Put simply; our presence in Afghanistan allows us to prevent the establishment of pipelines which would otherwise which would otherwise carry oil and gas though the region to China and Russia, and it also allows our robber barons to fill their pockets with our tax dollars and by exploiting what resources Afghanistan has. Claims of noble intentions are just propaganda used to sucker the public along for the ride.

I would like to know how often Rahm Emanuel attends meetings in the National Security Council , and how talkative, assertive and persuassive he is; is he in fact running the show, or is he cunning enough to have Hillary Clinton -- and perhaps a few others -- making his points? [Being the lobbys man in The White House, he further shields himself from criticism, by the fact that it was actually he (and Axelrod) who picked Obama. That fact shields them both from some criticism, and this is all cunningly worked out and planned from the outset]

There is no doubt that this argument about safe haven is dreamt up by The Israel lobby. The arguments they use to convince the public are always constructed in such a way, that on the face of it they seem plausible. But if you dive down into the substance -- as Walt and others have done -- they do not hold, and can easily be teared apart. However the lobby relies on, that very few are able to do that, because it does involve some brainwork to do it.

But Walts counter-argument that this commitment will cost The United States 60 billion dollars next year, certainly also is something that the public can relate to, and I only wish that this information is communicated out more broadly

Really? If the only reason we're in Afghanistan is to prevent pipelines to China and Russia, then shouldn't we be in Burma right now as well preventing the gas and oil pipeline routing north to Yunnan? And where were we when the Altai-Xinjiang pipeline was built? What about ESPO? But you're right of course, China would much prefer to deal with the Taliban when constructing pipelines--especially given its problems with the Uighurs and the East Turkistan movement.

If anything, the Chinese would prefer to deal with the US in a consortium pipeline deal through Afghanistan than it would the Taliban. Plus I think a pipeline from Gwadar to Xinjiang through Pakistan is more feasible for the Chinese to consider in the medium-term than one through Afghanistan.

There is a lot more to this issue than energy.

This is a good commentary, especially your reminder about how 9/11 was planned in Europe, not in Afghanistan.

Assuming al Queda has finite resources, however, isn't a counter argument that tying them down in Afpak might prevent them from focusing their resources on planning attacks from Europe (or wherever)? Arguably Iraq played this strategic role for some time. And would those who argue for withdrawal be also willing to advocate more stringent security measures, for example, for people who enter this country from places like Hamburg? If you're going to give al Queda carte blanche (your distinction between allowing al Queda not to plan attacks on the US is silly, because we won't know about this until they actually attack us) in Afghanistan, then there would have to be a trade-off in terms of both domestic security measures and border control. Would you be willing to make this trade-off, especially considering the nature of our CYA bureaucracy, it would almost certainly overreact in restricting freedoms?

This isn't about current or future safe havens, which Mr. Walt has ably shown wouldn't provide protection anymore.

However, I don't think the Hamburg or flight school angles quite get what the Afghanistan camps provided al Qaeda. They were essentially a sorting facility. Thousands of Muslims passed through Pakistan and Afghanistan during the Taliban era. The leadership could "interview" them by indoctrinating them in takfiri beliefs and see how they responded. Then they only had to pick a handful of capable people to create the core of the planes mission. Finding the "muscle" was probably quite easy, as the qualifying factor seems to rest mainly on being Saudi.

Here's a question: Would the planes operation have succeeded on the first try without the 3 from the Hamburg cell showing up in Afghanistan together?

It would be extremely hard, if not impossible to set up a similar sorting program today. Al Qaeda is not dumb, so it is unlikely that they even would seek such a safe haven. It wouldn't do them much good.

First, this argument tends to lump the various groups we are contending with together, and it suggests that all of them are equally committed to attacking the United States. In fact, most of the people we are fighting in Afghanistan aren't dedicated jihadis seeking to overthrow Arab monarchies, establish a Muslim caliphate, or mount attacks on U.S. soil. Their agenda is focused on local affairs, such as what they regard as the political disempowerment of Pashtuns and illegitimate foreign interference in their country. Moreover, the Taliban itself is more of a loose coalition of different groups than a tightly unified and hierarchical organization, which is why some experts believe we ought to be doing more to divide the movement and "flip" the moderate elements to our side. Unfortunately, the "safe haven" argument wrongly suggests that the Taliban care as much about attacking America as bin Laden does

Usually, the argument is that since the defeat of the Taliban government, the Taliban have become virtually one and the same with the jihadis who keep coming into the FATA for training.

