is President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.

By the time this article is published, the armed assault on Afghanistan, the Taliban regime, Osama bin Laden or his followers may have already begun. For some, it seems, they are all the same. But not to speak out against this is either a serious mistake or guilty acquiescence of the bellicose plans proclaimed repeatedly by US leaders.

The west’s quiet acceptance, particularly among European countries, pains me. It should fill all of us with despair. Yes, there are big speeches and important agreements are signed. But ultimately, the west accepts – and even takes part in – the violent response.

That the US was going to react as it says it will should come as no surprise. But the submission of other nations was difficult to foresee. It is alarming that countries such as France and Spain have not raised their voices to say “no”: to reject the violent solution as the only available option; to uncover the big lie of a “final solution” against terrorism.

I live in a country that has been fighting terrorism for 30 years and that daily clamours for the rule of law as the best means to confront it. What is not possible is that Spain should now put on a military helmet and pledge unlimited support for the hypothetical bombardment of nothing; for the massacre of poverty; and for a breach of the most fundamental logic, which proves that violence begets violence. The spiral of terrorism is fed by the number of dead counted among its victims.

It has been said of terrorism, particularly the Islamic or fundamentalist kind, that it is a widespread threat. But it is a phenomenon that has been helped by the west’s rejection of all that is different from its own culture or “civilised religion”.

The west and its political, military, social and economic hierarchies have been more preoccupied with the abusive and shameful march of production, speculation and profit than with an adequate redistribution of wealth. It has favoured a policy of social exclusion over integration and progressive immigration. And it has insisted on maintaining – and insisted on payment of – external debt instead of using those funds in the same countries it is now asking for help and understanding. For all those conscious mistakes, the west is suffering the terrible consequences of fanatical religious violence.

Lasting peace and freedom can be achieved only with legality, justice, respect for diversity, defence of human rights and measured and fair responses. It is impossible to build peace on foundations of misery. Above all, it should not be forgotten that there will come a time when justice is demanded of those responsible for these mistakes and the loss of a historic opportunity to make the world more just.

I am not thinking here about the justice demanded of those who masterminded and carried out the tragic events of September 11. That is the remit of national or international justice, as well as the intelligence and police services that have to compile the evidence. This is necessary if a fair trial is to take place. It is not sufficient to say: “I have the evidence but I cannot make it public for fear of endangering my sources.” That is not a serious approach – it is simply illegal.

Of course, everyone has already established the guilt of Osama bin Laden and, as the indisputable leader of Islamic fundamentalist terrorism, he probably is guilty. We should not forget that we are dealing with a horrible crime – but the response nevertheless requires due process. In its haste to eliminate Mr bin Laden, the west seems to have forgotten this fact. And that is serious.

The justice I am talking about is that which should be brought to bear not only on the Taliban for its brutal and oppressive regime but also on the leaders of western countries, who, irresponsibly and through the media, have generated panic among the Afghan people. Faced with the prospect of imminent invasion, this panic has forced them to flee towards supposed security and freedom. In reality, however, it merely drives them towards what is certain to be a human catastrophe. Who will answer for these deaths? Who will answer for the forced migrations? In all probability, the death of a few thousand Afghans will be of no interest to these leaders because, for all the grand speeches, their fate is already sealed.

The response that I seek is not military. It is one based on law, through the immediate approval of an international convention on terrorism. Such a convention should, among other things, include: rules governing co-operation between police and the judiciary; rules that enable investigations to take place in tax havens; the urgent ratification of the statute of the International Criminal Tribunal; and the definition of terrorism as a crime against humanity.

The time has come to look at the principles of territorial sovereignty, human rights, security, co-operation and universal criminal justice through the same lens. That, and that alone, should be the aim of the coalition of countries against terrorism.

*Baltasar Garzon is Spain’s leading anti-terrorist judge. A version of this article first appeared in El Pais.

In the aftermath of the unconscionable September 11 suicide attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Centre, an American newscaster said: “Good and evil rarely manifest themselves as clearly as they did last Tuesday. People who we don’t know massacred people who we do. And they did so with contemptuous glee.” Then he broke down and wept.

