Mr. Moderate

With the passage of the Iraq War funding bill yesterday, giving President Bush another blank check through at least the end of September, there has been much time wasted on talk radio and in print media with analysis of minute shifts of opinion among the political elites. All of this misses the main point: we are fighting the wrong war.

The right wing focuses on the terrorist acts in Iraq and claims “we have to fight them there or else we will end up fighting them here,” in the United States. This ignores the one undisputed fact of the 9/11 terrorist attack: it was an operation run by Osama bin Laden, and Osama bin Laden continues to hide out in safe houses, most likely in a region of Pakistan where neither the US nor Pakistani armies dare to go after him. My rejoinder to the right wing is this: we need to find and fight Osama where he is hiding or else he will continue to lead and inspire terrorists to come after Americans.

President Bush has tied down the bulk of our available fighting forces with intervention in a US-caused civil war in Iraq. Almost left to their own devices is a much-smaller NATO-led force of about 15% the size of the Iraq commitment, and the existing agreements with Afghanistan and Pakistan make it impossible for that force to go after Osama bin Laden. This is very-very wrong, and it needs to change. We need to fight the right war for a change.

The worst Islamic extremists around (outside of Iran, which is a separate problem) are in Pakistan. And they are not in small numbers, either. An outfit called “the Red Mosque” is so powerful that the Pakistani government does not dare to go after the criminals who run it and who terrorize various “liberal” Pakistanis. And “the Red Mosque” is just one terrorist madrasah among many. If you look at the various terrorists that have been arrested in either the USA or the UK, almost invariably they have ties back to Pakistan; and not to Iraq, Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia, or any other place.

What President Bush needs to do is to wind down US involvement inside Iraq as rapidly as he can, and redeploy the US troops which are freed up over to Afghanistan. When a sufficiently-large force is present in Afghanistan, we need to invade the safe haven where Osama bin Laden is hiding. We should have done it five years ago, and it would have prevented a lot of terrorist activity. We can’t do it too soon at this point.

The difficulty is that you have a nuclear-armed Pakistan which is being destabilized by Islamic radicals. If the USA goes after Osama, that will draw the radicals out to where the US forces can better fight them: in the rugged turf of Waziristan. It might cause some discomfort for the current government in Pakistan, but on the other hand, it might also allow that government to distance itself from the United States and win back respect among the non-radical Pakistani citizens.

So far, the US has refused to annoy the Pakistani people by having its forces cross the Pakistani border. The excuse for that refusal has been that such an action would “destabilize” the current government of Pakistan. Well, take a look now: that government is far less stable now than it was even two years ago. Frankly, there isn’t much left to destabilize, so we would be better off taking our chances and going after the terrorists in Pakistan than we would be continuing to leave them with safe havens across the Pakistani border.