Scott, that's a lot of points. I'll try answering a couple of them that I think are central.
1. we should have waited to find out who they were
we knew who they were and we knew where they were headquartered.
we had peacefully petitioned the Taliban government for some years before 9/11 to close the AQ training camps and stop providing a home for terrorists not native to Afghanistan. We asked them to expel them and to give us bin Laden.
you'll find a bunch of UN resolutions (1193, 1214, 1297 ) petitioning the Taliban.
"more peaceful means" didn't work.
2. small group of madmen incapable of doing anything more
how small is small?
their camps in Afghanistan were pretty large and had trained 10,000 or 20,000 or more people most of whom scattered and went to Central Asia or the islands in the Far Pacific or Africa to preach the word of bloody struggle. A couple of thousand came from Europe and returned.
just how incapable
AQ and bin Leaden were getting a lot of press and winning admirers.
The attacks on us didn't start with 9/11. They escalated to that rather large and spectacular thing and there was no reason to think that the attacks wouldn't continue or that they might not further escalate.
Afghanistan was a great base from which to build and AQ was supported by large sums of cash from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf and had a huge population of Pakistanis educated in hard-core fundamentalist schools financed by Saudi money.
The training camps in Afghanistan had the blessing and participation of Pakistan's military/intelligence who sent trainees that the Pakistanis would use to attack India in Kashmir.
I'm not sure how incapable they were or would have been.
and 5 years on,
things in Afghanistan and the neighborhood won't be good and they won't be as bad as they would have been. the Saudis were forced to reassess and withdraw their support for bin Laden and the Pakistanis have been pushed away from continued provocations against India and their blatant support for terrorism was rolled back.
my imagination tells me that Pakistan was headed toward becoming a far darker and more dangerous place than it now is, and what it is now is awfully bad.
The war in Afghanistan and the war in Iraq are simply different things and shouldn't be lumped together.
The first was a logical, justified and (all in all) successful response to 9/11.
The cost in Afghanistan wasn't excessive and the radical Islamist threat in Pakistan has been contained and blunted.
Scott, that's a lot of points. I'll try answering a couple of them that I think are central.
1. we should have waited to find out who they were
we knew who they were and we knew where they were headquartered.
we had peacefully petitioned the Taliban government for some years before 9/11 to close the AQ training camps and stop providing a home for terrorists not native to Afghanistan. We asked them to expel them and to give us bin Laden.
you'll find a bunch of UN resolutions (1193, 1214, 1297 ) petitioning the Taliban.
"more peaceful means" didn't work.
2. small group of madmen incapable of doing anything more
how small is small?
their camps in Afghanistan were pretty large and had trained 10,000 or 20,000 or more people most of whom scattered and went to Central Asia or the islands in the Far Pacific or Africa to preach the word of bloody struggle. A couple of thousand came from Europe and returned.
just how incapable
AQ and bin Leaden were getting a lot of press and winning admirers.
The attacks on us didn't start with 9/11. They escalated to that rather large and spectacular thing and there was no reason to think that the attacks wouldn't continue or that they might not further escalate.
Afghanistan was a great base from which to build and AQ was supported by large sums of cash from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf and had a huge population of Pakistanis educated in hard-core fundamentalist schools financed by Saudi money.
The training camps in Afghanistan had the blessing and participation of Pakistan's military/intelligence who sent trainees that the Pakistanis would use to attack India in Kashmir.
I'm not sure how incapable they were or would have been.
and 5 years on,
things in Afghanistan and the neighborhood won't be good and they won't be as bad as they would have been. the Saudis were forced to reassess and withdraw their support for bin Laden and the Pakistanis have been pushed away from continued provocations against India and their blatant support for terrorism was rolled back.
my imagination tells me that Pakistan was headed toward becoming a far darker and more dangerous place than it now is, and what it is now is awfully bad.
@ Scott Miller: My sense of denial may not have rooted fully, Scott, and I might be able to absorb a reasonable dose why I'm wrong and then some.
The war in Afghanistan and the war in Iraq are simply different things and shouldn't be lumped together.
The first was a logical, justified and (all in all) successful response to 9/11.
The cost in Afghanistan wasn't excessive and the radical Islamist threat in Pakistan has been contained and blunted.
Iraq is a whole different story.