It’s lunchtime in Spain (2:30 p.m.!) on 09/11/02, nearing ground zero moment back home. I’m multi-tasking in our 15th-century heap of stone: writing this column while monitoring The Anniversary on BBC World and CNN International.

I’m hearing these words: terror, murder, killing, bombing, hijacking, suicide. All these are now fixtures in our Attack on America vocabulary. Justly so. Note, however, the scant mention of “assassination.”

This absence relates to occupational semantics. Whereas the other terms of violence are labor-neutral, assassination is usually reserved for politicians and government employees. The term derives, famously, from the same root as hashish, which was used to train hit squads by an 11th-century Iranian mystic-killer named Hassan as-Sabbah, “the Old Man of the Mountain.” I’ve been to that very mountain (literally, not figuratively), wandered its ruined fortress, and spoken to local shepherds who keep alive the folk knowledge that those long-ago “eaters of hashish” – the original hashashseen – concentrated on political and government targets. Thus 21st-century Spanish functionaries, no matter how minor, are “assassinated” by ETA, the Basque terrorist movement. In contrast, WTC business people and Pentagon military personnel were only “killed” or “murdered.”

United Airlines 93 carried would-be assassins. Had it not crashed in that Pennsylvania field, government officials in the White House or Capitol building would have fallen victim to a sort of mass assassination.

“Victim” raises another worthwhile dictionary distinction: That plane’s passengers, together with 403 New York City uniformed emergency workers, rank as not only as “victims” but also, by category, as 9-11’s truest “heroes.” They actively gave their lives – “Let’s roll!” – as well as losing them. Likewise heroic (we can be certain if not specific) were many others within the three ill-fated buildings, human beings who died trying to save their fellows and whose stories we’ll never know. Still others took enormous risks and somehow survived. Dead or alive, they’re heroes.

Let’s resist verbal inflation. Without diminishing the tragedy of anyone’s violent death, it’s important to maintain the difference between real heroism and victimhood, however awful its circumstances. Victims aren’t automatically heroes. Same for survivors, no matter how worthy of support. Any culture that blandly conflates these categories – as our media culture increasingly does – has lost its edge. Without an edge, there’ll be less true heroism next time.

While there were many heroes and even more victims, no one was actually assassinated on 9-11. No one, that is, since Sept. 11, 1973, when a U.S.-backed military coup toppled Chile’s democratic elected government and murdered – assassinated – its reformer president, Salvador Allende. Wisely or not, Congress subsequently outlawed assassination as a tool of American policy. How does that law correspond to the $25 million reward offered by our president – “Dead or Alive” – on Osama bin Laden? What about the ad hominem implications of “Regime Change” in Iraq?

Whatever its status in current U.S. planning, assassination is alive and well in Afghanistan. Two top officials – a cabinet minister and a vice president – have been assassinated since the post-Taliban, U.S.-sponsored government of Hamid Karzai came to power. Neither crime has been solved.

It could be worse … and nearly was on Sept. 5. On that day our entire American investment in Afghanistan, embodied by Karzai and emblematic of the War on Terror, almost collapsed in Kandahar. Attending his brother’s wedding, the Afghan president was targeted by a uniformed soldier who, like so many Kandahari Pashtuns, had once sided with the Taliban. The assassin missed and was gunned down by Karzai’s American security guards. Kandahar’s governor, whose loyalty to central government is substantial but measured, took a bullet in the neck. Luckily, he’ll make it. Karzai’s own cool take: “I’ll be fine. I expect things like this to happen.”

But what if the next assassination attempt happens differently? Kandahar is Karzai’s home city. It’s the epicenter of Pashtun ethnicity. If he can be attacked in Kandahar, it can happen anywhere. If he is attacked successfully, what will become of Afghanistan, the first and most publicized of America’s post-9-11 battlegrounds? Car bombings and sniper fire have been on the rise all summer, even in Kabul. Finally (finally) the Bush administration speaks of some shift in priorities from military pursuit, now mostly fruitless, along the Pakistan border to peace- keeping and Afghan national reconstruction. Still (still) off the U.S. table: any discussion of using American troops as actual peacekeepers. Until that idea is taken seriously, there’ll be more assassinations.

