The threat resides within, and not in Afghanistan...

In an editorial published yesterday, The New York Times urges the Europeans to provide additional military resources in Afghanistan because the war being waged there is a common fight.
Defeating Al Qaeda is a matter of common defense. President Obama is right to insist that the allies do more. Now Europe’s leaders need to demand more of themselves, the paper insists.
Yet, for all practical purposes, al Qaeda has already been defeated in Afghanistan.
At a recent Senate hearing, John Kerry (D-Mass), Chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, asked Bob Grenier, a former CIA Pakistan station chief, the following question, so in terms of 'in Afghanistan, they have been disrupted and dismantled and defeated. They're not in Afghanistan, correct?
That's true, he replied.
There’s no Qaeda in Afghanistan and no Afghans in Qaeda, opined Marc Sageman, a former CIA officer.
According to US intelligence officials, there are only about 100 al Qaeda fighters left in the country.
If so, why is President Obama sending an additional 30,000 troops to fight an enemy that has already been defeated? Al Qaeda is already on the ropes globally, with ever-dwindling financial and popular support, and a drastically diminished ability to work with other extremists worldwide, much less command them in major operations. Its lethal agents are being systematically hunted down, while those Muslims whose souls it seeks to save are increasingly revolted by its methods, wrote the anthropologist Scott Atran, in the NYT.
Consequently, one is at a loss to explain the rationale behind the troop increase. To ask the Europeans to contribute further resources in order to wage a battle that has already been won makes no sense either. The newspaper argues that Al Qaeda has used its sanctuaries in Afghanistan and Pakistan to plot and launch attacks on European cities.
In fact, and this is the crux of the matter, the terrorist attacks that targeted London in July 2005 and Madrid in March 2004 were designed and executed by local extremists, and not al Qaeda militants located in Afghanistan or Pakistan.
As such, and for the time being, al Qaeda is no longer a threat.
By escalating a war which no longer has any reason for being however, we may resurrect that very threat the war in question was designed to eliminate.
It is a mistake to conflate the Taliban with al Qaeda.
The former seek to expel all foreigners from Afghanistan and impose an Islamic government in Kabul.
They have no other ambition, and waging holy war on the West is certainly not one of them.
Their alliance in the past was mostly tactical, and financial, the Taliban government being scant of resources.
In addition, most of those we refer to as Taliban are but Pashtun nationalists infuriated by foreign occupation, not Islamic fanatics. To be Taliban today means little more than to be a Pashtun tribesman who believes that his fundamental beliefs and customary way of life are threatened, Atran wrote. A key factor helping the Taliban is the moral outrage of the Pashtun tribes against those who deny them autonomy, including a right to bear arms to defend their tribal code, known as Pashtunwali, he added. Yet, by escalating the war against the Pashtun, we are pushing the Taliban into its (al Qaeda’s) arms, to quote Mr. Atran. An anti-foreigner and occupation alliance is thus constituted, much to the benefit of the terrorist movement, currently in great need of support and resources.
Let us not make the mistake of unwittingly reviving a movement that is currently moribund…
Does that mean that the terrorist threat has disappeared, and that Western nations should no longer fear attacks by Islamic radicals?
Not at all, but the threat is not where we think it is…
Mr. Sageman, the former CIA official, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last October that we have misinterpreted, if not altogether misread the terrorist threat since 9/11. In fact, the actual context refutes claims by some heads of the intelligence community that all Islamist plots in the West can be traced back to the Afghan-Pakistani border, he said.
The plots and militants do not originate in the East, but in the West…
Al Qaeda is not plotting against us (it is no longer in any condition to do so) only inspiring those in France, Britain, Spain, Germany the US and elsewhere whose ambition is to attack us. The real threat is homegrown youths who gain inspiration from Osama bin Laden but little else beyond an occasional self-financed spell at a degraded Qaeda-linked training facility, wrote Atran.
By our actions and policies, we are producing that terrorist threat we believe is primarily centered in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and that requires the presence of 140,000 foreign troops to contain and annihilate.
Hence, escalating the war will not make us safer, but only increase the risk of a terrorist attack on our own nations.
Even the US is not immune to this development of the homegrown terrorist threat, though it was widely assumed that Muslims in America, unlike those in France, for instance, were better integrated into mainstream society…
The Fort Hood killings, the arrest of Afghan-born Najibullah Zazi, and the recent detention of five young Americans in Pakistan suggest that this may not be the case.
What has made these young Muslims suddenly receptive to the message of jihad propagated by al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden?
Quite simply, it is our policies in Afghanistan, Iraq and the Middle East in general that has alienated and radicalized a small minority of Muslims living in our midst.
