Katch-22 in Kandahar

"To summarize: our invasion and occupation is what enables the Taliban to recruit massive numbers of Afghan teenagers into their cause. And now, we have to stay until we either kill all the people who hate us and want us gone from their country or propagandize deradicalize them into meekly accepting our presence. Once there are no more Afghans left who want us gone, then we can leave. For those of you who have been cynically claiming that this war has no discernible purpose other than the generalized benefits of Endless War for political officials and the Security State industry, now you know." -Glenn Greenwald, summarizing a Washington Post article on current plans for de-radicalization of Afghan youth.

Yossarian didn't know whether he believed in reincarnation or not; he just knew he wanted to stay alive, and if Eastern mysticism did the trick, that was good enough for him. Even if it meant that instead of being a B-25 navigator based on Pianosa during World War II, he was now a grunt in America's seemingly endless war in Afghanistan.

"Think I'll ever get back to New Jersey?" he asked Doc Daneeka, as they sat on a couple of canvas chairs in front of the medical tent.

"It depends," said Doc Daneeka.

"Depends on what?" said Yossarian.

"On whether you survive this war," said Doc Daneeka.

"Interesting you should say that," said Yossarian. "I've been thinking of ways I could get out of this war and get back to New Jersey. At last. And one of those ideas involves you."

"I'm not surprised," said Doc Daneeka. "Although I think you'll find New Jersey is not quite the garden spot you remember from 1942."

"I can't even figure out why we're fighting this war. Or why I'm here. Every day, the Taliban try to kill me."

"They're trying to kill everybody," grunted Doc Daneeka. "Don't think of yourself as so special."

"So why do you think we stay here?" asked Yossarian.

"Because they want us to leave," said Doc Daneeka. "As long as they want us to leave, we have to stay."

Yossarian nodded, sensing what was coming.

Doc Daneeka went on: "If they want us to leave, it means they're not ready for democracy and we have to stay."

"Until they're ready for democracy?" asked Yossarian, taking a shot.

"No, until they ask us to stay. When they ask us to stay, it means they're ready for us to leave."

"So if they ask us to stay, we know we can leave," said Yossarian, half to himself, filling in the blanks.

"Right," said Doc Daneeka. "They'll never be ready for democracy. Not even we are crazy enough to wait for that. Meanwhile, the war must go on, and we must keep killing them until they ask us to stay."

"Doesn't it seem unlikely that they'll ever ask us to stay if we keep on killing them?" asked Yossarian.

"It's only unlikely until we kill all the ones who want us to leave and only those who want us to stay are left," said Doc Daneeka, staring straight ahead as he took a swig from his beer bottle.

"But if we keep killing all the ones who want us to leave, won't that just make the ones who want us to stay angry about our killing all the ones who want us to leave, and then the ones who want us to stay will want us to leave, but we can't leave then because they want us to?" Yossarian took a deep breath, exhausted by articulating this fine web of logic.

"That's right," said Doc Daneeka. "As long as we keep killing all the ones who want us to leave, we'll keep turning the Aghans who want us to stay into Aghans who want us to leave, so we have to stay and keep killing those same Afghans until there are only Afghans who want us to stay."

"Then we can leave," said Yossarian.

"Right," said Doc Daneeka. "Or until there are no more Afghans at all."

"Can they have a democracy with no people?" asked Yossarian.

"Probably not," admitted Doc Daneeka.

"It's Catch-22 all over again," said Yossarian.

"Some things never change," said Doc Daneeka. "Especially in war."

"So about that Section 8," said Yossarian.

"Same problem as last time. The war's crazy, you aren't. I can't Section 8 you out of a war you think is crazy to fight when it's a war that's crazy to fight. Sorry."

"If I thought it was sane to fight this crazy war, would I be crazy enough for you to say I was insane and didn't have to fight?" asked Yossarian.

"Maybe, but not in this life."

And it's one, two, three...

what are we fightin' for?

