Tony Blair's hopes that this was to be Africa's week in the world media and the beginning of a second chance for the impoverished continent were blasted to bits in London last Thursday by terror squads with other priorities.
This much was clear immediately in the flash of the explosions in the London Underground: Cowardly killers such as these care not a whit about raising Africans out of poverty, fighting AIDS and climate change, or addressing any of the other worthy topics on the G-8 agenda constructed by the British prime minister. If Africa is buried under the collateral damage of these blasts, so be it; this is their attitude.
The true motives of terrorists are rarely known with certainty. Their communiqués glorifying criminality and blood lust in the name of politics or religion, or some perverse mixture of the two, are unreliable guides. These are people, if the word applies, who kill because they can.
They kill to break the will of their opponents, to purchase a ticket to paradise, to be paid in coin or a sick kind of prestige. The idea that they are punishing Mr. Blair -- for whatever reason -- by driving his efforts to double aid to Africa's poor off the world's front pages and television screens invites contempt and even derision.
Mr. Blair responded to the violence with appropriate calm and determination. He is not a man who will be cowed or deflected from his course by his enemies, or who will let emotion dictate his strategy. The nominal leadership of the G-8 that was his this year by custom has been transformed by his citizens' blood into a real authority over this group of presidents and prime ministers.
They have now been challenged frontally and as a group by the timing of the attack on their host nation. They must decide whether they will respond as a group -- by intensifying concrete contributions to fighting global terrorism -- or as separate nations seeking separate truces with al Qaeda, its offshoots and ilk who have left these leaders no place to hide.
Hope is not permitted to exist for others by the killers of London, Madrid, New York, Northern Virginia, Baghdad, Kabul and elsewhere. They traffic in despair, resignation and surrender. The G-8 leaders have said the terrorists will not prevail. It is up to those leaders to show that they mean those words.
