Michael Scheuer | Non-Intervention

There has been much recent moaning and groaning in the media about the growth of anti-Islamic sentiment in the United States. These queries have been accompanied by agonized and bewildered questions about where such sentiment comes from and what causes it. This scenario would be comical — nay, hilarious — if it was not destined to bring war into the United States. Let me say that I believe the two biggest and most obvious sources of anti-Muslim sentiment in the United States are the U.S. Congress and Muslim-American leaders.

The pro-Israel Senators and Congressman in the United States Congress. Tick off any number of names: Lieberman, Schummer, Graham, Cantor, Ackerman, McCain, Levin, Berman, Ros-Lehtinem, Bilirakis, Titus, McConnell, Cardin, Burton, Rothman, Demint — the list quite literally includes most members of both houses. These men and women have absolutely no qualms about praising, abetting, and funding any Israeli action that kills Muslims. When Netanyahu comes to the United States, they meet with him publicly and behind close doors (without State Department representatives); stand with him in defiance of sitting presidents; and then join him in calls for war with Iran, Syria, (someday) Turkey, or anyone else Israel wants the United States to fight a war against.

There is no reason for any Muslim-American to believe that even one of these pro-Israel representatives or senators have the slightest interest in their views, or any concern whatsoever for the life of any Muslim that Israel deems to be expendable. Needless to say, there is no reason for any non-Jewish-American citizen to believe these senators and congressmen care anything about their interests. If they did, why have the given a foreign brigand like Netanyahu the ability to take 300 million Americans into war with Iran that can only push the United States farther down the road toward ruin?

Why is there growing anti-Islamic sentiment in the United States, and why do many Muslim-Americans increasingly believe their government regards Muslim blood overseas as cheap? In large measure, you need look no further than Capitol Hill.

The cowardly leaders of the U.S. Muslim-American community. By behaving as victims and failing to speak the truth as they know it, U.S. Muslim leaders encourage their fellow citizens to believe that the lies of U.S. political leaders are true: Muslims hate freedom, liberty, gender equality, elections, democracy, and all the other things most Americans consider their birthright.

Muslim-America leaders know that Islam, like other major religions, is a religion of peace until its followers perceive themselves to be cornered by enemies who appear intent and able to destroy it. It is irrelevant whether this perception is correct; those holding it are confident of its veracity and will fight with determination and ferocity. The nuclear-armed Israelis, for example, perceive themselves mortally threatened by AK-47-armed Palestinians, and so since 2000 Israeli forces have killed six Palestinians for every Israeli killed by Palestinian fighters in the never-ending Israel-Muslim religious war.

U.S. Muslim leaders must stop whining and speak forthrightly, telling their fellow citizens that most American-Muslims are living proof that U.S. politicians lie about Muslims hating Americans because of how they live, vote, and think. They must publicly affirm both that most Muslim-Americans are integrating into U.S. society, and that increasing numbers of young Muslim-American males are picking up arms or explosives because they perceive U.S. foreign policy as an attack on Islam and its followers.

These Muslim-American leaders also must admit that they have a deadly serious problem within their community in the form of Islamist scholars and clerics who are sent and/or sponsored by the Muslim Brotherhood or by Arab regimes — especially Saudi Arabia — to labor to incite young, U.S.-citizen Muslim men to attack America because of its foreign policy, as well as to make sure that American-Muslims do not integrate into American society. [NB: This last-noted reality exactly mirrors the efforts by Israel and Jewish-American groups to de-integrate Jewish-American citizens from U.S. society so they put Israel’s interests above those of the United States.]

Muslim-American leaders must also speak honestly in order to replace the dastardly lies President Obama and his terrorism adviser, John Brennan, tell so often and so blithely, and which so greatly undermine America’s ability to defend itself. These Muslim-American leaders must tell their fellow U.S. citizens the irrefutable truth: The overwhelming number of references to jihad in the Koran and in the Prophet Muhammad’s traditions and sayings are martial in nature, and that very, very few references — and none that are controlling — have anything whatsoever to do with efforts to become a better person. U.S. citizens and their leaders need to hear this hard truth clearly, loudly, and repeatedly so that they can begin to understand why growing portions of the Islamic world are at war with the United States. No one can deliver it with sufficient authority save those Muslim-American leaders who both know and love their faith and honestly desire to be part of America’s society and political system.

Until Muslim-American leaders begin to educate all Americans on this issue, there is no chance of slowing the growth of anti-Muslim sentiment in the United States or defending the United States against those led and inspired by Osama bin Laden. If Muslim-American leaders continue to deliberately hide the realities of their faith and so the motivation of Islamist fighters here and abroad, they will encourage the anti-Islamic sentiment that Israel’s supporters on Capitol Hill — with their colleagues in the media, AIPAC, and major universities like Harvard — aggressively and knowingly cultivate with the aim of encouraging Islamist attacks in the United States by Muslim-Americans.

On this point, Israel, the Muslim Brotherhood, AIPAC, al-Qaeda, most of the U.S. Congress, and Saudi Arabia are brothers-in-arms. They all intend to provoke a war between America and Islam by showing that the United States and Israel are one in the same entity, one that is intent on destroying Islam. This is a difficult thing to say, but the actions and often the words of all these groups over the past 15 years lead to no other conclusion.

With mid-term voting over it is difficult to know exactly how many reliable voices and votes Tea Party (TP) issues will command in the Republican caucus beginning in January, 2011. Indeed, a cynic might expect savvy, long-time Republicans to simply absorb the Tea Party’s position on economic issues, make the TP’s voice nothing more than a “me too!” on economic legislation, and then run candidates to purge TP-supported representatives in 2012.

One way for the TP to avoid getting emasculated and then steamrolled in 2012 is to delineate specific goals in the areas of foreign and national security policy that must be supported by the Republican caucus, if the latter expects reliable TP support on economic issues. The TP’s foreign-affairs goals — if what its leaders said in the campaign is true — will be non-interventionist, pro-Constitution, and adamantly America First. Quick, substantive progress on these fronts ought to be the non-negotiable price for reliable TP support in the Republican caucus.

Now, TP representatives will be lectured by their Republican caucus mates and the so-called “conservative” Democrats about the “complex ballet of international politics,” and how naive first-termers are wise to stand back and let old congressional hands take the lead in dancing the U.S. part in that ballet. The media, too, will pipe in, describing any TP’er who seeks to return constitutionality and sanity to the conduct of U.S. foreign and national security policy as a “bull in the China shop,” a “racist,” an “Isolationist,” or even — hold on to your hat — an “archaic nationalist in world headed for a global government.” (NB: One would think any American would covet the last epithet as a badge of honor and defiance.)

With this sort of knee-jerk, not to say vicious opposition to the TP’s non-interventionism, it is important to keep the movement’s goals clear and simple, and then be willing to stand by them come what may. Let me suggest five relatively easy anti-interventionism actions that I think would meet with loud approval from most Americans who are not elitists, religion-crazed, or war-loving; that is, from most voters.