Here’s the rub: America is at war against people it doesn’t know, because they don’t appear much on TV. Before it has properly identified or even begun to comprehend the nature of its enemy, the US government has, in a rush of publicity and embarrassing rhetoric, cobbled together an “international coalition against terror”, mobilised its army, its air force, its navy and its media, and committed them to battle. The trouble is that once America goes off to war, it can’t very well return without having fought one. If it doesn’t find its enemy, for the sake of the enraged folks back home, it will have to manufacture one. Once war begins, it will develop a momentum, a logic and a justification of its own, and we’ll lose sight of why it’s being fought in the first place.

What we’re witnessing here is the spectacle of the world’s most powerful country reaching reflexively, angrily, for an old instinct to fight a new kind of war. Suddenly, when it comes to defending itself, America’s streamlined warships, cruise missiles and F-16 jets look like obsolete, lumbering things. As deterrence, its arsenal of nuclear bombs is no longer worth its weight in scrap. Box-cutters, penknives, and cold anger are the weapons with which the wars of the new century will be waged. Anger is the lock pick. It slips through customs unnoticed. Doesn’t show up in baggage checks. Who is America fighting? On September 20, the FBI said that it had doubts about the identities of some of the hijackers. On the same day President George Bush said, “We know exactly who these people are and which governments are supporting them.” It sounds as though the president knows something that the FBI and the American public don’t.

In his September 20 address to the US Congress, President Bush called the enemies of America “enemies of freedom”. “Americans are asking, ‘Why do they hate us?’ ” he said. “They hate our freedoms-our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.” People are being asked to make two leaps of faith here. First, to assume that The Enemy is who the US government says it is, even though it has no substantial evidence to support that claim. And second, to assume that The Enemy’s motives are what the US government says they are, and there’s nothing to support that either. For strategic, military and economic reasons, it is vital for the US government to persuade its public that their commitment to freedom and democracy and the American Way of Life is under attack. In the current atmosphere of grief, outrage and anger, it’s an easy notion to peddle.

However, if that were true, it’s reasonable to wonder why the symbols of America’s economic and military dominance -the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon-were chosen as the targets of the attacks. Why not the Statue of Liberty? Could it be that the stygian anger that led to the attacks has its taproot not in American freedom and democracy, but in the US government’s record of commitment and support to exactly the opposite things-to military and economic terrorism, insurgency, military dictatorship, religious bigotry and unimaginable genocide (outside America)? It must be hard for ordinary Americans, so recently bereaved, to look up at the world with their eyes full of tears and encounter what might appear to them to be indifference. It isn’t indifference. It’s just augury. An absence of surprise. The tired wisdom of knowing that what goes around eventually comes around. American people ought to know that it is not them but their government’s policies that are so hated. They can’t possibly doubt that they themselves, their extraordinary musicians, their writers, their actors, their spectacular sportsmen and their cinema, are universally welcomed. All of us have been moved by the courage and grace shown by firefighters, rescue workers and ordinary office staff in the days since the attacks.

America’s grief at what happened has been immense and immensely public. It would be grotesque to expect it to calibrate or modulate its anguish. However, it will be a pity if, instead of using this as an opportunity to try to understand why September 11 happened, Americans use it as an opportunity to usurp the whole world’s sorrow to mourn and avenge only their own. Because then it falls to the rest of us to ask the hard questions and say the harsh things. And for our pains, for our bad timing, we will be disliked, ignored and perhaps eventually silenced. The world will probably never know what motivated those particular hijackers who flew planes into those particular American buildings. They were not glory boys. They left no suicide notes, no political messages; no organisation has claimed credit for the attacks. All we know is that their belief in what they were doing outstripped the natural human instinct for survival, or any desire to be remembered. It’s almost as though they could not scale down the enormity of their rage to anything smaller than their deeds. And what they did has blown a hole in the world as we knew it. In the absence of information, politicians, political commentators and writers (like myself) will invest the act with their own politics, with their own interpretations. This speculation, this analysis of the political climate in which the attacks took place, can only be a good thing.

