While things are indeed getting better in Iraq, it increasingly looks like Iraq is a tactical victory in the WOMBAT, whereas Pakistan/Afghanistan are a strategic loss. Case in point: the Taliban have signed an agreement with the Pakistani government which allows them to impose strict Shari’a law on the Swat Valley. The sheer magnitude of the disaster that this represents cannot be overstated.
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This is a harsh, nasty thing to say, but, Afghanistan and northern Pakistan are just not very important.
The truth is that the poverty in Afghanistan is abject: a rich man makes $2,000 a year. Culturally, these folks are not Arabs, and don’t speak Arabic. A wealthy man owns three goats and a mule.
Al Qaeda did not start there. Al Qaeda found it a good hidey-hole because there’s not a fucking thing there worth fighting over except opium and a smidge of oil. If you’re part of a lunatic fringe violent cult, it’s the perfect hiding spot because no one gives a fuck about that place.
A huge intellectual mistake is to suggest that somehow, international terrorism was/is the fruit of Afghanistan’s poverty. No, I’m sorry, but that’s wrong. International terrorism did not start because Afghans are pissed off at the rest of us because they’re poor. Osama found it a helpful place to set up shop because no one cares about it.
I’m sure any decent Afghan wants to punch me in the face for saying it. I probably deserve it. But seriously: it’s just not that important as a country.
As usual, the CIA World Factbook is dispositive.
Afghanistan is a primitive, stone-age civilization, and an obscure cultural backwater. It just is. Al Qaeda found it the perfect place to hide. And that’s all.
Hrm, I’m not sure how one can characterize Iraq as merely a “tactical” victory. It was far more important than Afghanistan.
I’m not sure we can call the Hindu Kush a “loss” either — we threw the Taliban out of power and denied AQ a safe haven. At worst, it seems to be an expensive stalemate.
Also, the terrorists in that area tend to be funded with Arab oil money, which there’s a lot less of these days. I won’t be surprised if they collapse over the next year.
I dont believe poverty is correlated with terroism. However, as a haven, it does permit AQ to thrive and export its ideology to places like Somalia and Sudan. Its a cancer that has metastasized.
Iraq is a strategic victory in the WOMBAT – in the long term. Maliki seems to be en route towards becoming mini-Mubarak, which is definitely an improvement (Egypt did after all sign a peace treaty with Israel). The short term success in Iraq is a tactical victory, not a strategic one, because it does nothing to reduce the immediate threat of the established terror groups like AQ who still pose a threat. If anything, that threat is worse now.
Short term though, the bad guys are still out there. your CIA link is not “dispositive” – it just proves that Afghanistan is a borken country. Which is why it makes a great haven for this ideology we are at war against.
Michael Yon, on Afghanistan and the broader context of the war:
“It has become clear to me that we’re losing this war. But losing doesn’t mean lost. “
Aziz, I’ve seen you use the acronym WOMBAT several times now, and I have no idea what it means. I assume “war on something something something terror.”
Can you explain? Thanks.
gladly – it stands for War On Muharib, Brave Against Terror. I explain it in detail here and i am quite serious about it.
http://tinyurl.com/alv653
I think Yon is speaking about the past few years. The situation has certainly not gotten better over that time, but it’s still much better than the situation in October 2001.
I will say, though, that Afghanistan is proving we can either have a War on Drugs or a War on Terrorism, but not both.
Handing the terrorists a multi-billion dollar monopoly on a certain kind of consensual transaction is just not compatible with eradicating them.
I think Afghanistan is proving we can have a war we win, or one that the Europeans “help” us with, but not both.
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