I watched the movie "Restrepo" on Netflix recently; it had a short theatrical run a while back, too short for me to get there in time. It was good to save the money, I would say, on actually seeing the movie. I think the producer/cinematographer Sebastian Junger (author of Perfect Storm, that phrase which has forever entered our cliched lexicon as the only allowed description of a confluence of bad coincidences) did a good job with what he had. The movie is essentially static, as the lives of the men of the Airborne platoon posted at the Restrepo base in the Korengal Valley in Afghanistan must have really been during the year they spent there in 2007. Restrepo was the name of one of their fallen comrades, killed early in the deployment.

The movie has three main recurring sequences. Life atop the outpost; patrols; and interaction with native Afghans. The first is boring; the second intermittently gripping or a little theatrical in a self-conscious way, depending on what was filmed; and the third pathetic and very sad. Occasionally the U.S. military kills innocent natives. Then a meeting is held where the young American noncoms sit and explain why these things happen, sometimes in the presence of a dead and bloodied child who got in the way of a firefight or was hit by a rocket fired by a helicopter. These are strange encounters. The GIs are all decked out in their camo and state of the art weaponry, Kevlar helmets with built in spot lights, the works. The tribal elders have long straggly beards, a few teeth, weathered bronze skin, wear robes and turbans. The elders nod inscrutably, betraying no expression at all. The sergeant, through his interpreter, talks a mile a minute, patiently, condescendingly explaining why we're trying to kill the right people but it doesn't always work out that way, and anyway, don't go helping the Taliban or this stuff will happen more often.

There is no real attempt to place the war in context. You do not get the impression that anything the soldiers are doing is helping anything, but on the other hand, you're unable to tell whether it's counterproductive. It isn't made clear what other things those local Afghans would have to put up with in the absence of U.S. soldiers patrolling their valley and barging into their ancient dwellings. Out on patrol, as they take fire (and as two soldiers are hit, one fatally), you get the feeling that context doesn't matter. It's this group of soldiers versus the bad guys, and there's no room for philosophy. The Taliban, the mujahideen, are trying to kill the U.S. soldiers; the GIs want to kill them first and to protect each other. That's essentially the story.

Do the mujahideen want to kill the Airborne soldiers because the insurgents are in league with the attackers of September of 2001? Because they feel just the way an Egyptian ringleader, with an accomplice from the UAE, and a couple of other pilots, and 15 Saudis felt that day in New York and Washington? When they hatched their plan in Germany and perfected it in South Florida? Is that why these American soldiers are humping through the high mountains around the Korengal Valley, because we have to root out....what, exactly? You'll never figure it out from this movie. All you can say is that whatever is going on there seems far removed from one terrorist plot carried out in another part of the world.

The soldiers just seem like average guys. They horse around a lot, the F word is used constantly, they smoke, they're heavily covered in tattoos. Their quarters are messy and dirty and they have virtually no amenities. You get the impression they're well trained with their weapons. One slightly bizarre feature of modern...everything, really, which I hesitate to bring up, given the hardship, privation and mortal danger these guys were in - but even in combat, I noted, this strange modern phenomenon of Americans speaking as if they were characters in a movie was constantly present. Well, I suppose these guys were in a movie, but I couldn't help noticing the huge difference, for example, between the interviews of these soldiers (many of them conducted back home in the States after the deployment was over) and those conducted of the World War II GIs in the HBO series on the European and Pacific theaters. That's probably a brain belch for another day, but it is as if, in our media-saturated times, our very consciousnesses have become so permeated by media images and snatches of dialogue and action movie cliches that any kind of "authentic" behavior and reaction has sort of gone by the boards. You see this all the time in TV interviews after disasters, for example; everyone sounds exactly like the characters in a disaster film sound reciting scripted lines. We all know how it's supposed to sound - it's supposed to sound the way Bruce Willis would say it. The soldiers at Restrepo even spent some of their down time playing "World at War" on their GameBoys. Well, you know: why not? Their lives were imitating the art of our culture anyway.