But war is looming large. Whatever remains to be said must be said quickly. Before America places itself at the helm of the “international coalition against terror”, before it invites (and coerces) countries to actively participate in its almost godlike mission-called Operation Infinite Justice until it was pointed out that this could be seen as an insult to Muslims, who believe that only Allah can mete out infinite justice, and was renamed Operation Enduring Freedom-it would help if some small clarifications are made. For example, Infinite Justice/Enduring Freedom for whom? Is this America’s war against terror in America or against terror in general? What exactly is being avenged here? Is it the tragic loss of almost 7,000 lives, the gutting of five million square feet of office space in Manhattan, the destruction of a section of the Pentagon, the loss of several hundreds of thousands of jobs, the bankruptcy of some airline companies and the dip in the New York Stock Exchange? Or is it more than that?

In 1996, Madeleine Albright, then the US secretary of state, was asked on national television what she felt about the fact that 500,000 Iraqi children had died as a result of US economic sanctions. She replied that it was “a very hard choice”, but that, all things considered, “we think the price is worth it”. Albright never lost her job for saying this. She continued to travel the world representing the views and aspirations of the US government. More pertinently, the sanctions against Iraq remain in place. Children continue to die. So here we have it. The equivocating distinction between civilisation and savagery, between the “massacre of innocent people” or, if you like, “a clash of civilisations” and “collateral damage”. The sophistry and fastidious algebra of infinite justice. How many dead Iraqis will it take to make the world a better place? How many dead Afghans for every dead American? How many dead women and children for every dead man? How many dead mojahedin for each dead investment banker? As we watch mesmerised, Operation Enduring Freedom unfolds on TV monitors across the world. A coalition of the world’s superpowers is closing in on Afghanistan, one of the poorest, most ravaged, war-torn countries in the world, whose ruling Taliban government is sheltering Osama bin Laden, the man being held responsible for the September 11 attacks.

The only thing in Afghanistan that could possibly count as collateral value is its citizenry. (Among them, half a million maimed orphans.There are accounts of hobbling stampedes that occur when artificial limbs are airdropped into remote, inaccessible villages.) Afghanistan’s economy is in a shambles. In fact, the problem for an invading army is that Afghanistan has no conventional coordinates or signposts to plot on a military map-no big cities, no highways, no industrial complexes, no water treatment plants. Farms have been turned into mass graves. The countryside is littered with land mines-10 million is the most recent estimate. The American army would first have to clear the mines and build roads in order to take its soldiers in. Fearing an attack from America, one million citizens have fled from their homes and arrived at the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. The UN estimates that there are eight million Afghan citizens who need emergency aid. As supplies run out-food and aid agencies have been asked to leave-the BBC reports that one of the worst humanitarian disasters of recent times has begun to unfold. Witness the infinite justice of the new century.

Civilians starving to death while they’re waiting to be killed. In America there has been rough talk of “bombing Afghanistan back to the stone age”. Someone please break the news that Afghanistan is already there. And if it’s any consolation, America played no small part in helping it on its way. The American people may be a little fuzzy about where exactly Afghanistan is (we hear reports that there’s a run on maps of the country), but the US government and Afghanistan are old friends. In 1979, after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the CIA and Pakistan’s ISI (Inter Services Intelligence) launched the largest covert operation in the history of the CIA. Their purpose was to harness the energy of Afghan resistance to the Soviets and expand it into a holy war, an Islamic jihad, which would turn Muslim countries within the Soviet Union against the communist regime and eventually destabilise it. When it began, it was meant to be the Soviet Union’s Vietnam. It turned out to be much more than that. Over the years, through the ISI, the CIA funded and recruited almost 100,000 radical mojahedin from 40 Islamic countries as soldiers for America’s proxy war. The rank and file of the mojahedin were unaware that their jihad was actually being fought on behalf of Uncle Sam. (The irony is that America was equally unaware that it was financing a future war against itself.) In 1989, after being bloodied by 10 years of relentless conflict, the Russians withdrew, leaving behind a civilisation reduced to rubble. Civil war in Afghanistan raged on. The jihad spread to Chechnya, Kosovo and eventually to Kashmir. The CIA continued to pour in money and military equipment, but the overheads had become immense, and more money was needed. The mojahedin ordered farmers to plant opium as a “revolutionary tax”. The ISI set up hundreds of heroin laboratories across Afghanistan. Within two years of the CIA’s arrival, the Pakistan-Afghanistan borderland had become the biggest producer of heroin in the world, and the single biggest source of the heroin on American streets. The annual profits, said to be between $100bn and $200bn, were ploughed back into training and arming militants.

