In Which the Terrorists Win | The Agitator

We do have a pretty good idea how bin Laden pictured victory. It looks a lot like what we’re seeing now. He wanted a holy war. We gave him two. We’ve compromised our values, rolled back civil liberties, and let our politicians generally scare the crap out of us whenever they want new powers. Oh, and we’ve let the bastard live to gloat about it all.

This war should have been over the moment we disposed of the Taliban. The military doesn’t build liberal societies. They destroy illiberal ones (and they do it very well).

Radley Balko nails this one.  We won the war in Afghanistan in 2002.  Now, we’re in the business to trying to fight a war to eliminate future threats.  It just doesn’t work that way.  I wrote about this earlier when I critiqued Steve Biddle’s justification for war in Afghanistan:

The Flash Point Blog » Blog Archive » The Incoherence of COIN Advocates: Stephen Biddle Edition

Even worse, Biddle “stake” is meaningless: “…that Afghanistan never again become a haven for terrorism against the United States…”  Never?  Not in 10 years?  How about a 100?  Or a 1,000?  Has Biddle invented a magical “control the future” button?  It would have been great if he’d been around in 1919 to establish a settlement where Germany would never again threaten world peace.  And what does “haven for terrorism” mean?  Does that mean that no plot is ever discussed there?  That no training camps exist?  That no one who has ever lived in Afghanistan be involved?  I can’t even begin to fathom how to operationalize that goal.  It is the kind of phrase one expects from a candidate on the stump, not from the foremost defense analyst of our generation.  Indeed, as an argument, it is perilously close to gibberish.

You mitigate or eliminate threats to the best of your ability.  It is a damn-fool idealistic crusade to try to prevent threats from ever emerging in the future.