OSTON

The war in Afghanistan has gone well for the United States so far in two senses, military and moral. The Taliban has been driven from most of the country. And what we have learned about it and its Al Qaeda allies has shown that this is a necessary war, a just war.

Critics, more numerous in Britain than in this country, have called the war immoral despite the terrible provocation of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Some have depicted America as a bully targeting Afghanistan without adequate justification, careless of its people because they have different religious and cultural values.

The truth, we know now, is that most Afghans were the victims of Taliban cruelty so harsh that it has to be called psychopathic. Beating women for going out of their homes alone to get food, for example. The photographs taken in cities freed from Taliban rule show exultant faces.

We have also learned how close Taliban leaders were to Osama bin Laden, preaching his hatred and following his orders. Taliban soldiers, including tens of thousands of foreign volunteers, have to be taken seriously as a potential terrorist army.

Moreover, we know that bin Laden has sought weapons of mass destruction — nuclear, chemical, biological. In light of that knowledge, it is hard to understand how anyone can dismiss the gravity of the threat the world faced after Sept. 11.

But some of the moral and military high ground secured by the United States is now being given up on another front: law. That is the effect of President Bush's order allowing anyone who is not a U.S. citizen and who is suspected of terrorist activity to be tried by a special military tribunal.

The extraordinary sweep of the Bush order has not been widely understood — not by some commentators who have defended it, I suspect. It covers millions of resident aliens in this country: people with green cards. Any one of them could be brought before a military tribunal, instead of a regular court, if the president said he or she has "aided" terrorism or "harbored" a terrorist.

The trials by military commission would lack what most Americans would regard as essentials of fairness.

• Military officers, who are dependent on their superiors for promotion, would act as judge and jury.

• A two-thirds vote of commission members present at the time would be sufficient to convict — and to impose any sentence.

• The defendant could be barred, on security grounds, from seeing the evidence against him.

• The defendant could not appeal to "any court of the United States or any state."

• The trials could be held in secret.

What confidence could the world have in the justice of such a proceeding? Such confidence is crucial. The Nuremberg trials of Nazi leaders, in open court before an international tribunal, had a profound long-term effect in bringing Germans back to democracy and humanity.

If Mr. Bush's order had been limited to suspected foreign terrorists captured in Afghanistan or other foreign countries, it would have been more persuasive legally. It would parallel the use of a military commission to try Nazi saboteurs who were landed in the U.S. by submarine in World War II — a use upheld by the Supreme Court.

Sweeping millions of resident aliens under the order seems to violate the principle that civilians should not be subject to military law in this country. The Supreme Court held that imposing martial law in Hawaii in World War II was unconstitutional.

In recent years conservatives have given striking support to civil liberty. So it was sad to find some conservative voices enlisting behind the Bush order. Terrorists deserve no better, they argued. But of course the question to be decided at a trial — a fair trial — is whether they are terrorists.

Not just the nature of Mr. Bush's order but the way it was done smacked of illegitimacy. It was sudden, peremptory, without even a nod to consulting Congress.

This week President Bush renamed the Justice Department building for Robert F. Kennedy. It was a gracious ceremony, but there was an implicit suggestion that because of his toughness on crime Mr. Kennedy would have supported the Bush military tribunals. To the contrary, Robert Kennedy's years as attorney general were marked by his growing understanding that, if this country is true to itself, there can be no shortcuts to justice.