In 1995, the Taliban-then a marginal sect of dangerous, hardline fundamentalists-fought its way to power in Afghanistan. It was funded by the ISI, that old cohort of the CIA, and supported by many political parties in Pakistan. The Taliban unleashed a regime of terror. Its first victims were its own people, particularly women. It closed down girls’ schools, dismissed women from government jobs, and enforced sharia laws under which women deemed to be “immoral” are stoned to death, and widows guilty of being adulterous are buried alive. Given the Taliban government’s human rights track record, it seems unlikely that it will in any way be intimidated or swerved from its purpose by the prospect of war, or the threat to the lives of its civilians. After all that has happened, can there be anything more ironic than Russia and America joining hands to re-destroy Afghanistan? The question is, can you destroy destruction? Dropping more bombs on Afghanistan will only shuffle the rubble, scramble some old graves and disturb the dead.

The desolate landscape of Afghanistan was the burial ground of Soviet communism and the springboard of a unipolar world dominated by America. It made the space for neocapitalism and corporate globalisation, again dominated by America. And now Afghanistan is poised to become the graveyard for the unlikely soldiers who fought and won this war for America. And what of America’s trusted ally? Pakistan too has suffered enormously. The US government has not been shy of supporting military dictators who have blocked the idea of democracy from taking root in the country. Before the CIA arrived, there was a small rural market for opium in Pakistan. Between 1979 and 1985, the number of heroin addicts grew from zero to one-and-a-half million. Even before September 11, there were three million Afghan refugees living in tented camps along the border. Pakistan’s economy is crumbling. Sectarian violence, globalisation’s structural adjustment programmes and drug lords are tearing the country to pieces. Set up to fight the Soviets, the terrorist training centres and madrasahs, sown like dragon’s teeth across the country, produced fundamentalists with tremendous popular appeal within Pakistan itself. The Taliban, which the Pakistan government has sup ported, funded and propped up for years, has material and strategic alliances with Pakistan’s own political parties.

Now the US government is asking (asking?) Pakistan to garotte the pet it has hand-reared in its backyard for so many years. President Musharraf, having pledged his support to the US, could well find he has something resembling civil war on his hands. India, thanks in part to its geography, and in part to the vision of its former leaders, has so far been fortunate enough to be left out of this Great Game. Had it been drawn in, it’s more than likely that our democracy, such as it is, would not have survived. Today, as some of us watch in horror, the Indian government is furiously gyrating its hips, begging the US to set up its base in India rather than Pakistan. Having had this ringside view of Pakistan’s sordid fate, it isn’t just odd, it’s unthinkable, that India should want to do this. Any third world country with a fragile economy and a complex social base should know by now that to invite a superpower such as America in (whether it says it’s staying or just passing through) would be like inviting a brick to drop through your windscreen.

Operation Enduring Freedom is ostensibly being fought to uphold the American Way of Life. It’ll probably end up undermining it completely. It will spawn more anger and more terror across the world. For ordinary people in America, it will mean lives lived in a climate of sickening uncertainty: will my child be safe in school? Will there be nerve gas in the subway? A bomb in the cinema hall? Will my love come home tonight? There have been warnings about the possibility of biological warfare -smallpox, bubonic plague, anthrax-the deadly payload of innocuous crop-duster aircraft. Being picked off a few at a time may end up being worse than being annihilated all at once by a nuclear bomb.

