All those recent weeks of worry about whether the northern alliance would ever stir from its trenches suddenly seem like ancient history. Within just a few days, the alliance rolled through the key city of Mazar-e-Sharif in the north, then the Afghan capital, Kabul, and now is closing in on Kandahar, the Taliban’s headquarters in the south.

The new worry is how the Northern Alliance can be slowed – not slowed to protect the Taliban which protects the terrorist bin Laden, but slowed to allow civilization to catch up. The sudden exit of the iron-fisted Taliban leaves a power vacuum that something must fill.

What that will be is a grave concern – the northern alliance is little more than a loose combine of tribes with little in common other than consuming hatred of the Taliban. Among its leaders are men who once governed Afghanistan and who governed it so badly and bloodily that the Taliban-led revolt succeeded. The potential for atrocious reprisals is real.

So, too, is the potential for progress, for civilization to gain a great victory. From the start of the air campaign five weeks ago, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell has said the United Nations would need to assemble an international administration to govern until the Afghani people can build their own government. Yesterday, just hours after capturing Kabul, the northern alliance said it has invited all of the country’s religious and ethnic factions – except the Taliban – to come to the capital city and take part in building that government, and asked the U.N. to help. U.N. officials said it would send personnel to Kabul immediately; Turkey and Pakistan offered to dispatch troops for an emergency peacekeeping force. The UN has often been derided here, especially in Congress and by this administration, for being too much under the influence if countries that too often are critical of the United States and its policies. Now, with the U.N. being called upon to provide Afghanistan with an interim government, that independence and multinational perspective may be the U.N.’s greatest asset and a key to new, productive relations between the United States’ and all Islamic nations.

This is a rare moment. Never before has an oppressive, inhumane government collapsed so swiftly; never before have the nations of the world had such an opportunity to rebuild a shattered society from scratch. With the Taliban now fleeing to isolated mountain hideouts, humanitarian aid – food, medicine, clothing and shelter – can pour into Afghanistan, delivering its people from disaster. After two months of being fed Taliban propaganda via al Jazeera TV, Muslims throughout the world now must see that this truly is a war on terrorism; it never was a war on Islam.

The humanitarian aid must be as overwhelming and unrelenting as the air campaign against the Taliban and al-Qaida. President Bush, who already has called upon America’s children to send their dollars to Afghanistan’s children, now must call upon Congress to send billions. History may record the Taliban only as a sad footnote, but the opportunity its demise creates is history-making and must not be squandered.