However, as the Obama administration has pursued the war in Afghanistan, it is becoming clearer that there is some confusion about the mission because it appears that he has to go through the Taliban to get to Al Queda.
During the campaign of President Obama, I was leery about his fierce intension to pursue Osama bin Ladin in Afghanistan to the point that he would engage in a war against the Taliban. Yet I felt, like most people, that it was a righteous objective, since it was aimed at atonement for the 3,000 people ruthlessly killed by Al Queda operatives at the New York World Trade Center bombing in 2001.
However, as the Obama administration has pursued the war in Afghanistan, it is becoming clearer that there is some confusion about the mission because it appears that he has to go through the Taliban to get to Al Queda. The logic of this policy of pursuing a war against the Taliban is that the administration is willing to shut down the military operation in Iraq, only to open it up again in Afghanistan.
And the mission now appears to be to wipe out the Al Queda base in Afghanistan so that it cannot pursue operations against the U.S. or any other targets globally. This would be fine except that there is widespread recognition that much of the base of Al Queda is also in Pakistan.
The major problem is that although the Taliban has relations with Al Queda, no one has yet defeated the Taliban, neither the Russians nor the British, and it is unlikely that a full-fledged war between them and the United States will change that history. They have the advantage of familiarity with conducting military operations on their own terrain and we have the disadvantage of fighting a guerilla insurgency – more sophisticated than that in Iraq – from a distance.
The danger here is one of serious mission creep. The war against Osama bin Laden has morphed into a war against the Taliban and a wider relationship of nation building with Afghanistan in order to support their own effort to control the political forces in their country that may be hostile to U.S. interests. But the question is how long will that strategy take and how much will it cost in money and lives and, most important, will it lead to the primary objective of capturing or killing bin Laden?
So, the question I have is whether there is a mission in Afghanistan more narrow in the sense that it is possible to pursue Osama bin Ladin with the assistance of the sympathetic Afghanistan government, now that it looks like Hamid Karzai has been re-elected.
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