Commenting on the Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar ordering the destruction of the 2,000-year-old pre-Islamic statues of Buddha in Bamiya province, last

February, I started an article saying, "Mullah Mohammad Omar is not a name that is widely known -- until now. Unfortunately, that may soon change."

And change it has -- but far beyond anything anyone imagined at the time.

This was barely seven months before the catastrophic Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon that killed more than 3,000 people, flung Afghanistan and its rulers into the limelight of world affairs, and dragged the United States out of its isolationist politics and into a new war on the other side of the planet.

Afghanistan, as much of the rest of the world, was probably the last item on President George W. Bush's agenda as he set about getting his feet under the presidential desk in the Oval Office.

Bush appeared keen on keeping America as much as possible out of international affairs. The main concern at the time seemed to be the tax refund - a nice political gesture to win "W" some additional domestic support -- pulling the United States out of the Kyoto Global Warming Treaty and bringing the troops home from Bosnia. This latter issue was a point Bush kept repeating during his election campaign, arguing that U.S. troops should not be used for peacekeeping or nation building.

The top national story, pre-Sept. 11, was the alleged affair California Rep. Gary Condit was supposed to have carried on with the missing Washington intern Chandra Levy -- a story that has since vanished from the pages of the nation's newspapers and television airwaves as quickly as the unfortunate intern did.

Television was also preoccupied with the XFL (remember them? -- Vince MacMahon's of World Wrestling Federation fame's failed attempt to jazz up American football) and moronic shows such as "Survivor," "Temptation Island," "Who Wants to be a Millionaire," or "The Weakest Link."

The other story to gain considerable momentum in the latter part of 2001 was on the dangers of bioterrorism, written only one day after the Sept. 11 attacks. In it, I pointed out how, as a nation, the United States was unprepared for an eventual attack by terrorists using chemical or biological agents as weapons of mass destruction.

In just seven short months, Omar and his acolyte Osama bin Laden have become household names along with "Taliban," "Al Qaida" and the biological agent, "anthrax."

Back in February Omar, the supreme leader of the Taliban who ruled over much of Afghanistan with an iron fist, imposing their interpretation of Sharia, or Islamic law, was practically unknown and unheard of in the West, at least to the general public.

Little, if anything, was written about Afghanistan, a country where women's rights disappeared along with democracy, basic services and education -- except for what was provided by religious Islamic schools.

Yet Sept. 11 changed all of that. The nation was rudely dragged away from the tax relief, Condit's affairs, silly television games, and was hurled into unprecedented horrors.

The United States not only became involved in a new war, but also in nation building and peacekeeping in a country thousands of miles from its shores. America learned that it could not ignore international affairs, and that the well-being of Afghanis, Palestinians, Israelis, Pakistanis and Indians had a direct impact on their own safety and well-being.

In the madness of that year, a New York landmark was destroyed and an oppressive regime was forced out of power in that faraway land. In retrospect, it seems as if much more that a single year has gone by.