1. Legislation making it illegal for the president to take the country to war or use U.S. military forces for more than ten days — to allow for preemption of immediate threats — without a formal declaration of war, which he (or she) must ask for, and on which the Congress must publicly vote after public debate.
2. Legislation making it illegal for the president of the United States to commit U.S. military forces in support of an ally choosing to initiate an offensive war against one of its enemies. If already-in-place treaties require the United States to support offensive wars by treaty-partners, the Executive Branch will be directed to appropriately amend them or to give notice of U.S. withdrawal per the treaty’s provisions.
3. Legislation declaring U.S. neutrality in all wars involving states not tied to the United States in a defensive alliance. The legislation will order that declarations of neutrality be accompanied by the automatic application of a full embargo of U.S.-made arms on all combatants.
4. Legislation declaring that no U.S. military forces will serve at any time under the command of a non-U.S. commander or an international organization.
5. Legislation that terminates foreign aid of all kinds if the U.S. domestic unemployment level rises above 4 percent. Consideration would be given to restarting foreign aid when the unemployment level drops below 4 percent and remains below 4 percent for 12 months.

Each of these five points is in the interest of Americans: they restore the war-declaring prerogative to Congress, as the Founders intended; they eliminate a president’s ability to take America to war at his/her whim, which the Founders strove to guard against; they neither favor nor discriminate against any foreign country, per the guidance in Washington’s Farewell Address; they keep the United States out of other peoples’ wars; and they apply a respectable degree of common sense in using U.S. taxpayer funds to care for Americans when they are in need.

Many people have ideas about how the Tea Party can preserve its identity and score substantive legislative accomplishments that will be seen by voters as measurable deeds that match the TP’s words. The federal government’s debt, growth, and accumulating power must be cut, and laws that make U.S. interventionism and wars less likely contribute to effort. Success in the foreign-policy and national-security areas, moreover, would give Tea Party candidates a solid base on which to contest future elections by making them members of the only movement that did something tangible to restore the Constitution, revitalize republicanism, and champion those non-elite Americans who are paying for Washington’s interventionism and unnecessary wars with their taxes and their children.

I have received several notes from people I respect asking what I meant by saying: “We need to get serious about killing many more of our Islamist enemies and their civilian supporters.” I said some form of this on FOX News this week and in several articles I have written in recent weeks.

My statements and the questions they provoked go to the heart of the reason that I began — with the help of several very kind and talented people — to write at this site. As I noted in the first piece I wrote here, I have nothing but the greatest respect for the people at AntiWar.com, LewRockwell.com, and at other sites dedicated to liberty and a non-interventionist foreign policy. They were kind in publishing my work when I first began writing; I remain in their debt.

I began writing here, however, because I believed, and still believe, that the wages of U.S. intervention abroad are war and more war, and that that reality will not change until the American electorate removes our bipartisan interventionist elite from federal office. Let us hope that the Tea Party and other non-interventionists begin that process today.

But it is important to recall that this is a process, and one that is getting a very, very late start. The U.S. government’s interventionism has been growing and solidifying for half-a-century; our grammar and high schools inculcate our young with a belief in the innate goodness of sticking our noses in other peoples’ business and trying to change them — via coercion if necessary — into mirror images of ourselves; and then, on high-school graduation, many of these young people go to universities that largely support endless, militant interventionism, teaching that America proves its worth by what it does to westernize people overseas — especially by building democracies — not by what it does to improve life in North America.

On top of all this, most of the media is interventionist to the hilt. Whether to install rights for women where they are anathema; destroy Iraq and Iran for Israel and Christian Zionists; champion the cause of a female poet in Burma; pour countless millions down the corrupt Haitian drain when Americans are hungry and jobless; or give 400 million borrowed-from-China dollars to massively corrupt Palestinian leaders, the media are often an important motor driving U.S. interventionism.

Now, all of this should be ended as quickly as possible. But that laudable goal is not yet near the horizon. Even if change toward non-intervention begins to take hold today, the Congress, the media, the schools and universities, and the White House will stay in the interventionists’ hands. Another step forward may be made in 2012, but given the vagaries of politics, it is possible that some 2010 gains by non-interventionists will be rolled back. Unless an event occurs domestically that forces most Americans to see the great and perhaps irreversible damage that has been and is being done to the republic by Washington’s interventionism, it will take decades to retire the Wilsonian fantasists who cause wars, waste our blood and money, and erode our liberty.

Where does this leave America? Well, it leaves us with growing popular support for non-intervention — which is good news — but it also leaves the interventionists in power and, more important, it leaves 80-percent of the Muslim world interpreting U.S. foreign policy as an attack on Islam meant to destroy the faith and its followers. While only a percentage of that number has taken up weapons to fight the United States, the motivation for others to begin fighting will continue and grow more compelling while Washington is run by interventionists and its foreign policy in the Muslim world is static.

This reality, in turn, requires Americans to think not only about how to legitimately rid ourselves of interventionists, but about how we defend the republic against the anti-U.S. enemies the interventionists have cultivated and nurtured in the Muslim world for 50 years and more. No matter how much we dislike war, the interventionists have brought us wars which will have to be fought in tandem with political campaigns to send into permanent retirement those politicians, teachers, and journalists who drive the intervention that ignites wars.

To defend the republic while ridding it of interventionists, I do not know of any other viable choice but to use the U.S. military to kill increasing numbers of the Islamist enemy and its supporters. Because the only action that will sap the enemy’s motivation to fight is an end to U.S. interventionism, and because we cannot remove the interventionists and their policies in the foreseeable future, we will have to fight hard and bloodily overseas for the republic’s survival. And we must not shy from the fact that the interventionists — in their slavish, self-interested support for Israel and Arab tyrants — have and are enraging growing numbers of young, U.S.-citizen Muslim males. At some point in the not distant future, these young men will begin conducting attacks in the United States that will come to be regarded as commonplace.

Whether I am right in this calculation, time will tell. And I can say truthfully, moreover, that there is no one who hopes more than I do that those I admire at AntiWar.com, LewRockwell.com, and in the Liberty movement generally are correct in believing both intervention and war-making can be opposed and halted at the same time.

But I do not think this is a realistic possibility. Instead, I believe only the ferocious, bloody-minded use of U.S. military forces against the Islamist enemy and its civilian supporters can keep our foes at bay until U.S. voters rid the republic of the interventionists who have given us nothing but war.

Perhaps it is needless to say, but if we the voters fail to eliminate the interventionists and their policies, the chance of ending this era of seemingly endless war is remote at best, and that, of course, would all but ensure the end of liberties we have known. Indeed, the American citizenry has a vital role to play, while U.S. Marines and soldiers spend their lives to buy time to end war-causing intervention.

Thus, the voters’ task of ending intervention is of transcendent importance. If you doubt that, consider the words of a leading antebellum statesman and future vice president of the Confederacy. “No principle is more dangerous to us,” said Alexander Stephens, “than that of compelling other nations to adopt our form of government. No instance is to be found upon record of any republic having ever entered upon such a hazardous crusade, which did not end in the subversion of its own liberties and the ultimate enslavement of its own people.”

While still a developing story, today’s successful al-Qaeda effort to get explosives into the United States and Europe on aircraft flying out of Yemen again emphasizes the deception presidents Obama, George W. Bush, and Clinton have practiced on the American people. Nothing could be more untrue then the claims by these men that al-Qaeda and its allies are merely a small bunch of — take your pick — thugs, criminals, or nihilists who have nothing to do with the Islamic religion. This lie, quite simply, is slowly killing American security.

