Finding the Masterminds of Terrorism

As our government knew in the early aftermath of September 11th, the terrorist leadership that trained and funded the hijackers who killed thousands of people were holed up along the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan. It's almost difficult to remember, but that is where we went first. We had the support and the sympathy of nearly every civilized nation to send troops to Afghanistan. Ordinary Iranians, Iraqis and others in the Muslim world were sympathetic and expressed their own fears that the worst terrorists would not stop their efforts in the U.S. or Western Europe. They knew that bin Laden and Company didn't just want to punish the United States. They wanted power and dominion over the entire Middle East, especially its wealth and military apparatus. They wanted Israel vaporized and to make sure that women across the Middle East were denied education and forced to accept an invented, warped interpretation of Islamic Law.

We all know what happened next. We made a half-hearted attempt in Afghanistan and blew our wad on Iraq because of a range of stupid assumptions, lies and a personal vendetta from President Bush. We squandered the good will of Middle East citizens and watched as young men and some women put their money on bin Laden as the ultimate victor. That train already left the station and it's almost a waste of time to wring our hands over it any longer.

The Obama Administration understood what most people across the world understood years ago. Afghanistan was the problem and if we failed there, Pakistan would become destabilized, India would begin to think more seriously about challenging Pakistan for long-disputed border land and finding and eliminating the worst terrorists would get lost in the sauce. More than 8 years later, we're back to discussing how many troops we really need and for how long in Afghanistan. The Taliban has been a well-understood military junta for years. It is patient, tenacious and is not afraid of tanks and bombs. The Soviets burned their hands on that stove 30 years ago, thinking that their military superiority would make annexing Afghanistan a cake-walk. They found out from personal experience that the terrain is difficult and that the Afghani people were at the point where they would pledge allegiance to anyone who decided not to kill them or take away their livelihood.

So, how many soldiers will it take to find these sub-human despots in the caves along the Afghanistan/Pakistan border, help rebuild what has been physically destroyed and leave the place physically and politically cleaner than when they arrived? How long will it take? We are at least beginning to understand what the Obama Administration believes is necessary. It doesn't sound irrational to add 30-50,000 troops in addition to troops from other nations. I lack military expertise and am therefore in the same position as most Americans. I'm stuck with trusting the administration, its intelligence apparatus and its stated resolve to find these characters as quickly as possible. Every day we don't find them encourages a new generation of terrorists to believe that they, too, can destroy their own nation and ours and do so with impunity. We are fast approaching a time when a whole generation of young Middle Eastern people will have no memory of anything but the destruction of war and will begin to consider it a normal state of affairs. That is the long-term danger. Once that happens, finding the current leadership and bringing them to justice or outright killing them will be widely applauded by some but won't immediately fix the problem of younger people learning more so they can fill in for the captured, jailed or dead elders.

As most of us know, it took a generation to normalize relations with a unified Vietnam. Like China, their claim to be a communist nation is mostly chatter at this point, at least as far as economic theory is concerned. The overwhelming majority of Vietnamese are not old enough to remember what happened in Indo-China and are now seeking to improve their lives by trading with the United States and the rest of developed nations.

We might end up having to wait that long for reconciliation with the Middle East and then only after we leave. Get ready for a long slog. I support the administration's efforts but neither the terrorists nor Americans are stupid enough to believe that it won't take very long to fix a problem that began long before the planes were hijacked.