Whatever the reason, we're still in Aghanistan, more than nine years after the putative cause for our involvement occurred. The soldiers of the Airborne platoon seem competent at killing people, but the "hearts and minds" project is probably in the wrong hands. Why, indeed, should they be expected to carry out such a mission anyway? They've got other things to worry about, like surviving. As it becomes increasingly obvious that President Barack Obama is not very clear on why he does anything, it's hard, after watching a movie like "Restrepo," to escape the conclusion that we're in Afghanistan because we were there when Obama was elected, and he doesn't like to change things, campaign slogans be damned. The military brass told him we should stay, and that was good enough for him. And thus the war drags on and on and on.

This I gotta see

(A little while before viewing my President's speech on Afghanistan.)

(Cue music from "Rocky.")

Rahm Emanuel Productions Presents: Surge II: Afghanistan - This Time It's Focused!

This had better be good, after all the promo and build-up. Barack has been pretty dull over the last few months, but then how fascinating can you be when you're talking about health care reform and budget deficits? B-o-o-o-ring. So finally the early winter blockbuster (beating the other studios to the punch during the holiday season) we've all been waiting for to break the monotony of endlessly mind-numbing reports on the GDP, and jobless rates and whether or not we'll have another stimulus, fercryinoutloud.

This is all the stimulus the American people need. War! (what is it good for - dadunhdaDUNH!)

Since the O-Man's capitulation to the guys wearing scrambled eggs on their shoulder boards was always a foregone conclusion - (I mean, c'mon: what was he gonna do? Make someone unhappy?) I only hope he doesn't spend too much time apologizing for agreeing to do what everyone told him to do during those "tense," "grueling," "exhaustive" meetings he's been holding with Biden, Gates, Hillary, Petraeus, McChrystal and even, during the last meeting, the budget director Orszag (always a bad sign when one of the suits from the studio shows up to tell you you're running over budget). Knowing the President as I don't, however, I know he's going to hem and haw a lot as he explains all the codicils and conditions attaching to this escalation.

To wit, it's not "open-ended." It's not a "blank check." There will be "benchmarks" to gauge our progress and the progress of the Afghan government in meeting our benchmarks. Also (and this is the bathetic rationale for choosing West Point for the speech, aside from the zero percent chance of hearing anyone yell out "You lie!" from the audience), he will tell us that the hardest thing a President can do is to order men into harm's way, especially when he has to do it in order to placate Right Wing critics who will otherwise criticize him for being too "soft." (Thus forcing his Right Wing critics to criticize him on one of the 732 other bases they use.) Actually, I think there could be a couple of things harder, such as emulating George Washington and actually putting yourself in harm's way, but that's another matter.

Maybe he'll actually use the phrase "off ramps." (What kind? Cloverleaf? Runaway truck?) I sure hope so, but maybe it's too colloquial. Mostly, "mission," "cost" (especially the lives of our brave young men and women) and some stuff about terrorist bases and the like. We can't allow Afghanistan ever again to be the place chosen by those who would do America harm to "plot and scheme" to attack us. Instead, we've forced Bin Laden and Co. to travel 50 yards east into Pakistan.

I'm starting to see the problem with the Sequel as mass entertainment to get our minds off the fact the country is swirling down the toilet bowl economically. Rahm, I'm sure (since he knows the Biz) also is aware of the problem with this "vehicle." The war's over eight years old, you know? It's like "Seinfeld" got in the last season or so: repetitive, contrived, kind of forced. The magic is gone. The cool part was late fall of 2001, when the Marines were overrunning Kandahar and vindicating the American people. Now it's the last month of 2009 and...the Marines are trying to overrun Kandahar and vindicate the American people.

How much boffo box office does this franchise still have? Does it got legs left at all? Oh well. If any front man can sell it, it's our Prez. Hey look - didn't we buy into him?

Nonsensical Slogans as Official Policy

I've remarked a few times on a phenomenon which has become the norm in American politics over the last decade or so, namely, the Nonsensical Slogan as official policy. As a prime example, there was Bush/Cheney's deathless repetition of the real reason for the war in Iraq: "We're fighting them there so we don't have to fight them here." In my naivete, I was prone to thinking this moronic incantation only demonstrated that Bush & Cheney were foolish. How wrong can a person be? They were way ahead of me, in actuality, because the slogan worked.