We are facing a talented, patient, pious, and determined enemy which is motivated by the tenets of Salafi Islam, a kind of Islam that is not mainstream in the Muslim world but one that is a respected mode of belief, the followers of which are the fastest growing sect in Sunni Islam. The Islamists who fight us are religiously motivated men who believe U.S. foreign policy is a weapon meant to destroy Islam and its followers; they will continue attacking as long as Washington maintains this foreign policy status quo, especially vis-a-vis U.S. support for Muslim police states and Israel. (And this status quo will stay no matter who wins the Congress next Tuesday. Why? Because the legislators will not seek energy self-sufficiency as long as their profligate spending depends on loans from the Arab Peninsula’s tyrannies (and China), and because many legislators have been suborned by U.S.-citizen Israel Firsters, men and women whose first loyalty is not to the United States.)

On the strategic level al-Qaeda’s successful airborne movement of explosives from Yemen to the United States is an important success for the organization’s campaign against U.S. and Western economies. And it is an example of the type of operations bin Laden is planning at his leisure while General Petraeus and his gun-toting social-scientists fecklessly seek to win Muslim hearts and minds. Like the botched Times Square bombing earlier in 2010, today’s events amount to victory in failure. While there is no icing on al-Qaeda’s cake — that is, no corpses or physical destruction for media broadcast — the United States and its allies will now spend huge amounts on increased security measures, technical gadgetry, and security employees; will slow down job-producing commerce by intensifying security for cargo-carrying aircraft; and will become ever more intrusive (and smug) in stripping the last bits of privacy from Americans who travel by air. And while all this probably useless spending, hiring, and snooping goes on, the jokers who get elected next Tuesday will leave almost completely unguarded thousands of miles of America’s land and coastal borders.

Here is a piece I published this week on the National Interest’s foreign-affairs blog. It deals with Osama bin Laden’s new audiotape threatening attacks on France. I am sure many pundits will insist this week’s bin Laden threat and today’s explosives-and-aircraft events are unconnected. They will be wrong, and the tune they sing in making the argument is simply another part of their best-known melody, “Whistling Past the Graveyard.”

On 27 October 2010, Al-Jazirah Television broadcast a new audiotape by Osama bin Laden meant to exploit the Muslim world’s growing anger toward France specifically, and against Europe generally. Defending the recent kidnapping of five French nationals in Niger, bin Laden said the action was an appropriate response to France’s ongoing intervention in the affairs of Muslims in North and West Africa; its persecution of Muslim women in France via its ban on burqa wearing; and the presence of nearly 4,000 French troops in Afghanistan. Bin Laden warned Paris it is foolish to think that France’s anti-Muslim actions will go unanswered by al-Qaeda and other mujahideen. “The equation is very clear and simple,” bin Laden said, stressing, as he always does, the justice of reciprocal treatment in wartime, “the fault lies with the one who initiates [the hostilities] … as you kill, you will be killed; as you abduct, so shall you be abducted; as you ruin our [Muslim] security, so shall we ruin your security.”

The new message is vintage bin Laden in several ways. With the United States and Britain, France has always been high on al-Qaeda’s target list because of its discriminatory treatment of French Muslims; its support Algiers against the Algerian insurgents; its military aid to West African regimes; and its presence in Afghanistan. In addition, since 2006 bin Laden and al-Qaeda have highlighted their intention to bring the jihad to the Niger-Nigeria-Gulf-of-Guinea area to “liberate” the region’s Muslims from the anti-Islamic policies that Europe’s governments force their “agent regimes” in West Africa to apply. And as he has done regarding the Arab Peninsula’s energy resources, bin Laden notes that the oil, uranium, and other natural resources of West Africa are the property of the Muslim ummah and that the mujahideen intend to end the West’s control of them.

While using familiar themes, the timing of bin Laden’s message is meant to exploit several current realities that favor al-Qaeda and other jihadis:

• France and most western European states are on a high state of alert because of credible intelligence that bin Laden has authorized Mumbai-like attacks in their cities. With this threat already on the table, bin Laden is trying to enhance fears among publics, politicians, and security services and force them to continue high levels of counter-terrorism spending.
• Bin Laden intends the message to praise and spur on fighters who make up al-Qaeda’s forces, and those of its allies, in North and West Africa. The past few years have seen al-Qaeda-in-the-Islamic-Mahgreb (AQIM) continue its insurgency in Algeria, as well as expand its operational reach in Mauritania, Mali, and elsewhere in West Africa. Al-Qaeda also has gotten a pledge of loyalty from a growing Islamist militant group in Nigeria known as Boko Haram. Bin Laden’s message signals al-Qaeda’s support for these groups’ activities; stresses its intention to continue inspiring jihadist activities in West Africa and across the continent; and bears witness to al-Qaeda’s growing martial capabilities in West Africa.
• Bin Laden also highlights NATO’s deteriorating position in Afghanistan and reminds France and other NATO states that they will all pay a price for occupying a Muslim country. This aspect of the talk is fully in keeping with bin Laden’s quite successful post-9-11 effort to strip away countries from the coalitions Washington led into Iraq and Afghanistan. In this message, he refers to the latter “Bush‘s accursed war.”

And while bin Laden does not focus on the United States in this message, its release six days before U.S. mid-term elections is not a coincidence. Bin Laden’s words are meant to remind U.S. voters that he is still alive and al-Qaeda is quite viable; that the Obama administration is, like Bush’s, losing the Afghan war; and that the war — with the Iraq war — has pushed the United States to “the verge of bankruptcy in all major areas, and soon it will go back beyond the Atlantic Ocean, Allah willing.”

Less noticeable to the public, but surely most worrying to U.S. policymakers is the message’s clear indication that al-Qaeda’s presence and strength is growing in the oil-rich Gulf-of-Guinea region, from which America will be importing 20-percent of its crude in the next several years.

Finally, for those who argue bin Laden is irrelevant, French Defense Herve Morin unexpectedly said on 28 October 2010 that “our troops may leave Afghanistan next year … we can transfer responsibilities to the Afghans in 2011.” This positive response to bin Laden’s threat is even quicker than the Spanish government’s cave-in after the Madrid bombings.

Have you noticed that with ten days to go until the mid-term elections everything is coming up roses in Afghanistan? Yes, on the eve of the vote, General Petraeus’s Afghan surge is suddenly and magically producing positive results. He and other senior U.S. and NATO officials are pumping out stories about: “We know bin Laden is living in a house and is not on the run;” the “success of drone strikes;” “promising peace negotiations” with the Taliban; and the “unstoppable Kandahar offensive.”

Now, the question is: Can this be a true case of coincidence, or is it all manufactured and transparent hooey meant to keep the Afghan war off voters’ minds until after November 2nd? My guess is that it is the latter.

