We're talking about King Lear and President George W - about the thin grey line between tragedy and comedy, between pathos and bathos. And we are walking the line. This war on terror, for the moment, is still a Ridley Scott sort of movie: all clenched jaws and derring-do. Not many laughs. But Robert Altman is waiting in the wings, ready to take over as black hawks go down and black farces begin. Absurdity is its own comeuppance. Altman's only problem may be knowing which absurdity to start with. Can it be the director of homeland security, Tom Ridge, dutifully explaining a few days ago (and 1,300 incarcerated suspects later) why the FBI still hasn't located a single al-Qaida cell operating in the USA? "I think we should assume and operate under the notion that some are still in the United States...."

Some "notion", in very slow motion. Poor Tom's a-cold. Can it be Mrs Bin Laden, explaining to readers what happened to Osama's kids when the Taliban banned schools? Oh, we "hired private tutors who taught them English and Arabic and maths and science. They also trained them to use the computer". New Labour couldn't have done it better, nuncle. But if I had to start anywhere this morning, it would be with the Mullah Omar. If, that is, I - or anybody else - knew where he was. The missing mullah, after all, is not some malevolent genius, more a muddled plodder. He's the stocky, luxuriantly bearded village cleric plucked long ago by the Pakistan secret service to be its not very imposing front man in Afghanistan. He is, famously, one eye short of a pair (and three wives over the norm). His political skills, in the days after September 11, make him a natural contender for the Stephen Byers Foresight and Planning Award. He's been on the run all winter, mostly sighted riding a motor bike through outlying villages. He used to be Afghanistan's leader, an Afghan living among Afghans in a Kandahar house with animals in the front parlor. Not exactly an unknown quantity. But the combined strength of western - nay, world - intelligence hasn't laid a finger on him yet.

Is that a joke? It is becoming one. We may still, just about, nod sympathetically as Osama does his Scarlet Pimpernel act again. He has always been damned elusive. Omar, though, is quite another matter. When he gets on his bike, he makes his secret pursuers - the spies in the sky, the agents on the ground - seem merely foolish. And once you start sniggering, there is so much more to snigger over.

Of course the World Trade Center wasn't remotely funny. Of course the scenes of smoking rubble evoked sorrow and pity in purest form. But the rest of the show (to be honest) has been down hill all the way. Anyone who is anyone in al-Qaida has done a flit, probably to Pakistan (though Pakistan is deemed on our side, and thus not subject to the kind of histrionic vengeance Ariel Sharon wreaks on Arafat). The evil empire, meanwhile, fumbling with a dud box of matches and failing to set fire to its best training shoes, has signally failed to strike back.

Is that because B-52s, unloading death by the thousand ton from a great height, have smashed its infrastructure? Perhaps. But we're entitled by now to inquire: "what infrastructure?" The FBI can't find one. The paperwork captured in Kabul and surrounds is goggle-eyed scribbling. Months pass, filled only by hysterical, unfulfilled warnings from US attorneys general and British chiefs of police. Nothing happens. Osama, even at the best of times, couldn't bring any momentum to his atrocity-making; but this is ridiculous. The special forces can't find the villain and the villain doesn't strike back. Missions impossible becomes mission wholly improbable.

And that, at root, is the trouble with all this second-phase Saddam stuff. We were told, if you remember, to expect a new kind of war, blending the military, the diplomatic and the power of secret intelligence as never before. But there is, on examination, nothing new about Mr Bush's latest defense budget. It wants more of everything, to be sure, but the everything is old, heavy-duty kit left over from Gulf and cold war thinking. Here, one more time, comes son of star wars to confront a future menace which present policies are supposedly obliterating anyway. Nor, from Saudi Arabia to the EU, is diplomacy faring so well, either (as Dick Cheney has just painfully discovered). Which leaves the spooks swinging and singing alone. Omar, I miss your apple pie.

Yet, more than ever, the west needs its intelligence arms to take the strain. It needs to pick up a few of the real ringleaders. (Radovan Karadzic would be a start.) It needs to have precise information about Iraq's biological arsenals that can be used, out in the open, to sway public opinion, not shiver Tony Blair's timbers in his private office. It needs to come clean about an al-Qaida threat which is in danger of becoming grotesquely overblown, swollen by bluster. It needs to get its thinking in order.

There is no sign of that happening. (Why else should Britain's anxious generals unburden themselves to the Observer yesterday rather than Mr Blair?) On the contrary, we're back in the old bind of gab first and ponder later. We are parking our tanks on Saddam's lawn again without finding a gate to bring them in through. That's not a matter of morality. If some ambitious Iraqi colonel, bank account stuffed and ambition fueled, put a gun to the old despot's head and pulled the trigger, we could all rejoice. The Takriti tyrants have ruined their country and made victims of their people. Doing something about them is, though, a matter of reality.

Is Israel the final, blood-stained joke? Even Jewish comedians are finding that a hard connection to make. But it has, in its own grisly way, become something akin to a joke. When Ariel Sharon randomly rounds up hundreds of Palestinian camp boys and stamps numbers on them, we know we can either laugh or cry. And laughing is the harder option.

Don't we see that one UN resolution goes with another, that Tel Aviv and Baghdad are under the same instruction? Don't we see that being tough on crime involves being tough on the causes of crime (as they grow, in pain, around Gaza)? Don't we see that consensus means sharing a purpose, which also means a common sense of humor? Don't we see how absurd, how fast, our posturing has become?

Intelligence is not just in the gathering, but in the application too. So ... out went the candle, and we were left darkling.

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2002

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