Although the statement itself made no sense. Bush, in a press conference, admitted unequivocally that Saddam had "nothing" to do with 9/11. So - what was the basis for the insistence that we would fight Iraqis here if we did not fight them there? Have we ever fought Iraqis here? Have they ever tried to invade or attack us here? We've been in combat with Iraqis, in desultory fashion, on and off since 1991. In all that time, with all that provocation, did they ever attack us? Yet Bush & Cheney (and Rove), seasoned pols that they were and are, had a better reading of the American booboisie than I, I have to admit.

It's at least reassuring to read other writers once in a while who refuse to abandon common sense in the face of propaganda. Take, for example, Johann Hari, a fine writer who contributes on the HuffPost sometimes. He was analyzing the various rationales for continuing the American occupation of Afghanistan. The Nonsensical Slogan most often trotted out, by Bush originally and now by the Obama Administration, is that we cannot allow Afghanistan "to become a safe haven for terrorists planning attacks against the United States." At the surface, at least (that is, before you spend two or three tenths of a second thinking about it), this rationale seems more plausible than fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them here. Hari points out, however, as I've tried to do before, that this reasoning is equally lame.

He adds a few facts I hadn't thought of. Since 9/11, there have been two other headline terrorist attacks, the 3/11 attacks on the trains in Madrid, and the 7/7 attacks on British public transit. None of these attacks (including 9/11 on New York and D.C.) was actually "planned" in Afghanistan. As far as preparations for 9/11, most of those were done in Hamburg, Germany, and in South Florida. It is strictly and only the temporary residence of Osama bin Laden and a few top al-Qaeda henchmen in Afghanistan that provided cover for what was actually simply an acting out of American rage against a plausible foe. Except that Bush & Cheney completely blew it where bin Laden was concerned, so it's difficult to see now what in the hell it was about.

The other aspect which Hari talks about is what might be called the Whack-A-Mole problem. Supposing for a moment that terrorists need a "safe haven" to "plan attacks" (and in the three examples above, there is no evidence for this), why is it that Islamic terrorists would cooperate by all migrating to Afghanistan so we can annihilate them? That presents a contradiction in terms: if they're that stupid, what's the real problem anyway? If General Jim Jones is correct (no one has authoritatively contradicted him), there are currently about one hundred members of al-Qaeda left in Afghanistan. One shudders to think that if there were many more before, then like toothpaste being pushed from the tube, they are now all over the border in nuke-armed Pakistan. How helpful. But more to the point, what is it about Afghanistan that makes it uniquely suitable as a "terrorist base" as opposed to other Muslim states such as Yemen, Indonesia or Algeria, or, to refer to the actual home states of the actual 9/11 hijackers, Egypt and Saudi Arabia? The United States cannot actually invade, occupy and nation-build in every last country that might be used as a terrorist "base," and to repeat: why does a terrorist need a "base?" Timothy McVeigh used the United States as a base, and he accomplished what he was after.

I work on the assumption that President Obama is a pretty clear thinker and must see these easily-grasped points. It does not make sense to confer upon Afghanistan the unique status as "terrorist stronghold" simply because it was bin Laden's last-known forwarding address, following stints in Saudi Arabia and Sudan. Yet Obama repeats, over and over, that the Afghanistan War is a "war of necessity." Necessary for what, and to whom?

Frontline's "Obama's War"

Pretty good show on PBS a couple of nights ago about the war in Afghanistan. An embedded reporting team moved around Helmand province in Afghanistan with Echo Company, a Marine outfit patrolling an area dominated by the Taliban. Spliced into the hour-long show were excerpts from speeches from David Petraeus and lots of think-tank talking heads. I came away with these thoughts:

1. Watching Petraeus's PowerPoint-aided speech to some think tank institute or other (one of those focusing on defense), I was struck by how similar in style and content a war speech is these days to the language of the business consultant. "Missions," "objectives," "modalities," "partnering with," etc. It's a real industry, war-making in this country, with a huge constituency. A lot of people in government and quasi-government would be out of work if we stopped fighting wars. A war is a business venture with purposes far removed from the putative reason for the conflict; for example, no one is very convincing that the Afghan War, now in its 9th year, is really about 9/11 anymore. When you think about it, how could it be? A certain obeisance is paid to this original rationale, but the main purpose of the war is the war itself, and all the careers and government contracts connected to it. This situation provides tremendous institutional momentum.

