Another is soul-searching: "Do you enjoy being ruled by the Taliban? Are you proud to live a life of fear? Are you happy to see the place your family has owned for generations a terrorist training site?"
It is hard to assess the effect of the leafletting. From the testimony of recent refugees, most Afghans are more focused on their own fight for survival than the war against terrorism. As bombs hit the cities, people flee to the villages. As bombs hit the villages, people flee to refugee camps along the borders, arriving destitute, frightened and hungry.
People are eager for news but information is scarce. Television has been banned by the Taliban; there are no newspapers to speak of. Radio has been people's primary link to the world. The Taliban's Radio Shariat was quickly silenced by the air raids.
The United States would like to provide its own substitute. Last week, Congress voted to create Radio Free Afghanistan, a station that would beam Afghan versions of entertainment and American versions of the news. In the meantime, a special aircraft occasionally broadcasts from the sky.
Many Afghans are accustomed to listening to the British Broadcasting Corporation and the Voice of America, which offer news in the local languages. While the reporting is generally considered unbiased, editorials may not be regarded as similarly so. Recent Voice of America editorials have had much the same tone as the leaflets.
On Wednesday, the Voice of America warned hungry Afghans that food had been stolen from United Nations warehouses and that the Taliban may have poisoned it.
"It is hard to believe that anyone ó even those as evil as the Taliban leaders ó would ever poison food intended for starving people," the editorial said. "But then, who believed before Sept. 11 that anyone would hijack civilian airliners and deliberately crash them into buildings to kill thousands of innocent people?"
In Pakistan, the battle for the headlines largely seems to have been won by Abdul Salam Zaeef, the Taliban's ambassador in Islamabad. Virtually every weekday, he has hosted a news conference from the embassy's veranda, making allegations about American "atrocities" to a huge audience of foreign journalists desperate for news from Afghanistan.
A few days ago, the government of Pakistan, America's frontline ally against the Taliban, told Mullah Zaeef that his barrage of vitriol was outside the norms of diplomatic conduct. He was asked to curb his hospitality to the press.
The allies announced their own effort to counter the Taliban spin, opening the war office in Islamabad in an effort to immediately respond to accusations. Islamabad is 10 hours ahead of Washington. By the time the Pentagon has issued its rebuttals, the newspapers in many countries have already gone to press.
A Place for bin Laden
In Propaganda History
Turning civilian passenger planes into missiles will not be the only benchmark set by Mr. bin Laden and his Al Qaeda organization. In the annals of propaganda, Mr. bin Laden will be remembered, too, for the audacity he showed by leaping onto the television screens of the world only hours after American bombs started falling on Afghanistan.
This was a man wanted by the most powerful nation on earth. And there Mr. bin Laden was, suddenly, on videotape, sitting calmly before a rocky outcrop, his only weapon a Kalashnikov rifle. He delivered a statement about Allah having struck America in its highest places, wished the killer pilots godspeed to paradise and vowed that this was just the start of an apocalypse.
"You have to choose your side," he told the world's one billion Muslims, and leaned back contentedly for a sip of water.
From that instant the propaganda war was joined, and it is far from clear in the Muslim world that Mr. bin Laden is losing it.
Although American television networks have been persuaded not to run Mr. bin Laden's tapes unedited, the Islamic audience he cares about can still see and hear him.
For this audience, there is Al Jazeera, the CNN of the Arab world, chosen as the recipient of his tapes. The text of his latest tape, in which he attacked moderate Arab leaders and the United Nations, was on the front page in newspapers across the Muslim world, and on scores of Arab Internet sites. Beyond that, the message has been broadcast, and rebroadcast, from the pulpits of myriad mosques.
Racks in the bookstores of cities across the Islamic world are filled with books about Mr. bin Laden, and with magazines that carry his photograph on their covers.
The evidence from the Muslim world is that Mr. bin Laden's hatred for America and his call for a holy war has a vast, receptive audience. Opinion polls show it, and anecdotal evidence confirms it.
In Pakistan, America's reluctant partner in the war on terrorism, it is hard to find anybody who does not condemn the Sept. 11 attacks. But in slum sections of Karachi, Lahore and Peshawar, people with almost nothing line up to buy bin Laden T-shirts.
This article was reported and written by Edmund L. Andrews, Felicity Barringer, Barry Bearak and John F. Burns, with Ms. Becker.
