Afghanistan Cannot Be Won & We Dare Not Lose Against Al Qaeda

The question in Afghanistan is not: Should we beat the Taliban? Though that is what it seems to have become. The questions are: Can we beat the Taliban, and are they our most important enemy? We cannot beat the Taliban--without utterly destroying human life at levels we will not accept. And bad as they are, complicit in fighting us as they are, our enemy, against whom we cannot allow ourselves to lose, is Al Qaeda.

Conflating the Taliban and Al Qaeda is as serious an error as Bush's conflation of Saddam and Al Qaeda. There is no plausible path that leads us to anything that could even vaguely be defined as victory. The Taliban are indigenous--and they are tribal, political, religious and ethnic. They are not all our sworn enemies...yet. But we're working on it.

We are, by not carefully distinguishing between the Taliban and Al Qaeda and among the various brands and branches of Taliban, pushing them together. They are uniting amongst themselves and with Al Qaeda to fight us. We are also pushing them east into what was the semi sanctuary of western Pakistan in Swat and Wazirastan. Together they are further destabilizing Pakistan. This is a very bad thing.

The prize and the peril are in Pakistan. With a large and politically powerful military, with a weak and corrupt government and with 85 to 100 nuclear bombs, their fate is critically important to us and the world--not to mention India. Those nukes in the wrong hands, in Al Qaeda hands would be the worst news the world could get. Worse, even than a nuclear Iran--also not a great prospect.

Iran, unlike Al Qaeda, is a nation with cities, factories and universities. They may be bad players on the world's stage but they have not, so far, been, suicidal. They use agents and arm puppets to do their destructive acts. Yes, they want hegemony over the region but they are happy to arm agents to fight, bomb and subvert other governments and the State of Israel.

The same cannot be said of Al Qaeda. They are stateless, have no good return address and are suicidal as well as indiscriminately homicidal. They are radically portable, so saying that they are in Afghanistan or Pakistan, while true at the moment, doesn't mean very much. Not being a state, they franchise and can move anywhere. 9-11 did not happen because of hooded terrorists swinging on monkey bars in Afghanistan. It happened because grievance and terror are portable. Egyptians and Saudis studying in Germany, pilots taking lessons in our Mid West, Florida and San Diego were on those planes. The money came from Saudi Arabia.

We need to focus on Al Qaeda wherever they are. We don't need massive armies; we need international cooperation. The Saudis are beginning to understand that the Faustian bargain they made with Al Qaeda is coming back to bite them. With the assassination attempt at the royal prince in charge of anti-terrorism last week and considerable unrest in the royal family itself, they are seeing that they cannot buy off their radicals by giving them money and sending them abroad.

The gathering threat of Iran to the Sunni and Arab World is putting them in a mood to help--to help in calming things with Israel and create a united front in facing Iran.