• The announcement that Osama bin Laden is living safely in a house in Pakistan — which misleadingly suggests NATO has his location — is important only because it destroys the deception long practiced by presidents Bush and Obama which claims that because of U.S.-NATO pressure bin Laden is running from rock-to-rock and cave-to-cave and so cannot communicate with and command al-Qaeda. This has always been untrue; if bin Laden was frequently moving, he would have been killed or captured long ago because constant movement under pressure produces mistakes that yield precise targeting data.
• The drone strikes are killing Islamist field commanders because there are far more drone attacks than ever before and because the insurgent commanders lead from the front, not from bunkers in Tampa or Qatar. (NB: It always seems astounding that when missiles are fired from 20,000 feet into enemy-controlled territory, the military is instantly able to tell the media precisely which important commander was killed and exactly how many casualties were inflicted.)
• Regarding “negotiations” with the Taliban and other insurgents, the Taliban are talking — if they are talking — because they have seen the U.S.-led coalition run from Iraq without victory, and because they sense Afghan victory as they see Washington and the U.S.-NATO coalition preparing to leave once Obama gets past the mid-terms and begins preparing for the 2012 presidential election. At day’s end, the U.S. and NATO are seeking terms from the Taliban and its allies, not the other way about.
• The U.S.-NATO Kandahar offensive is a “success” because generals McChrystal and Petraeus gave the Taliban eight months warning that the offensive was coming and so insurgent commanders moved fighters and ordnance out of the way. Worth noting also is that Petraeus delayed the offensive’s start for six weeks so his Potemkin campaign would give mid-term voters a Clintonesque “don’t worry, be happy” feeling about the Afghan war.

Also adding to the idea that the “positive” Afghan trend my not be mere coincidence is that it sounds familiar to what happened in Iraq before the 2008 presidential election. Petraeus used his much ballyhooed counterinsurgency doctrine (COIN) to produce enough security in Iraq to get that war off 2008’s political center stage because neither Obama nor McCain wanted it to be a central issue.

As we are seeing today, the COIN approach did little in Iraq except delay U.S. defeat and ensure Shia supremacy. Petreaus and his COIN theorists took temporary advantage of the anti-al-Qaeda sentiment produced in Sunni Iraqis by the indiscriminate killing conducted by al-Qaeda forces under Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. U.S. forces deftly hired, trained, and armed these anti-al-Zarqawi Sunni fighters and teamed with them to reduce violence.

But the success was tactical and, as we are seeing, transitory. The U.S. military has been directed to abandon its former “allies” in the what was called the “Sunni Awakening,” and in the wake of that abandonment the Sunnis see civil war ahead as they watch U.S. combat forces withdraw; U.S. diplomats help install a Shia regime; and Iran’s clear intent to aid Iraq’s Shias against Sunni Iraqis. And, naturally enough, Iraq’s Shia regime would be crazy to maintain or absorb an armed Sunni force as it is preparing to exact vengeance from Iraq’s Sunni community after U.S.-led forces depart.

In addition, after al-Zarqawi was killed, bin Laden sent new, more politically adept, and less bloodthirsty leaders to rebuild al-Qaeda-in-Iraq, as well as to begin mending ties to Sunni “Awakening” fighters who fought al-Zarqawi. Even though the replacement for al-Zarqawi was killed in 2010, he and other al-Qaeda commanders have put the group on the road to recovery in Iraq; this success, of course, was helped by a pro-Shia U.S. policy that makes Iraq’s Sunnis amenable to taking aid from any quarter. Indeed, so successful is this comeback that both Iraqi officials and U.S. generals admit al-Qaeda is again an effective component of the Sunni insurgency and is operating in rural and urban environments.

Quite predictably, therefore, Petraeus’s so-called COIN “success” in Iraq is fraying and appears headed down the road to ultimate collapse and sectarian civil war. But the Iraq surge did do its job: It allowed Obama to avoid appearing as a “surrenderista” during the presidential campaign, and permitted McCain to avoid too frequently reminding voters that his party started and lost the insane Iraq war. And all this “political success” cost America was tens of billions of U.S. dollars, thousands of U.S. casualties, and ultimate defeat.

If recent events in Afghanistan are staged and not coincidental, they may well produce — at the same costs as in Iraq — a similar “political success” in Afghanistan. If this comes to pass, Petraeus will again have done what was demanded by his political masters, and our soldiers and Marines will once again have played a part Bob Dylan long-ago described as being “only pawns in the game.”

Since publication of Bob Woodward’s Obama’s Wars the pro-Obama media have claimed U.S. generals “boxed in” the president in terms of sending additional troops to Afghanistan. Neil Sheehan (washingtonpost.com, 3 October 10), Tom Ricks (foreignpolicy.com, 4 October 10), and Melvin Goodman (consortiumnews, 5 October 10) have all portrayed poor ol’ Barack as being surrounded by big bad generals who want to continue the Afghan war on an ever larger scale. On the basis of what actually is in Woodward’s book, this is nonsense. Indeed, Woodward amply demonstrates that Obama bases his Afghan policy on what is good for his political fortunes, and that his concern for U.S. lives and security is nil.

Let us deal with the U.S. generals first. There is no doubt that this generation of U.S. generals is not the stuff from which legends — or victories — are made. With exception of one Army and one Marine general, Woodward’s book describes generals who know they are losing in Afghanistan; know that the three levels of troop reinforcements being debated — 40,000, 30,000, and 11,000 — are inadequate; and know that even the high end, tabled-but-never-discussed option of 85,000 troops would be insufficient. Rather than “boxing in” Obama, the generals appear to cower in his presence and refuse to speak frankly; they instead compete with each other to tell Obama what he wants to hear, which is: “We can make do with whatever number of troops you decide, Oh Genius Leader.” In other words, they throw the welfare of their soldiers and Marines to the wolves to please Obama and the political jackals who surround him, a crew of conspiracy-loving men led by the new National Security Adviser Thomas Donilon who quickly decide the U.S. military is Obama’s enemy. (pp. 81, 121-22, 195, 197, 313-15, and 319-21)

The generals peopling Woodward’s book appear as calculating civil servants and not soldiers, and, counter-intuitively, this is most true of generals who belong to the Special Forces or other elite military units. Indeed, these men — especially Petreaus and McChrystal — seem to have no real grasp on what they are doing; no real concern about what the enemy is doing, motivated by, or how many of them U.S. troops confront; and no idea of how idiotic it is to imagine an infidel occupier can win the hearts and minds of a conservative and tribal Islamic people. One lesson of Woodward’s book is that America’s elite soldiers are equipped with too much theory and social science; too little reality and history; and too much moral cowardice to lead American armies in the field. That job ought to be left to traditionally trained generals who know wars are won by killing, and lost by the application of social-science experiments.

But in Woodward’s book it is Obama who runs the show, and he makes it clear from the start that he wants no part of the Afghan war and would prefer to simply withdraw from it. The reason he does not do so has nothing to do with being “boxed in” by generals (p. 281), but by his concerns about the coming mid-term and 2012 elections.

Woodward makes clear that Obama cares neither for U.S. security nor for the men and women serving in Afghanistan. Whatever I do, Obama twice tells Senator Lindsey Graham, it cannot be something that costs me support in the Democratic party. (p. 336) In other words, Obama places his party’s hold on political power over U.S. national security.

Now if these were the only two occasions in Woodward’s book where Obama said his Afghan policy is meant to hold political power, not to defeat America’s enemies, it could be attributed to slips of the tongue. But they are not.

President Obama, throughout Woodward’s book, browbeats the military into a number of reinforcements for Afghanistan that will protect his Democratic base and will allow him to campaign in 2010 and 2012 on the claim that he did his best to prevail in Afghanistan. The number of troops Obama decides will meet these goals is 30,000, this after learning that even 85,000 more troops would “protect” only 60-percent of Afghans, which is the key to his administration’s policy. Oddly, Obama and his advisers never discussed how many troops would be needed to meet this central policy goal.

Having thus made his administration’s goal unattainable by choosing a reinforcement package of 30,000 troops, Obama proceeds to make it clear that he is ready — in order to protect his political future — to deliberately orchestrate a disaster for the United States in Afghanistan.