As for "flipping", you should read some of what Ahmed Rashid has written on the Taliban. He's extremely pessimistic about the possibility of flipping "moderate" elements of the Taliban to the US, in part because most of the moderate leaders are dead.

Third, it is hardly obvious that Afghan territory provides an ideal "safe haven" for mounting attacks on the United States. The 9/11 plot was organized out of Hamburg, not Kabul or Kandahar, but nobody is proposing that we send troops to Germany to make sure there aren't "safe havens" operating there. In fact, if al Qaeda has to hide out somewhere, I’d rather they were in a remote, impoverished, land-locked and isolated area from which it is hard to do almost anything. The "bases" or "training camps" they could organize in Pakistan or Afghanistan might be useful for organizing a Mumbai-style attack, but they would not be particularly valuable if you were trying to do a replay of 9/11 (not many flight schools there), or if you were trying to build a weapon of mass destruction. And in a post-9/11 environment, it wouldn’t be easy for a group of al Qaeda operatives bent on a Mumbia-style operation get all the way to the United States. One cannot rule this sort of thing out, of course, but does that unlikely danger justify an open-ended commitment that is going to cost us more than $60 billion next year?

That's a double-edged sword, since the same terrain also makes it extremely difficult to retaliate against them when they do pull off a successful attack planned in the FATA.

Moreover, there are arguably "channels", some of them dating back to the fight against the Soviets, for funnelling foreign fighters into the area for training, and getting them back out. That helps facilitate this type of thing, in the way that family and other networks between certain locations in Mexico and certain ones in the United States facilitate immigration.

Fourth, in the unlikely event that a new Taliban government did give al Qaeda carte blanche to prepare attacks on the United States or its allies, the United States isn't going to sit around and allow them to go about their business undisturbed. The Clinton administration wasn't sure it was a good idea to go after al Qaeda's training camps back in the 1990s (though they eventually did, albeit somewhat half-heartedly), but that was before 9/11. We know more now and the U.S. government is hardly going to be bashful about attacking such camps in the future.

Where are we going to strike from? Cruise missiles can be launched from carriers (as we did last time), but Reaper drones (a major part of the current response against the border area) only have a combat radius of 1,878 miles, which may not be enough.

Just as importantly, where are we hitting? This is an area where getting on-the-ground intelligence is very difficult (the US supposedly only started getting good intel on the border area in the past two or so years), and it's very difficult to get that intel if you're only going to be in the area for a short-time, at best. What that effectively means is that we'll be relying on largely Pakistani intel, and dependent on good relations with them.

Fifth, as well-informed critics have already observed, the primary motivation for extremist organizations like the Taliban and Al Qaeda is their opposition to what they regard as unwarranted outside interference in their own societies. Increasing the U.S. military presence and engaging in various forms of social engineering is as likely to reinforce such motivations as it is to eliminate them. Obama is hoping that a different strategy will eventually undercut support for the Taliban and strengthen the central government, but it is still an open question whether more American involvement will have positive or negative effects. If we are in fact making things worse, then we may be encouraging precisely the outcome we are trying to avoid.

That might work in the Taliban's case (they largely only care about Afghanistan, and partially about Pakistan), but it won't work in the case of Al-Qaeda. These guys have a very broad idea of what they consider "interference" in the Islamic World.

Sixth, one might also take comfort from the Soviet experience. When the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, the mujaheddin didn't "follow them home." Were the United States to withdraw from Aghanistan and the Taliban to regain power (or end up sharing power, which is more likely), going after the United States won't even be on their "to do" list.

That's probably true in the case of the Taliban.

Peter Bergen, http://afpak.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/08/19/how_realistic_is_walt_s_realism
as do so many other commentators reveal Mr. Walt's poor analysis and complete failure to comprehend a region of the world he devotes no small amount of his time to. And while it's entirely reasonable to have an opinion about a war your country is fighting, Mr. Walt's opinion despite his academic credentials in reality displays no more substance than a mediocre high school student who has googled a few pages.

I suppose in the 'Realist' world there is little or no place for morality only legitimate pursuit of national objectives.

However I would point out that there is a moral obligation that the US owes Afghanistan that seems to be completely overlooked by all commentators no matter what side of the argument they advocate.

It was the US that systematically destabilised Afghanistan. It was the US that invited Saudia Arabia into the region for co-operation to challenge then Soviet hegemony over central Asia by deliberately introducing the most radical elements of Wahabi/Salafist Islam to challenge the Soviets.

