As the US rains down not just bombs, but small transistor radios tuned to American news, the battle to win the hearts and minds of Afghans - and the world's Muslims - is joined.

Air-dropped vegetarian meals, pamphlets, radios - and his Sunday speech televised to the Arab world - are a strategic part of President Bush's message: This is not a war against against Islam, but a global war on terrorism.

But Islamic extremist Osama bin Laden is taking his campaign to the airwaves. Within hours of the initial US and British attacks on Afghanistan, Al-Jazeera, the Arab equivalent of CNN, broadcast a taped statment by the Al Queda leader in which he thanked Allah [God] for the Sept. 11 attacks on the US. The bin Laden message, taped prior to the US attacks, clearly seeks to rally a reaction in the Islamic world to the US assault.

In the coming days and weeks, the public-opinion war - particularly in Afghanistan and the Muslim world - is likely to be as crucial as the military campaign.

From Amman, Jordan, to Islamabad, Pakistan, a remarkable kind of global debate is now playing out in local media, with many newspapers running Mr. bin Laden's words from his videotape on front pages alongside Bush's speech Sunday. In Egypt, from which hail many of bin Laden's top lieutenants, the extremist's words were printed without censoring.

"There's so much distrust of the US in the Muslim and Arab worlds right now you can't say anyone is winning or losing this battle yet," says Shibley Telhami, a Mideast expert at the University of Maryland. "It is the beginning of a clash of civilizations within the Middle East," he adds, with people drawn to bin Laden's anti-Western rhetoric feeling confirmed in their beliefs, while those who fear his impact now feeling "even more fearful."

In announcing the beginning of strikes Sunday, President Bush chose simple, declarative sentences to make the moral case for action and to draw the distinction between terrorists and Muslims he hopes the world will hear. "At the same time the oppressed people of Afghanistan will know the generosity of America and its allies," Bush said, adding that the campaign includes drops of food, medicines and supplies. "We are the friends of almost a billion [people] worldwide who practice the Islamic faith," he said.

Speaking on Monday morning news shows Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said the US had dropped 37,500 humanitarian food aide packages as part of what he calls the "so-called war."

And as the leader of the only US ally that participated directly in Sunday's military attacks, British Prime Minister Tony Blair also emphasized that this is a war neither against the Afghan people nor Islam. "It angers me, as it angers the vast majority of Muslims, to hear bin Laden and his associates described as Islamic terrorists," Mr. Blair said Sunday. "They are terrorists, pure and simple."

Yet just how that message was being received in key Muslim countries was mixed on Monday.

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