After the 30,000 figure is agreed, for example, Secretary of Defense Gates continued to seek to augment that number, which Woodward’s book shows Gates thought inadequate. Obama reacted with multiple warnings that if Gates and others continued seeking more troops he would make sure America lost in Afghanistan.

—”Referring to Gates and the uniformed military [trying to get more troops], he [Obama] said, “They [the military] think its the opposite [that he would not send fewer than 30,000 troops]. I’d be perfectly happy …” He stopped in mid-sentence. “Nothing would make Rahm [Emmanuel] happier than if I said no to 30,000. … Rahm would tell me it’d be much easier to do what I want to do [domestically] by saying no,” the president said.” (pp. 303-04)

—”Can you support this [the 30,000-troop addition]?” Obama asked [Gates]. “Because if the answer is no, I understand it and I’ll be happy to just authorize another 10,000 troops and we can continue to go as we are and train the Afghan national force and just hope for the best.” (p. 309)

—”If you [Obama is speaking to his senior advisers on Afghanistan] have any personal misgivings or any professional doubts about what were about to do [authorize 30,000 troops], tell me know, because I need to hear it, he [Obama] said. ‘If you don’t think this is the right approach, say so now. the only alternative is just to go with the trainers’ — the 10,000 to 11,000 option that in the military’s judgment carried the most risk.” (p. 326)

—”Even with a narrower [Afghan] mission and resourcing, there is [,Obama said,] still no appetite here for doing this [sending 30,000 troops]. So there cannot be any dogfights between you [McChrystal], Petreaus, Mullen, and Biden, and that includes you, Karl [Eikenberry, U.S. ambassador in Kabul].” Addressing Eikenberry, he [Obama] said, “If this is not the case, I will go with” the 11,000 trainers only.” (p. 230)

Obama is nothing if not consistent. Having never considered a troop augmentation big enough to have even a chance of securing U.S. interests, he constantly threatened the military with scrapping the inadequate 30,000 number and replacing it with a defeat-ensuring 10-11,000 total. It is hard to see how Obama’s complete unconcern for U.S. interests amounts to the generals boxing him in.

Finally, Woodward reveals the best evidence of Obama’s unconcern for the lives of U.S. troops and all other Americans. Since his election, Obama and his senior advisers have known the location of a large network of facilities in Pakistan used by the Islamists to train fighters to kill U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan and to attack in Europe, the United States and elsewhere. Per Woodward:

—”Priority one for the DNI [Director of National Intelligence], and now [after his election] Obama, had to be the ungoverned tribal regions along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border where Osama bin Laden, his al-Qaeda network, and branches of the extremist insurgent Taliban had nested 150 training camps and other facilities.” (p.3)

And what have Obama and his national-security team done about these 150 camps. Nothing. Again, Woodward:

—”The United States military did not have “war” plans for an invasion of Pakistan. Instead, it had and continues to have [when Woodward’s book was published in September, 2010] one of the most sensitive and secret of all military contingencies, what military officials call a ‘retribution’ plan in the event of another 9/11-like attack on the U.S. by terrorists based in Pakistan. Under this plan, the U.S. would bomb and attack every known al-Qaeda compound or training camp in the U.S. intelligence database. Some locations might be outdated, but there would be no concern, under the plan, for who might be living there now. The retribution plan called for a brutal attack on at least 150 or more associated camps.” (p. 46)

There you have it. Since Obama’s election, he and his advisers — military and civilian — have maintained a list of 150 or more facilities at which Islamists are now being trained to kill Americans and their allies. Faced with a war Bush and Obama have chosen not to win, Woodward points out that Obama has a plan to retaliate after — repeat after — an unknown number of Americans are killed by al-Qaeda inside the United States.

Yes, you have got it straight. Those 150 camps and facilities are now producing the men who are defeating us in Afghanistan and those who will kill Americans at home, and Obama is not hitting them because he wants to have targets to attack after al-Qaeda demonstrates he has utterly failed. And now, thanks to Obama’s jackals leaking this “retribution” plan for Woodward to write about and al-Qaeda and the Taliban to read, the camps and facilities will be moved and there will be no targets to strike after al-Qaeda slaughters Americans in the United States.

At the end of his book, Woodward quotes Obama as saying he thinks “that we can absorb a terrorist attack.” (p. 363) Sadly, Obama clearly and deliberately has created the circumstances that will allow his thesis to be fully tested.

Last evening I finished reading Bob Woodward’s new book Obama’s Wars, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010). Woodward’s book is very similar to the first of his trilogy on the Bush administration’s reaction to 9/11, Bush at War, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002). Each books underscores the utter sameness and ignorance of Democrats and Republicans in regard to the war being waged on the United States by increasing numbers of Islamist fighters at home and abroad. Read Woodward’s Bush and Obama books and two things become immediately obvious.

1.) For any person not in the bipartisan U.S. political elite — a caste which includes not only politicians, but court historians like Woodward and the U.S. military’s general officer corps — publication of either Obama’s Wars or Bush at War, would result in multiple felony indictments for publicizing highly classified national intelligence reporting, collection methods, and programs. But so far above the law are Woodward, his publisher, the Republican and Democratic politicians who eagerly lined up to spill the beans to Woodward, and the generals who leak secrets, play politics artfully, but cannot win a war, that none of them have any fear or moral qualms about revealing information that benefits not only the Islamists we are fighting but such nation-states as China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia.

Woodward blithely describes the senior Obama officials who gave him copies of secret documents; spent multiple hours allowing their classified divulging to be tape-recorded; and provided him with “National Security Council meeting notes, personal notes, memos, chronologies, letters, PowerPoint slides, e-mails, government cables, calendars, transcripts, diaries, and maps.” (p. xii) Having digested this illegally disclosed material, Woodward then arranged — as he did with Bush — to conduct a long interview with Obama in order to check his facts. On clear display in Woodward’s books on Obama and Bush is the limitless contempt the bipartisan U.S. political elite has for the law and security of America.

2.) The spice added to Woodward’s Obama book by disclosing highly classified data is desperately needed because — as in the Bush book — discussions among the president, his advisers, Democratic and Republican leaders, and the military never, ever rises above the banal. Indeed, the characters who populate Woodward’s Obama and Bush books can only be described as exceedingly well-educated men and women who are perfectly ignorant of the problem they are addressing. In the Obama book, for example, the following items can be found:

“His [General Petraeus’s] primary insight was that the U.S. could not kill its way out of the war.” (p. 15)

Why, then, were we driven from Iraq and are being driven from Afghanistan because the enemy is killing our troops?

“But he [Afghan President Karzai] had been diagnosed as a manic-depressive, according to intelligence. Karzai was on medication and had severe mood swings.” (p. 65)

Why, then, are the American people being told that Karzai is a leader who is steady and reliable enough to build a “new” Afghanistan and so justifies the price America is paying in lives and money?

“Do you understand [asked Secretary of State Clinton] what the alternative would be if we don’t stick to this [waging the Afghan]? she asked. The gains for women will evaporate and the UN would be driven out” [p.102]

So, our soldiers and Marines are dying and being crippled in Afghanistan so Mrs. Muhammad can vote and abort, and so the UN can continue wasting U.S. taxpayer money?