It was the deliberate policy of the Carter administration to introduce and recruit Radical Islamic forces to destabilise Afghanistan drawing the Soviet Union into a quagmire. It was the Brzezinski policy adopted by Carter to further export fundamentalist (Salafist/Wahabi) Islam to Central Asia to further destabilise the Soviet Union. More than a Million Afghanis have died as a direct result of the war the US initiated.

Zbigniew Brzezinski was the architect of that policy which saw the world through strictly 2 dimensional cold war tunnel vision. Here was his answer in 1998 admitting to the deliberate destabilisation.

Le Nouvel Observateur, Paris, 15-21 January 1998 Q: And neither do you regret having supported the Islamic fundamentalism, having given arms and advice to future terrorists?

Brzezinski: What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?

Le Nouvel Observateur, Paris, 15-21 January 1998 Q: Some stirred-up Moslems? But it has been said and repeated Islamic fundamentalism represents a world menace today.

Brzezinski: Nonsense! It is said that the West had a global policy in regard to Islam. That is stupid. There isn't a global Islam. Look at Islam in a rational manner and without demagoguery or emotion. It is the leading religion of the world with 1.5 billion followers. But what is there in common among Saudi Arabian fundamentalism, moderate Morocco, Pakistan militarism, Egyptian pro-Western or Central Asian secularism? Nothing more than what unites the Christian countries. (Remember this is 1998 and not all has unfolded)

Full interview http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/BRZ110A.html

It was this same tunnel vision whereby the Carter presidency deliberately decided not to support the Shah and accept a revival of the old Islamic Republic because they would be anti communist, believing that is all that mattered.

Fast forward, the US is now deeply mired in 2 wars both of which can be directly traced back to policies of Carter and Brzezinski.

If the US had not pulled the rug on the Shah there would have been no Iran/Iraq war, No Gulf War 1 or 2, No Iranian support for Syria or Hizbollah, No Iranian support for the most extreme irredentist elements in the Arab world, such as Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Egyptian Islamic Jihad, interesting side bar you remember them, they got chased out of Egypt settling into Afghanistan renamed themselves Al Quaeda. And interestingly enough New York where they first started trying to blow up the World Trade Towers in 1993.

Further no 1982 attack on US forces in Lebanon. No sleazy US military assistance to Iraq and most importantly there would have been a strong US ally in Central Asia unlike the candidate Brzezinski and Carter chose to go with, General Zia and Pakistan.

If the US had not destabilised Afghanistan it would not have become a Taliban state hosting foreign extremists that developed into Al Quaeda.

Brzezinski and President Carter enlisted Saudi Arabia to build a string of Jihadi Madrasas in Pakistan catering to students from Central Asia to destabilise the Soviet influence. Neither Brzezinski or President Carter seem to reflect for a moment that Saudi Arabia is a much worst police state than the former Soviet empire with far greater contempt for liberal western values.

The list is longer but I think the uninformed can start to grasp the enormity of these failed short term policies.

Although Islamic extremism was already a well developed ideology and a growing threat, and we can't know how we would be dealing with that threat today, it is most certain the US would not be in Iraq now or 1991 or NATO bogged down in Afghanistan for the foreseeable future.

Again, more than a Million Afghanis have died as a direct result of the war the US initiated in Afghanistan. Surely the US owes something to the Afghan people and how that debt could be settled might be a better starting point in the debate.

If the idea is to stop China from getting gas should we go invade Australia because they just signed a historic $50AUD billion for Exxons share of the Gorgon Gas project. Makes perfect sense to invade an ally to stop China from getting gas. Heaven forbid more deals go through from Australia's massive north west shelf gas haven.

Your comment about Hamburg makes me wonder how much of the problem is a people problem as compared to a territorial problem. If we have an important people problem, then why do we continually have a mind-set that the military should be in control of the solution? After all, the warlords and poppy merchants are interlaced with the Taliban; so if we offer deals and leadership that pulls them more into the global mainstream, the Taliban will die a natural death.

This brings me to the conclusion that we do not know how to offer leadership or make deals, so we use the ultimate red herring, the military, to go act like we are dealing with the problem.

What’s more, if we remove the military aspects, we could have an interesting discussion about our interests in Central Asia.

Bob Spencer

Al Qaeda fights for the Caliphate.

They will keep fighting until they get it or are destroyed.

why war still dominate this world? what is the benefits for us? it makes many people suffer.

Ipanks