As long as we can be convincingly portrayed as enemies of Arabs and Muslims, then we shall be vulnerable to terrorism no matter how many soldiers patrol the unruly lands of Asia and the Middle East.
As one British journalist put it, albeit rather crudely, if the United States wants to improve its image in the Islamic world, it should stop killing Muslims.
The Harvard Professor Stephen Walt studied this very issue and concluded that, in the last thirty years, the US, with help from its friends, is responsible for the death of about 290,000 Muslims, and this is a very conservative estimate.
Conversely, Muslims killed ten thousand Americans (including soldiers) during this period, a ratio of thirty to one…
When you kill tens of thousands of people in other countries -- and sometimes for no good reason --, you shouldn't be surprised when people in those countries are enraged by this behavior and interested in revenge. After all, how did we react after September 11? concludes Mr. Walt.
The US has been in Iraq for more than six years, in Afghanistan for eight…
In the latter country, we have killed anywhere from 12 to 32,000 civilians already…
The fact that we do not even know exactly how many is a telling one.
What must the Afghans think?
Can they really trust us to protect them, and shield them from harm?
Surely, we mean well. Perhaps, but it is only what we do that counts.
Instead of bringing security and development, we have sowed chaos and mayhem,
Afghanistan should have been easy. Eight years in, the U. S. has restored brutal warlords, established a corrupt authority, and killed civilians. The Taliban look good by comparison, wrote the journalist Nir Rosen.
The reality on the ground is that Afghanistan is Vietnam redux. Afghan President Hamid Karzai's regime is an utterly illegitimate, incompetent kleptocracy. The Afghan National Army (ANA) -- slotted to take over the conflict when the coalition pulls out -- will not even be able to feed itself in five years, much less turn back the mounting Taliban tide, wrote Thomas Johnson and M. Chris Mason in Foreign Policy.
Sending an additional 30,000 troops, escalating a war that we have been waging ineptly for the last eight years sends a clear message to the Afghans and all the other Muslims who already view us with suspicion: we intend to impose our order on your country, regardless of what you think or desire, and the number of victims our determination to win the war shall engender…
Just the length of U.S. involvement in these countries (Iraq and Afghanistan) is provoking more Muslim Americans to react, wrote Robert Leiken, a terrorism expert at the Nixon Center.
The longer we’ve been in Iraq and Afghanistan, the more some susceptible young men are coming to believe that it’s their duty to take up arms to defend their fellow Muslims, suggests Bruce Hoffman, of Georgetown University.
This new deployment increases the risk of the next 9/11. It will not make this country safer, Robert Pape, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, told the NYT.
In essence, we are now manufacturing our own enemies, within our own communities at home…
A change of policy is long overdue. We, as messengers of a great civilization, should promote peace and development, and forsake our obsession with war and counterinsurgency. We claim not to be at war with Islam, but then why are we fighting and killing so many Muslims?
The most effective anti-terrorism policy is called economic development.
Let us strive to improve living standards of the people of this region, and encourage economic activity. Let us devote our efforts and resources to providing them with an education and economic opportunities.
If we genuinely try to help them fulfill their potential, and not seek to impose our order and values on their societies, will so many in so many places continue to loathe us?
I shall wager that the answer is no…
We believe the president knows perfectly well that Afghanistan is Vietnam all over again, both domestically and, as we wrote in Military Review this month, in Kabul and out in the Afghan hills, where good men are bleeding and dying. And he's seeking the same cynical exit strategy that Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger did in 1968: negotiating the best possible second-place position and a "decent interval" between withdrawal and collapse. In office less than a year, the Obama administration has already been seduced by the old beltway calculus that sometimes a little wrong must be done to get re-elected and achieve a greater good, Johnson and Mason conclude their piece in Foreign Policy.
One wonders which of the following two propositions is the most dispiriting: that President Obama actually believes a policy that has failed for eight years shall suddenly begin to succeed now that he is in charge, or that he knows perfectly well that it will not, but lacked the courage to put an end to the war now, preferring instead to defer the withdrawal decision to July 2011, once the popular COIN strategy of Petraeus and McChrystal will have patently failed?
In any case, a chance to display authentic leadership, and change course has been lost…
In a powerful speech against the Vietnam war delivered in New York in 1967, Martin Luther King said the following,
We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace in Vietnam and justice throughout the developing world -- a world that borders on our doors. If we do not act we shall surely be dragged down the long dark and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.
It is late, but probably not too late, to use our power with wisdom and benignancy.
Let us not condemn ourselves to fighting endless wars, wars in which we end up killing thousands and betraying our values and ourselves for no discernable reason…
(the photograph above of US Marines in Afghanistan is by AFP)