“We are not [,said Defense Secretary Gates,] going to defeat the Taliban.” (p. 220)

Then why in the world did we send 30,000 more troops to fight a war our military chief, and his president, claim we cannot win?

“The president [Obama] wanted to move the Pakistanis to bring some semblance of law and order to the ungoverned tribal areas….” (p.285)

Why, at this late date, doesn’t the president know that the disaster in and threat from Pakistan’s tribal area is the direct result of what he and Bush asked Islamabad to do; that is, to send the Pakistan army into the region, which caused a civil war? Why doesn’t Obama know that the equation for Pakistan — as it is for the United States — is: More intervention equals more war?

These are just a few of the tens of examples of the rampant ignorance manifested by the leading actors-felons in Woodward’s Obama’s Wars. If you do not have time to read the whole book and look for them, but are sure that I am mistaken, just look up ten items in Woodward’s index that are unquestionably pertinent to understanding the Afghan problem:

1. Islam;
2. Afghan tribalism: nature and impact;
3. jihad;
4. Afghan minorities: diversity, animosities, and conflict;
5. Afghan history: uniting impact of and unrelenting war on foreign occupiers;
6. Pashtun tribes: history of their political dominance and hatred of Afghan minorities;
7. Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states: continuing aid to the Taliban and al-Qaeda;
8. Pakistan: Islamist Afghanistan key to national security;
9. Afghan Islam: ever more Arab-like since 1979;
10. Prophet Muhammad: Muslims’ duty to drive infidel invaders off Muslim land.

Oops! I just looked and found that none of these terms is in the index. I guess neither Woodward nor those he interviewed realized they did not have a clue about what they were discussing.

Because public discussion about Afghanistan is heated in the wake of another corrupt Afghan parliamentary election, as well as because of rising U.S.-NATO casualties and the start of General Petreaus’s long-delayed Kandahar “offensive,” I have posted below a talk that I recently delivered. The talk deals with how al-Qaeda’s role in the Taliban’s war against the U.S.-led coalition has shifted from mostly combat to mostly support since 2006-2007. It argues that the smaller role al-Qaeda now plays is as vital as the larger role it played earlier, and that it is, indeed, more dangerous to the United States and its European allies both inside Afghanistan and externally.

This article is much longer than most of the pieces I post here, but I hope readers will find it informative.

I was asked this afternoon to discuss al-Qaeda’s [AQ] current role in Afghanistan. As it happens, AQ’s Deputy Chief Ayman al-Zawahiri recently issued a statement concisely showing that he, Osama bin Laden, and al-Qaeda are operating on the belief that AQ’s heavy lifting in Afghanistan, at least in a military sense, is over, and that the bulk of the combat against the U.S.-NATO forces is in the capable hands of Mullah Omar’s Taliban and the organizations of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, Sirajuddin Haqqani, and others.

Speaking in a taped audio statement to the Muslim ummah, al-Zawahiri opened by saying:

“What I want to point out here in this talk of mine isn’t the imminent victory — Allah permitting — of the mujahideen under the banner of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan led by the Amir of the Believers, Mullah Muhammad Omar Mujahid, may Allah protect him, for this is something which the enemy and the friend have agreed about, by the grace of Allah, and no one doubts it will happen, not even the American-led Crusader coalition itself. Rather the argument is about ‘when’ and ‘how.’”

While the Western media and the White House have described al-Zawahiri’s words as “more ranting and raving,” and one senior U.S. official rebutted al-Qaeda’s deputy leader with the astounding claim that “the United States is winning in Afghanistan,” there is no reason to believe al-Zawahiri presented anything other than AQ’s perception of reality on the ground in Afghanistan. And there is even less reason to think his claim is inaccurate.

Since at least early 2007, al-Qaeda has been reducing the presence of its fighters in Afghanistan. The reduction is due not to excessive loses or military failure, but from a simple recognition that the Taliban and other Afghan insurgent groups have more than enough well-trained manpower to force an end to both the occupation and Karzai’s regime.

This reality was welcomed by bin Laden and his lieutenants as it allowed them to return to al-Qaeda’s traditional modus operandi, which is to support Islamist insurgencies not to lead them.

And given the temporarily disastrous impact Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s attempt to lead Iraq’s Sunni resistance had on al-Qaeda’s fortunes, the group’s senior leaders could only have been relieved when the Afghan mujahideen proved they had recovered enough to retake leadership of the insurgency in late 2006 and early 2007.

The shifting of AQ’s role from playing a major combat-and-leadership role to playing its traditional support role can be dated from bin Laden’s 2007 appointment of the recently killed Egyptian insurgent, Mustafa Abu al-Yazid, also known as Shaykh Said.

Abu al-Yazid was a founding member of al-Qaeda and perhaps its most respected administrator, financial manager, and logistician. Al-Yazid had had some combat training and experience during the anti-Soviet jihad but he was not a skilled field commander.

Abu al-Yazid‘s appointment was a clear signal, as noted above, that AQ’s role in Afghanistan was henceforth to be marked with less combat activity and more support activities. I must say it has never been clear to me that Bush and Obama Administration officials picked up on the importance of this shift, notwithstanding the fact that al-Yazid himself explained his role in support of the Afghan mujahideen in several lengthy interviews with al-Jazirah and al-Sahab, the latter is al-Qaeda’s media organization.

Indeed, the recent statement by CIA Chief Panetta that there are only about 50 or 100 al-Qaeda fighters left in Afghanistan — if it is accurate — clearly underscores the vital but much less manpower intensive role al-Qaeda is now serving in Afghanistan.

So what, then, are the most important activities al-Qaeda is now performing in Afghanistan? While to my knowledge we have not yet heard from the man who replaced Abu al-Yazid, there is no reason to think al-Qaeda’s modus operandi in Afghanistan has changed since al-Yazid explained it in 2008 and 2009. The following are the four areas in which al-Qaeda’s effort now focuses:

First, training:The improved combat performance of Taliban and other Afghan insurgent forces since late-2001 is witness to the training regimen provided by al-Qaeda trainers. As Abu-al-Yazid told the media, al-Qaeda established numerous small camps in Pakistan’s tribal area after evacuating Afghanistan and began training both Afghan fighters and would-be mujahideen who came from elsewhere in the Islamic world. It also is likely that AQ and the Taliban used the larger training camps in Pakistani Kashmir to train fighters for Afghanistan. Included in the training were classes on how to assembly and deploy IEDs of the type used in Iraq. Prior to his death, Abu al-Yazid said that because the Taliban had sufficient manpower, some non-Afghan Muslims being trained in South Asia were being sent to fight in Iraq, Somalia, North Africa, and Yemen.

Second, logistical assistance: As noted, AQ’s self-designated primary role in each Islamist insurgency it assists is the provision of logistical, financial, training, and procurement support; al-Yazid himself was one of AQ’s best in these skills. Al-Qaeda’s logistical and financial networks are now helping and supplementing the Taliban’s and there is no indication the Afghan insurgents are wanting in any necessary of war. The logistics arena is, like the combat arena, a place where the need for AQ personnel declines over time. Just as al-Qaeda fighters teach combat skills, the organization’s support people teach logistical, organizational, and financial skills that help an insurgency to become more self-sufficient and over time allows AQ to reduce its manpower commitment. (NB:The fact that, unlike the Soviets, U.S. and NATO commanders have refused to mine the passes connecting Afghanistan and Pakistan has greatly eased the task of managing logistics operations and so increased both the Taliban’s combat capabilities and U.S. and NATO casualties.)