2. The show opens with a Marine commander giving his version of Henry V's St. Crispin's Day speech. It's not a very good speech. He tells the Marines that 50 years from now their grandchildren will ask them about what happened that summer in Afghanistan. With all due respect to the terrible danger the grunts face every day over there, I kind of doubt this. 50 years from now the Afghanistan War will be in the same category as the Panama invasion or the great conquest of Grenada. Anyway, given the awful, inarticulate nature of modern speech patterns in America, wouldn't it be better just to quote the Bard himself?

This story shall the good man teach his son;

And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,

From this day to the ending of the world,

But we in it shall be remembered-

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;

For he to-day that sheds his blood with me

Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,

This day shall gentle his condition;

And gentlemen in England now-a-bed

Shall think themselves accurs'd they were not here,

And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks

That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.

Clearly this is what the commander was going for, and it didn't work. I would say, however, that Henry V's decision to invade France was beset by a problem similar to the Afghan invasion: Henry's war didn't make any sense either, but with Shakespeare writing his material, it seemed more rational.

2. Everyone in Afghanistan, except the U.S. military, is interested primarily in one thing: the money you can make with opium poppies. The Taliban, Karzai's government and the native tribes are all up to their eyeballs in heroin production. Karzai's chief aide is a narco-dealer, for example, or is widely viewed as one by the populace. The U.S. military just looks the other way: they can't win hearts and minds by wiping out the lucrative poppy business, so they leave it alone.

3. Pakistan is a real mess. No doubt this is the real reason we're in Afghanistan - to keep an eye on the Muslims with the nukes. The ISI (Pakistan's security apparatus) is highly supportive of Afghanistan's Taliban, which means that a lot of the billions in aid we pay to Pakistan probably finds its way one way or another into the hands of our nominal enemy. The Pakistanis, by and large, seem to hate us, so the idea of a direct solution to our problem, simply garrisoning soldiers in Pakistan, is a non-starter, as the management consultants/generals might say. So we have to mess around with a war next door in order to keep our forces ready to...? Hard to say.

4. Karzai is hugely corrupt and probably plays the Taliban off against us and vice versa.

The grunts of Echo Company patrol the primitive villages of southern Afghanistan and get shot at, and blown up, by a largely unseen enemy who avoid direct confrontation. It really looks like such a war could go on forever. The Taliban aren't going to leave and the local, non-hostile population seems largely indifferent to their presence so long as they're allowed to grow opium poppies. Karzai rules Kabul, but beyond that it's all sort of the Wild West.

I suppose the only real question is whether our presence in Afghanistan helps or hinders stability in Pakistan. Those who want us out say it "destabilizes" Pakistan, those who say we "must win" claim our presence is necessary. McChrystal (who spends a lot of time on-air during the show) of course believes he needs a lot more troops in order to get the job done. I imagine he'll get most of them because Petraeus demonstrated in Iraq that a fractional increase in the number of American troops (the "surge") does something, and I don't think Obama wants to take a chance on varying from this template even if the two situations are not at all analogous. The war may fail, but Obama will want to fail in a way that is acceptable to the War Industry, and in America Surges 'R Us. If you go rogue and do something weird, like withdraw completely, you take a huge gamble. You change the "brand." In later reconstructions of your failure, the analysis will be simplified so that Fox News and the Republicans will yell that Obama had the compelling example of The Surge to guide him, but made some fancy argument that Iraq was not Afghanistan and tried something else. That doesn't play in America. Way too complicated.

Vietnam Redux

My guess is that we're fighting in Afghanistan because the military establishment always demands at least one hot war in progress, and now that Iraq has finally petered out (because of Nouri al-Maliki's treacherous snookering of George W. Bush), Afghanistan is the only candidate. The Pentagon needs wars for lots of reasons. They're essential for training soldiers in actual combat, for keeping the vast armies of mercenaries under contract employed (many of the mercenaries are former military lifers seeking an upgrade in pay and working conditions, plus that Bondsian License to Kill), and most of all, as a laboratory for all the weapons and gadgets produced by defense contractors. Officers get promoted, they collect war stories, they acquire battle credibility.