The US government, and no doubt governments all over the world, will use the climate of war as an excuse to curtail civil liberties, deny free speech, lay off workers, harass ethnic and religious minorities, cut back on public spending and divert huge amounts of money to the defence industry. To what purpose? President Bush can no more “rid the world of evil-doers” than he can stock it with saints. It’s absurd for the US government to even toy with the notion that it can stamp out terrorism with more violence and oppression. Terrorism is the symptom, not the disease. Terrorism has no country. It’s transnational, as global an enterprise as Coke or Pepsi or Nike. At the first sign of trouble, terrorists can pull up stakes and move their “factories” from country to country in search of a better deal. Just like the multi-nationals. Terrorism as a phenomenon may never go away. But if it is to be contained, the first step is for America to at least acknowledge that it shares the planet with other nations, with other human beings who, even if they are not on TV, have loves and griefs and stories and songs and sorrows and, for heaven’s sake, rights. Instead, when Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, was asked what he would call a victory in America’s new war, he said that if he could convince the world that Americans must be allowed to continue with their way of life, he would consider it a victory. The September 11 attacks were a monstrous calling card from a world gone horribly wrong. The message may have been written by Bin Laden (who knows?) and delivered by his couriers, but it could well have been signed by the ghosts of the victims of America’s old wars. The millions killed in Korea, Vietnam and Cambodia, the 17,500 killed when Israel-backed by the US-invaded Lebanon in 1982, the 200,000 Iraqis killed in Operation Desert Storm, the thousands of Palestinians who have died fighting Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. And the millions who died, in Yugoslavia, Somalia, Haiti, Chile, Nicaragua, El Salvador, the Dominican Republic, Panama, at the hands of all the terrorists, dictators and genocidists whom the American government supported, trained, bankrolled and supplied with arms. And this is far from being a comprehensive list. For a country involved in so much warfare and conflict, the American people have been extremely fortunate.

The strikes on September 11 were only the second on American soil in over a century. The first was Pearl Harbour. The reprisal for this took a long route, but ended with Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This time the world waits with bated breath for the horrors to come. Someone recently said that if Osama bin Laden didn’t exist, America would have had to invent him. But, in a way, America did invent him. He was among the jihadis who moved to Afghanistan in 1979 when the CIA commenced its operations there. Bin Laden has the distinction of being created by the CIA and wanted by the FBI. In the course of a fortnight he has been promoted from suspect to prime suspect and then, despite the lack of any real evidence, straight up the charts to being “wanted dead or alive”. From all accounts, it will be impossible to produce evidence (of the sort that would stand scrutiny in a court of law) to link Bin Laden to the September 11 attacks. So far, it appears that the most incriminating piece of evidence against him is the fact that he has not condemned them. From what is known about the location of Bin Laden and the living conditions in which he operates, it’s entirely possible that he did not personally plan and carry out the attacks-that he is the inspirational figure, “the CEO of the holding company”. The Taliban’s response to US demands for the extradition of Bin Laden has been uncharacteristically reasonable: produce the evidence, then we’ll hand him over. President Bush’s response is that the demand is “non-negotiable”. (While talks are on for the extradition of CEOs-can India put in a side request for the extradition of Warren Anderson of the US? He was the chairman of Union Carbide, responsible for the Bhopal gas leak that killed 16,000 people in 1984. We have collated the necessary evidence. It’s all in the files. Could we have him, please?)

But who is Osama bin Laden really? Let me rephrase that. What is Osama bin Laden? He’s America’s family secret. He is the American president’s dark doppelganger. The savage twin of all that purports to be beautiful and civilised. He has been sculpted from the spare rib of a world laid to waste by America’s foreign policy: its gunboat diplomacy, its nuclear arsenal, its vulgarly stated policy of “full-spectrum dominance”, its chilling disregard for non-American lives, its barbarous military interventions, its support for despotic and dictatorial regimes, its merciless economic agenda that has munched through the economies of poor countries like a cloud of locusts. Its marauding multinationals who are taking over the air we breathe, the ground we stand on, the water we drink, the thoughts we think. Now that the family secret has been spilled, the twins are blurring into one another and gradually becoming interchangeable. Their guns, bombs, money and drugs have been going around in the loop for a while. (The Stinger missiles that will greet US helicopters were supplied by the CIA. The heroin used by America’s drug addicts comes from Afghanistan. The Bush administration recently gave Afghanistan a $43m subsidy for a “war on drugs”.)