Third, intelligence collection: AQ’s intelligence-collection networks in Afghanistan and Pakistan operate in a framework built over twenty-five years. In intelligence terms, al-Qaeda is an old-established South Asian firm. Based on relationships created during the anti-Soviet jihad (1979-1992), AQ’s intelligence officers work closely with those of Mullah Omar, Hekmatyar, Haqqani, and others. And although he is an Afghan parliamentarian and appears pro-Karzai, bin Laden also has close ties to Shaykh Abdul Rasul Sayyaf who commands a small but well-trained and highly clandestine insurgent force in Kabul and the region west of the city. AQ has a long history of cooperation with Sayyaf; Shaykh Sayyaf, for example, gave bin Laden land for his first training camp, and helped al-Qaeda to set up Masood for assassination in September 2001. It would be Pollyanish to think this cooperation has ended; it is more likely that Sayyaf‘s people provide intelligence to AQ and other Afghan mujahideen about the plans and intentions of Karzai’s regime, the movement of NATO forces in and around Kabul, and assists them in covert operations in the city.

There are two areas of intelligence collection which are especially important to al-Qaeda and its Afghan allies at the moment:

The first area is in the southern provinces of Helmand, Nimruz, and Kandahar and focuses particularly on collecting intelligence on Canadian and British forces. Abu al-Yazid and other senior al-Qaeda leaders have drawn attention to the weak support that British and Canadian voters provide for their governments’ Afghan commitment; more than half of Canadians oppose the war, and about two-thirds of Britons oppose it. As the pace of operations in Kandahar increase, Taliban insurgents are likely to try to inflict as many casualties as possible on UK and Canadian soldiers, an action which directly serves al-Qaeda’s strategic goal of stripping away U.S. allies.

–The second area in which al-Qaeda is surely operating with other Afghan and Pakistani insurgent organizations is in ensuring a steady flow of intelligence about the land routes NATO uses to move supplies, fuel, and ordnance into Afghanistan from Karachi, Peshawar, and the Former Soviet Union. The Afghan mujahideen drove the Red Army to distraction with an uncanny ability to slow, disrupt, and bleed the vehicle convoys on which the Soviets and their Afghan allies depended for all of their needs. Then as now, Afghanistan produces nothing and so every materiel need had to be brought in from the Soviet Union, and because of mujahideen anti-convoy operations the Soviets and their allies were always short of everything. In this realm, it is likely that al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and Hekmatyar are especially interested in building a capability to attack the resupply routes from Central Asia. Each of these organizations have long been eager to build a capacity to project power into Central Asia, and each surely welcomes the chance to build ties to the mujahideen in northern Afghanistan who are beginning to believe they have simply exchanged an infidel Soviet occupation for an infidel U.S.-NATO occupation and its Karzai puppet.

Fourth, media operations: As it has done in Yemen, Somalia, Iraq, and North Africa, al-Qaeda’s al-Sahab Media Production Organization has revolutionized the local insurgency’s attitude toward and use of the electronic media. Prior to 2001, Mullah Omar and his lieutenants had little domestic media capability and none internationally. In fact, Omar and his coterie frankly said they cared little about media activities, and some Taliban leaders even regarded media equipment as unIslamic. Things have changed. Today the Taliban has an around-the-clock media organization that produces regular video tapes, audio messages, and radio broadcasts from all parts of Afghanistan. This coverage features interviews with Taliban commanders, video of attacks on NATO forces; and testimony from local Afghans welcoming the Taliban’s return and the Islamic justice systems it brings. This reporting feeds the print and electronic media in Pakistan and the Arab Peninsula and is fed worldwide on Taliban Internet sites that are available in Pashtu, Arabic, Urdu, and some other languages. Taliban media operatives also use satellite telephones to contact Western reporters when NATO operations kill civilians, and the operatives often send pictures or video of the incidents to their Western contacts via their mobile phones.

The Taliban’s media operations — when added to those of the Pakistani media and al-Jazirah — are again making the Afghan jihad a priority concern across the Muslim world, a fact that seems to be validated by media reporting that in 2009, donations from individuals in the Arab Peninsula states and other Muslim nations provided a greater portion of the Afghan insurgents’ operating revenue than did their share of profits from heroin trafficking. All told, the impact of the media productions by the current Afghan insurgents dwarfs that of the media produced two decades ago by the anti-Soviet jihadis. Millions more Muslims worldwide are intimately familiar with the events and personalities of today’s Afghan war than they were twenty years ago during the anti-Soviet war, and that awareness is yielding increased volunteers and donations.

Overall, then, Afghanistan is no longer a place that requires the bulk of al-Qaeda’s attention and human and material resources. Al-Qaeda believes Mullah Omar’s Taliban and the other Afghan insurgent groups have the war well in hand and that the slow but steady spread of insurgent operations around the country clockwise from Kandahar demonstrates that the Afghan mujahideen have the initiative and that more ordinary Afghans — nationalists and Islamists — want to be rid of the occupation.

As a result, while al-Qaeda core is based in South Asia, it is still able to devote increasing amounts of its manpower and resources to activities outside Afghanistan and Pakistan. The improved capabilities of al-Qaeda in Yemen, Somalia, and North Africa are evidence of this, as is the ongoing rebuilding and increasing operations of al-Qaeda in Iraq, the just reported planning for wide-ranging al-Qaeda-related attacks in Europe; and the growing presence of Salafist scholars and mujahideen groups in Jordan, Lebanon, Gaza, and Jerusalem. Bin Laden and his lieutenants also have successfully increased the number of U.S. citizens within their military and media wings, which surely means that al-Qaeda is planning more attacks on U.S. interests and is intent on further radicalizing young U.S. Muslim males

Bin Laden and his lieutenants also perceive that the U.S. government has never understood its Afghan problem, has never intended to win the war, and that the current U.S. administration has given up. The points supporting this belief include:

The excessive concern of U.S. leaders for civilian casualties and the resulting reduction in night operations, artillery support, and air attacks to prevent such casualties. All three were major negatives for the mujahideen and the reduction of such operations is most welcomed by them.

The success of U.S.-NATO operations humanitarian operations — 3 million more Afghan kids in school, better health care, more roads and electricity, etc. — that has occurred simultaneously with the geographic spread of the insurgency and the increase in popular support for it. Afghans are accepting Western aid, but they are not giving their hearts and minds to the occupiers.

Washington’s abandonment of virtually every war goal set out in 2001, as seen in its willingness to deal with the Taliban and last year’s setting of a date for the start of U.S. troop withdrawal. Each is seen as evidence that the current Administration has thrown in the towel.

The widespread corruption of the Karzai regime, and especially that of the president’s family and friends, has made it clear to the mujahideen and most of the Afghan people that the regime represents only itself and can survive only as long as there are NATO bayonets to protect it, no matter how many elections are held.

The willingness of the U.S.-NATO high command to give the mujahideen six-months’ notice before major offensives — as was done in Helmand and now in Kandahar — is taken as evidence that the last thing Western forces want to do is to incur heavy casualties and so the mujahideen are given time to move the bulk of their manpower and supplies out of harm’s way before campaigns are started.