This kind of rationale does not play well on the political scene, of course. We're not that far gone in cynicism yet, though we're working on it. The original Afghan meme, sold to the American public 8 years ago, was that Afghanistan was a "safe haven" for al-Qaeda where it could train terrorists and plot attacks on the United States. In the wake of 9/11, almost all Americans went along with this Dick&Jane story read to us by W&Dick. I can recall that even Al Franken, when he had his radio show on Air America, steadfastly supported the war in Afghanistan, probably with his run for the Senate in mind. It became doubly important to support the Afghan venture after Iraq was invaded: being against both wars was the sure mark of the lily livered liberal.

I was against both wars from the start, as was the Sage of Boynton, the 92-year old veteran of the Pacific campaign in WW II. The Sage thought that we "should do nothing," meaning we should not have used conventional military forces for an invasion simply because this is what we're set up to do. This, indeed, was the rational course. The terrorists who carried off 9-11 were all dead. They did not plan the 9-11 attack in Afghanistan. The central plotters (the four pilots) began their plotting in the late 1990's in Hamburg, Germany, where they attended mosque together. These facts are confirmed in the Report of the 9-11 Commission, which I have read. Rumors of their trips to Afghanistan are most often attributable to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, whom we now know was waterboarded 183 times by the CIA. The circumstances of his interrogation are curiously absent from the official 9-11 Report. Even if Khalid was gurgling the truth, there is no particular reason why the four pilots, or the 15 muscle hijackers (who were almost all from Saudi Arabia), needed to travel to Afghanistan for training. What is it about the jungle gyms there that were essential to overpowering unarmed stewardesses or opening unlocked cockpit doors?

As far as Osama bin Laden was concerned, a warrant had been out for his arrest for years prior to 9-11. He was the financier, the money source of a kind of Terrorist Foundation, who passed on terrorism proposals and made funding grants. Peter Bergen's book on bin Laden is the best source of info I have seen on this question. I doubt seriously that bin Laden kept his money in an Afghan bank, with no offense intended for his Taliban "hosts." He was a canny investor and businessman who shorted the U.S. airline and tourist industries on the eve of 9-11 and then cleaned up on the mayhem he caused, a kind of Terrorist Insider Trading. But his "training camps" or his residence could have been taken out with cruise missiles, as Clinton had attempted before. What was the purpose of a full-scale military invasion and an 8-year occupation? Al-Qaeda and bin Laden did not need Afghanistan; it's just where they happened to be (some of them, anyway).

In addition to the rationales given above, Bush&Cheney wanted to give the definite appearance of doing something. They wanted to invade Iraq and desperately sought connections to 9-11, but these connections could only be made in Cheney's mind, and that wasn't enough even for the American populace thirsting, in an omnidirectional way, for revenge. So Afghanistan would have to do, because Big Dog Osama was there and he would suffice for the casus belli. Then Rumsfeld, Bush & Cheney (Moe, Larry & Curly) totally screwed up the invasion and let Osama get away, so there was no one left for the Taliban to harbor.

Eight years on, and we've revised the Mission Statement a few times to keep the Predator drones flying and mercenaries shooting. We're now nation building, keeping an eye on Pakistan, and denying al-Qaeda safe haven within Taliban-controlled areas of Afghanistan, which somehow have survived 8 years of warfare and siege by the mightiest nation on Earth. But maybe 8 years more will do the trick. Barack Obama supports the war for the same reason Al Franken did: O is the President of a militarized nation, and it won't do to be against even stupid wars if it's the only one you've got going. You can be the Commander-in-Chief of a peacetime army if you're Dwight Eisenhower and have already demonstrated your mettle in actual combat, but not if you're Bill Clinton, W Bush or Barack Obama and left all the combat to others when you had the chance.