Sept. 9 marked The Anniversary (Kabul-style) of Afghanistan’s most significant assassination in two decades, that of Ahmad Shah Masood. This brilliant and indefatigable Tajik had led his valley’s jihad against the Soviets, served as a bloody defense minister in the subsequent mujahedeen government, and by 2001 was the last obstacle to complete Taliban control over Afghanistan. His killing by an al-Qaida suicide bomber was linked, in all likelihood, to attacks on America two days later.

Now Kabul, even with a Pashtun as president, is mostly controlled by Tajiks. Its police force, secret service and defense ministry are all Tajik-run. As such, Karzai has had to swallow, with characteristic grace, a concerted post-mortem canonization of Masood, the martyred Tajik hero. Twice before, in important public ceremonies, Karzai has been upstaged by gigantic images of Masood (see this column, Dec. 25, 2001 and May 10, 2002). The 9-9 anniversary of Masood’s assassination unleashed new levels of hagiography.

Things began days earlier at Masood’s green-domed mausoleum in the Panjsher (“Five Lions”) Valley. Hamid Karzai, who would leave for U.N. meetings in New York prior to 9-9, paid his respects flanked, as is so often the case nowadays, by his de-facto co-ruler, Tajik Defense Minister Fahim. Mourners also included the Russian defense minister. For 10 years (1979-1989) Masood was the Russians’ most resolute enemy. Said a custodian of the grave, “If a fight is over and the defeated enemy comes with an offering, like a sheep or other bounty, he is forgiven. When [the Russian minister] bowed before Masood’s grave today, even if he had killed my father, I would have forgiven him.”

The main ceremony took place in Kabul’s stadium where a huger than ever poster of Masood was revealed – in precisely the same spot where, in more settled times, the head of state used to be pictured. Masood’s 13-year-old son was front and center, accepting a schoolgirl’s bouquet, greeting dignitaries and delivering a precociously elegant speech. On many people’s minds: How would Afghanistan be different today had Masood not been assassinated? Would he, rather than Karzai, now be head of state? Would the 13-year-old be next in dynastic line?

As always with Afghanistan, it depends whom you ask and in which ethnic area. Kabul and points north are festooned with Masood posters, but not Kandahar or Jalalabad or Bamiyan or Herat. On a recent talk show, one Afghan diplomat (Tajik) implied, undiplomatically, that Masood would have been a far better president than Karzai. Two Afghan women (Pashtun) retorted that Masood was a chauvanist and a murderer. A gaggle of French intellectuals is nominating him for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Given this bitter schism over a man assassinated last year, the brutal reality of two assassinations this year, and the near assassination of President Karzai last week, all the Bush 9-11 talk about “liberation” and “emerging democracy” in Afghanistan is either disingenuous or stupid. Either way, our War on Terror seems increasingly problematic in the country where we began it. The same old feel-good slogans and proxy policies won’t win that war. What would help win it in Afghanistan and elsewhere? How about some open discussion, some challenging of strategic assumptions, even on the newly designated Patriot Day?

Now it’s dinnertime (9:30 p.m.!) in Spain. Both BBC and CNN are still going strong with 9-11. Same facts but different treatment: BBC explores ideas; CNN celebrates emotions. Both covered President Bush, and I watched closely. I admire, very much, his ability to connect emotionally with individual Americans. In this respect, he’s the presidential equivalent of CNN. On this day of mourning, BBC went beyond grief and pride; it raised some questions. I mourn the president’s disinclination – or inability – to explore ideas.

Dr. Whitney Azoy, a cultural anthropologist and former U.S. diplomat in Kabul, has worked for 30 years with Afghanistan and the Muslim world. He was last in Afghanistan in May on a U.S. government contract.