The exaggerated attention given to Afghanistan, first by the Americans, and now by other members of NATO determined to prove that though they may have let the Americans down in Iraq they will do their bit in Afghanistan, is based on a series of errors.
The main error, however, is to believe that the experience of Al-Qaeda should fix, forever, the importance of Afghanistan. But while Al-Qaeda is an important terrorist group, it is hardly the only one. There are hundreds whose names we know, and other hundreds or thousands whose names we do not know, or that have no names, or knowing their names would hardly matter. The amount of time that goes into solemn parsing of whether or not "this terrorist act" (in Mumbai, or in Beslan, in Madrid or Amsterdam) is or is not "part of an Al-Qaeda plot" is absurd. These are all Muslim terrorist groups. They have their immediate and local aims. Lashkar-e-Toiba has as its immediate aim forcing the Indians to abandon Indian-held Kashmir. That does not mean that the members of Lashkar-e-Toiba would not, if they could, lend a hand, say, to those local Muslims enjoying themselves killing Hindus in Bangladesh, or killing Jews in Israel, or possibly, in London, helping out with killing British citizens on their way to work. It is just a question of what particular local or Lesser Jihad for the moment floats your murderous boat. Arabs of every kind have been found fighting with the Taliban, and in Bosnia, and in Chechnya, and Pakistanis were found by Christian Lebanse fighting with the PLO, and of course Pakistanis have been discovered blowing up the British Infidels who had nothing to do with Kashmir.
Afghanistan is no more indispensable to terrorists for training than is any other place on earth. Almost none of the terrorist attacks in Amsterdam and Madrid, London and Moscow and Beslan, Jerusalem and Djerba, were carried out by people who had ever trained in Afghanistan. The endless videotapes of those recruits on the monkey-bars, or high-stepping it in their black balaclavas, while eerie Arab music, music to kill the Infidels by, wails on the soundtrack, keeps reminding us all of those camps in Afghanistan. But again, it forces us to focus too narrowly.
Afghanistan is reverting to type. It is reverting, that is, to its deep-rooted and primitive Islam. Last week, in the magazine section of The New Duranty Times, there were several photographs of Afghani couples. The man, turbaned, prematurely wizened (they were all in their 40s and 50s), craggy faced, barefoot, sat looking straight at the camera. And beside the man in each grim and telling photograph sat his new bride, perhaps his second or third, a silent or smiling or chirpy young girl, 9 or 10 or 11, and anyone who looked carefully at those photographs, and who has been reading about Afghanistan, knows that it is not slick and plausible and slippery Karzai who is representative of Afghani society, but those men with their child brides.
What is to be done? What is to be done is to have as little to do as possible, to expend not more men and money, but to intermittently intervene from afar, in the meantime letting Afghanistan sink into its own internecine struggles. The Infidel Man's Burden is too much at this point. We don't have the time, the political will, the resources. We can rely on this or that warlord, no doubt someone who does not bear much looking into (for god's sake, the famous Massoud enjoyed massacring his enemies), but that is not our affair.
Our affair is to weaken, and to weaken at the lowest cost to ourselves because this war has no foreseeble end, the menace of Islam, by weakening, dividing, demoralizing, diminishing the appeal of, the camp of Islam. It can be done. But we need not be present in Iraq or Afghanistan to pursue this goal. In fact, a Western Infidel presence guarantees that some -- even some military men unduly impressed, on a human level, with this or that touching example of personal bravery or seeming loyalty by a particular Iraqi or Afghani, which can get in the way of a less sentimental assessment of why we cannot rely on the handful of semi-decent (and are we sure they are semi-decent, or merely for the moment, behaving well because, for the moment, they need our aid in killing their local enemies?).
The problems of Muslim peoples and states -- their penchant for violence and for conspiracy theories and hysterical reactions, their failure to create modern economies, their tendency to accept despots or a series of despots, as long as those despots are Muslims, the intellectual desertificiation, the moral paralysis -- these are all problems that come from the belief-system of Islam itself. Having to pretend to believe an unpleasant set of tenets, having to admire Muhammad or to pretend to, having to locate legitimacy of government not in the consent-- even the manufactured consent-- of the governed, but in the Qur'an and Sunnah, as codified in the Shari'a, having to adhere to the Islam-presribed hostility toward all non-Muslims and the contmept for women -- all of this has contributed to make these places what they are, and will be.
Within these lands,a strong leader, an Ataturk, might manage to impose systematic constraints on Islam, and to create a class of the secular who may dimly recognize that Islam is the source of their problems. But the example of Kemalist Turkey shows that even there, many decades, many generations, many laws and changes in attitudes are required, and that even then, after all that, Islam keeps coming back, like Rasputin.
We cannot devote our money and men to making Muslim countries better unless we realize that Islam is the explanation for their woes, and recognize further that no Infidels can change Islam, can constrain it in Muslim countries. But in the lands still part of that Infidel world, we are free to constrain it, to limit or hobble the various instruments of Jihad, including Da'wa and demographic conquest, and that this is the minimum that all Infidel governments owe their often ignorant and certainly largely unwary populations.
And that is best achieved by stopping to make the counter-Jihad an affair of creating "Iraq the Model" (an idiotic notion) or "Afghanistan"
where democracy, prosperity, you name it, is on the march.
What is on the march in Afghanistan is Islam. Just a few years have gone by, and already the hatred directed at the Taliban has dissipated, and that hatred turned to the eternal foe, the Infidels, and consequently, the Taliban itself is back, though not quite as before. It doesn't matter. Islam is back, or rather Islam in Afghanistan never went away.
Look at those photographs of those Afghan couples. That is Afghanistan. Not Karzai, or his restaurant-running siblings (or the one who went back to strike it rich in the "new" Afghanistan). Not Zalmay Khalilzad or those "Afghan-Americans" who have little to dow with, are completely unrepresentative of, the real Afghanistan.
Husbanding, not squandering, of resources of every kind is now required. It is, the Pentagon tells us now, to be a "long war." Indeed.