57% of the American populace now opposes the Afghan whatever it is. I guess, this being a democracy and everything, we should see a wind-down and a denial of funding from the Democratic House. Yeah, I know. Ha ha. That's a good one.

Echoes in the Left-O-Sphere

Bill Maher had a lively crowd at his table Friday night on "Real Time," including Gavin Newsom and Alan Cumming, the Irish comic actor.  At one point in the discussion, Bill Maher made a point which has occurred to me over and over again, that the entire case against Afghanistan and its role in the attacks of 9/11 seems to be built on the complex of dreaded jungle gyms (which Maher may have called monkey bars) which show up in the standard stock footage every time we hear about bin Laden's training camps.  Maher had ealier inteviewed Robin Wright (the journalist, not Mrs. Penn), and she had confidently assured us that we cannot allow Afghanistan to become a "failed state," or it will become a breeding ground for terrorists.  Thus, we have no choice: we have to remain in Afghanistan indefinitely to nation-build even though, as with Iraq, this was not part of the original mission statement or war authorization.

Maher wondered to his panel (which also included P.J. O'Rourke) whether the world actually needs a whole "failed state" in order to breed terrorists, or in order for them to plot an attack against the United States.  I think a fair reading of the Report of the 9/11 Commission, which gave full credence to the testimony of Khallid Sheikh Mohammed at a point before we knew he had been systematically tortured, leads one to the conclusion that the actual plotters of the attack were in no need of Kandahar, Afghanistan or even a children's playground in order to put together a successful conspiracy.  Atta & the other ringleaders were apparently radicalized by contact with the West while attending school in Hamburg, Germany, and held their meetings at the local mosque and in their apartments.  If bin Laden was a funding source, and if Khallid Sheikh was actually the mastermind, it nevertheless does not follow that they needed a whole "harboring country" in order to proceed with their plans to enter the United States, train in American flight schools and hijack the aircraft.  It seems also doubtful whether the prior attack on the World Trade Center in 1993 in any way relied on the existence of a "safe haven" for terrorists; similarly, the attacks on American embassies in Africa in the 1990's did not require the Taliban or a whole country full of radical Muslims as preconditions.

In his speech on Tuesday night, President Obama emphasized, to deafening applause, that Afghanistan would not be used to "launch" attacks against the United States again.  This is more or less the standard formulation of the thesis, but it points to an almost superstitious approach to anti-terrorism in this country.    If Osama bin Laden was in Afghanistan when the attacks of 9/11 occurred, then the U.S. military must fight, for seven plus years and counting, in that country so that bin Laden can't use that country again.  I'm sure this plan, as formulated, will probably succeed.  There are, however, two billion Muslims in the world; the largest Muslim population anywhere is Indonesia, where we are not fighting any battles at all.  And what is it about fighting a land war in Afghanistan that would prevent another group of 15 Saudi "muscle" hijackers from going to work for another Egyptian (probably radicalized originally in the Muslim Brotherhood, not al-Qaeda) and UAE national (Mawran al-Sheihi)?  What would have worked in 2001 was to act on the good work of American intelligence agencies which discovered clear evidence of the plot, and all without (a) a "war on terror," or (b) an invasion of Afghanistan.  The clearest rationale I can think of for the war on Afghanistan in the first place was that it distracted the American people from thinking about these fundamental, obvious facts.

The problem of "bad conditions" in Muslim countries is simply far too diffuse to approach the problem by pacifying every trouble spot with the U.S. military. Added to this difficulty is the widely acknowledged problem that "collateral damage" in the form of civilian casualties in Afghanistan probably results in greater risk to American security.  

I think it's unfortunate that President O, who is beginning to find his stride in very positive ways in other areas, feels the need to double down on this original American mistake. I can understand the political exigencies; it's more important to appear tough on terror than it is to make any sense.  But Maher's simple question reflects what I think is a lucid perspective on Afghanistan. One looks at the war and can find no rationale, no matter how far your gaze. Alice in Wonderland looked down the road and said she could see nothing.  The King complimented her on her vision; one must have astonishing eyesight, he said, to see nothing at such a great distance.