Vodkapundit » Muddling Through

Steve explains what he means by the term. I still don’t really think that he defines the meaning of “victory,” so much as he explains a strategy for remaining in Afghanistan and gathering intel and killing bad guys.

He describes Afghanistan as being “not so much a country as it is a spot on the map where other countries aren’t,” and I think that is a reasonable take. But then, what is victory in such a place? He points out that, in theory, we could more or less pave the entire place and turn it into a shopping mall, but that such an outcome would not solve the principal question of our time, which is “the Middle East’s failure to adapt to modernity.”

Here he begins to veer off the reality, because the real problem is Islam’s failure to adapt to modernity. And that is not only a Middle Eastern problem, it is a global problem. Saying that they “export their problems as terrorism” overlooks the possibility that a lot of Islam’s problems aren’t exported or imported, but are ingrained.

However, the two primary ME contenders, Saudi Arabia and Iran, do export quite a bit of the means for terrorism - men, money, training, weaponry, and so on. And this touches on the other area I think Steve glosses over a bit - “our attempt to upset the Middle Eastern apple cart, and try to forge a modern, stable state right smack dab in the middle of the Persian Gulf. The jury on that is still out, but it was at least an attempt to deal with the disease instead of just the symptoms.”

The only disease we should care about is the dangers to ourselves from Islamic terrorism. And we will never get a handle on Islamic terrorism until we understand that it is a phenomenon of state regimes, not of grassroots activism.

Does al Qaeda make their own bullets or the machine guns they use to fire them? Grow food from the air, build training bases out of twigs and sticks?

Terrorism is cash intensive, and the money and the things money buys come from state regimes via various occult and torturous channels. The Taliban regime in Afghanistan was dangerous to us not because it attacked us, but because it sheltered and supported al Qaeda, which did attack us. If the Taliban had not done so, al Qaeda would not have been in that country as a significant presence, and the Taliban would still be in power in Afghanistan. And we wouldn’t give a damn that they are, in that case.

Where Steve hits the largest disconnect is in the notion that an “un-modern” Middle East is the cause of terrorist attacks against us. That is patently not the case, because the Middle East has resisted modernity for a thousand years, but significant anti-Western Islamic terrorism is basically a phenomenon of the past forty years.

Saudi Arabia supports, arms, recruits for, trains, equips, pays for, and directs al Qaeda and all the other significant Muslim Sunni terrorist gangs. Iran supports, arms, recruits for, trains, equips, pays for, and directs the Shia terrorist gangs (and others, when it suits their purposes). The central question of the Middle East is which of those two powers will achieve hegemony, and to a significant extent that is as much a religious question (or at least a question strongly fueled by religion) as it is a geopolitical issue.

The bottom line of all this rambling is that I don’t believe “muddling through” describes anything recognizable as “victory.” Sure, Afghanistan makes a nice flytrap for killing Islamist cannon fodder of one sort or another, but as Steve points out, “But what would change, really? Al Qaeda would still have money, they’d still find weapons, they’d find a new place to hide, and they’d still have this virulent ideology — and thus plenty of recruits.” And this will be true whether we stay or go in Afghanistan.

The reason I am so jaundiced about all of this is that it seems to me all our actions over the past fifteen years or so, when Islamist terror began to be directed at us, specifically, has been a concerted effort to avoid dealing with the central fact of such terror - that it is a phenomenon of regimes, and so in order to deal with the terror, we must deal with the regimes that enable it.

Here’s a simple example: Israel faced a concerted, well-financed attack from suicide bombers trained and directed by Saddam Hussein. Does it face such an attack from him today? No, because we destroyed his regime and killed him and his monstrous sons. It has little to do with what else we have done there, but we killed him, and destroyed the regime that had been enabling the terror.

That is a strategy that works. That is a good definition of victory. If we applied it to Iran and Saudi Arabia, by whatever means worked, we would bring to an end almost all of the Islamist terror actions aimed directly at us. Because it is regimes aiming the weapon. Once you understand that, the solution becomes obvious.

Afghanistan is little more than a power vacuum in which Saudi Arabia and Iran vie for influence in the Islamic middle east by trying to kick us out. If they were no longer doing so, I doubt we would care about much of anything that goes on in that benighted part of the world.

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