Now Bush and Bin Laden have even begun to borrow each other’s rhetoric. Each refers to the other as “the head of the snake”. Both invoke God and use the loose millenarian currency of good and evil as their terms of reference. Both are engaged in unequivocal political crimes. Both are dangerously armed-one with the nuclear arsenal of the obscenely powerful, the other with the incandescent, destructive power of the utterly hopeless. The fireball and the ice pick. The bludgeon and the axe. The important thing to keep in mind is that neither is an acceptable alternative to the other. President Bush’s ultimatum to the people of the world-“If you’re not with us, you’re against us”-is a piece of presumptuous arrogance. It’s not a choice that people want to, need to, or should have to make.

In the aftermath of the terrible shock of the tragic events on Sept. 11, I extend my deepest sympathies to all those affected. From the bottom of my heart, I pray for the victims, and I pray that their families may find inner strength, healing and, eventually, renewed happiness.

It is impossible not to be outraged at the senseless loss of so many lives. And yet it is not the numbers that make this tragedy so horrific. Every single person lost was irreplaceable and immensely precious — a much-loved sister, father, son, mother or friend. Each individual’s life contained infinite possibilities waiting to be realized. In the most terrible manner imaginable, we have been reminded of the immense value of human life.

In all its teachings, Buddhism stresses how sacred and precious life — especially human life — is. One scripture reads: ‘A single day of life is worth more than all the treasures of the universe.’ Terrorism, which so cruelly robs people of life, can never be excused or justified by any reason or cause. It is an absolute evil. And when such acts are committed in the name of religion, it demonstrates the utter spiritual bankruptcy of the perpetrators.

As human beings sharing a common home, we have all been impacted by this terrible deed. In the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., ‘Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.’ We must unite across differences of nationality and faith in order to create a world free of injustice, violence and terror.

I call for a just and equitable international tribunal to be established to try those responsible for acts of terrorism and other crimes against humanity.

But the struggle against terrorism requires more than short-term international cooperation. It requires a profound reexamination of the nature of human civilization. For much of our history, humanity has been trapped in vicious cycles of hatred and reprisal. We must redouble our efforts to break this cycle and transform distrust into trust. I believe that this is the most effective and fundamental antidote to terrorism and its repugnant worship of violence.

It is the function of evil to divide; to alienate people from each other and divide one country from another. The universe, this world and our own lives, are the stage for a ceaseless struggle between hatred and compassion, the destructive and constructive aspects of life. We must never let up, confronting evil at every turn.

This attack was an ultimate manifestation of evil and shows us the vilest depths to which human nature can sink. In the end, the evil over which we must triumph is the impulse toward hatred and destruction that resides in us all.

Unless we can achieve a fundamental transformation within our own lives, so that we are able to perceive our intimate connection with all our fellow human beings and feel their sufferings as our own, we will never be free of conflict and war. In this sense, I feel that a ‘hard power’ approach, one that relies on military might, will not lead to a long-term, fundamental resolution.

I believe that dialogue holds the key to any lasting solution. Now, more than ever, we must reach out in a further effort to understand each other and engage in genuine dialogue. Words spoken from the heart have the power to change a person’s life. They can even melt the icy walls of mistrust that separate peoples and nations. We must expand our efforts to promote dialogue between and among civilizations.

I am utterly convinced that we were not born into this world to hate and destroy each other. We must restore and renew our faith in humanity and in each other. We must never lose sight of the fact that we can still make the 21st century an era free from the flames of war and violence — an era in which all people may live in peace. To this end, we must strive to make a profound reverence for life the prevailing spirit of our times and our planet. I believe that this is the greatest and most enduring way to honor the memory of the victims of this enormous tragedy.”

Daisaku Ikeda is a Buddhist philosopher, author and peace proponent, and recipient of NAPF’s World Citizen Award. He is also the President of the Soka Gakkai International, a lay Buddhist organization and an NGO with more than 12 million members in 177 countries and territories around the world. A central theme of SGI President Daisaku Ikeda’s works is his probing into the transformative means by which human dignity and peace can be at once accessible and extended to all humanity.