The enormous U.S.-NATO expenditure of time, money, and manpower to build large Afghan military and police forces, a program that mostly benefits the mujahideen. The British tried this in the 1880s, the Soviets did the same in the 1980s, and the result was the same both times: the Afghan fighters enlisted to get armed, trained, and learn the enemy’s tactics and then deserted to the mujahideen; others won some trust from their trainers and then turned their guns on them; and yet others continued to serve in the forces as agents-in-place to assist the mujahideen at a later time.

The miniscule presence of U.S.-NATO combat forces in Afghanistan and their one-hand-tied-behind-the-back modus operandi. For al-Qaeda and the Taliban, it is not only laughable but self-defeating for the U.S. and NATO to believe that they can beat the insurgency with 120,000 troops focused on winning hearts and minds when the Soviets could not do so with 120,000 troops using the utmost savagery.

In closing let me say that al-Qaeda’s ability to reduce its manpower and material commitment to the Afghan jihad does not connote any lessening in its determination to see the U.S. and NATO forced to withdraw. If the Taliban’s current positive conditions turn negative, bin Laden will refocus some of al-Qaedas forces and resources in its support.

Afghanistan, for al-Qaeda, all Islamist groups, and most Muslims, remains of overwhelming symbolic and theological importance. It is the site on which Allah provided the mujahideen with Islam’s first victory over a superpower, and al-Qaeda, their mujahideen brethren, and their civilian benefactors will spare no effort to fight so as to be deserving of Allah providing Islam a second victory over a superpower in the same Muslim land.

On 12 September 2010, the Washington Post published a much-discussed and highly praised OpEd by former ABC journalist Ted Koppel. The gist of the article is that Washington’s response to 9/11 amounted to playing into bin Laden’s hands. Well, no kidding.

Needless to say, Mr. Koppel argues that the world began on 9/11 and that all of today’s troubles stem from Mr. Bush’s time in office — what a coincidence the piece came on the eve of midterm elections! He of course neglects to mention that Mr. Clinton, more than anyone else, is responsible for the war America is fighting today against al-Qaeda and its Islamist allies. Still, there is more than enough abject failure for the last three presidents to share, including the sainted Mr. Obama, who is mentioned but once in Mr. Koppel’s article.

Mr. Koppel’s essay is a partisan political commercial meant to support the Democrats and it is wrong on many counts. Indeed, Mr. Koppel’s article is much like those we see defending the Bush administration’s war-making activities in Republican venues; in both instances, partisanship and lust for office triumphs over concern for genuine U.S. national security interests.

Mr. Koppel says: “Al-Qaeda is an organized terrorist group.”

Wrong: Al-Qaeda is an organized, worldwide insurgent group. Had it been anything remotely resembling a traditional “terrorist group” the CIA’s successes against it before 9/11 would have exterminated it. But because it is an insurgent group, it cannot be decapitated, which we have proven indisputably by the failure of covert action, drones, rendition, and Special Forces operations meant to destroy al-Qaeda’s leadership. Finally, terrorist groups are lethal nuisances; al-Qaeda poses a national security threat to the United States.

Mr. Koppel says: “The Bush administration’s initial response to 9/11 was just about right.”

Wrong: The Bush administration’s initial response to Afghanistan was perhaps the single most irresponsible and self-defeating military-political initiative ever launched in U.S. history. The Bush invasion of Afghanistan captured a few cities; installed an incompetent, unrepresentative, and apparently gangster-like man as president; and deployed too few troops to prevent all of our enemies from escaping to fight another day. Bush, Rumsfeld, and the other boy-warrior advocates of the “light-footprint, win-their-hearts-and-minds approach” ensured that the U.S. would be defeated in Afghanistan and Iraq. The only workable post-9/11 plan for Afghanistan was a massively destructive 12-15 month punitive expedition against the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and their civilian supporters, to be followed by an immediate withdrawal with a frank acknowledgment that the same punishment — or worse — might need to be applied again at a later date.

Mr. Koppel says: “As for the 100,000 U.S. troops in or headed to Afghanistan … [they are there because] Pakistan has an arsenal of 60 to 100 nuclear warheads. Were any of those to fall into the hands of al-Qaeda’s fundamentalist allies in Pakistan, there is no telling what the consequences would be.”

Wrong multiple times:

• Our troops are in Afghanistan to destroy our Islamist enemies who intend to attack the United States at home and abroad. That U.S. and NATO forces have and will fail to do so does not change the only rational and worthwhile mission for our troops.
• Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal is in danger because U.S.-NATO forces have been in Afghanistan for 9 years; because the Alliance refuses to do anything to help itself and dragooned Pakistan’s army into fighting its war; and because of the stupidity of the Pakistani government in agreeing to do so, thereby causing a civil war in Pakistan. The fact is that the longer we stay fecklessly milling about in Afghanistan and pleading with Pakistan to do more of our fighting, the greater chance there is of a nuclear weapon going to the Islamists.
• There is every way of “telling what the consequences would be” if the Islamists get a nuclear weapon: They will try to get it into the United States and, if successful, they will detonate it in a major city. (NB: They have religious authorization to kill up to 10 million Americans with nuclear weapons.)

Mr. Koppel says: “America’s war on terrorism is widely perceived throughout Pakistan as a war on Islam.”

Wrong: No, the United States government is perceived throughout the Muslim world as being at war with Islam. Mr. Koppel suffers from the same arrogant racism that infects all of our bipartisan elites: He and they believe that Muslims are too stupid and primitive to be able to distinguish between Americans — who most Muslims treat, as individuals, with the utmost courtesy and regard as generous, hard-working, and religious — and the U.S. government. The best polling available shows nearly 80-percent of Muslims worldwide — men and women, young and old, moderate and extremist — identify Washington’s foreign policy, and not Americans, as intending to undermine or destroy Islam. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have strengthened this perception, but it is foolish to think that ending the wars — or the rendition, Guantanamo Bay, and interrogation issues Mr. Koppel ritualistically anguishes over — would change the perception of Muslims. As long as bipartisan Washington stays on the Arab Peninsula, plays utterly loyal employee to its Israel-First paymasters, and promotes Arab tyranny Muslims will believe the U.S. government is waging war on Islam.

Mr. Koppel asks: “Could bin Laden, in his wildest imaginings, have hoped to provoke greater chaos?”

Answer: Yes, and he did not just hope but counted on being able to produce the chaos that is now coming to the United States. Osama bin Laden knows his Muslim brethren and the U.S. bipartisan elite better than most U.S. leaders are willing to recognize. He knew, for example, that Muslims would refuse to go to war and kill themselves because of U.S. elections, emancipated women, and draft beer. He also knew that Muslims would fight to defend their faith and brethren against U.S. government attack. He likewise knew that neither U.S. party would ever change U.S. policy supporting Israel and Arab tyrants, and that those and other policies would eventually motivate young U.S.-citizen Muslim males to attack targets inside the United States. Thus, not only did bin Laden know the chaos his actions would ignite, he correctly predicted that the bipartisan U.S. governing elite would to lie to Americans about their attackers’ motivation until the jihad had time to take root in North America.

After reading Mr. Koppel’s OpEd I recalled that my dad always warned warn his kids that they should not put much stock in what TV journalists said because they simply read what someone else wrote from a teleprompter. Given his OpEd in the Post, my Dad’s advice seems better than ever, and one hopes Mr. Koppel does not sally forth with any more analysis or recommendations that he writes himself.