Posted by Bob's World,
This is the great irony, the two places we have sent our military to "defeat terrorism" in fact, have very little to do with the root cause of the political factors that gave rise to AQ and also that motivate many nationalist insurgents across the middle east (from places like Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Egypt, Algeria) to engage the West in acts of Terrorism.
I sympathize with your frustration my brother, but I question the practicality of addressing so called root causes, especially political factors that gave rise to AQ (and groups like them that arose and have fallen in the past). We all know the problem is painfully complex, so any post is simply one or two thoughts on the subject out of many. “Some” reasons I do not concur with your point above are:

It is imperial hubris for us to attempt to “push” our values upon another country. What you see as illegitimate governments may in fact be legitimate in the eyes of the majority of their population. Just because a few thousand radicals who want to impose Shari’a law upon their fellow men are dissatisfied doesn’t equate to a popular revolt. While not political correct (I know that concerns our lawyers) the “root” cause is not oppressive governments in the Middle East or Western oppression, but rather the interpretation of Islam itself my some (not a majority) of its followers. Jihad existed long before the West had colonies, and the root cause was their religion, which is political. They strived to establish a caliphate by the sword. If we think that the current governments are illegitimate just wait until a caliphate is established and all women are oppressed, education is dumbed down to religious studies, and these nations go backwards in time. It is tricky business for us to determine what is legitimate and what isn’t.

On 9/11 we were attacked by AQ, not by illegitimate governments in the Middle East. Their base was in Afghanistan, and the American people appropriately demanded a harsh response for the murder of close to 3,000 citizens. I’m not sure attempting to reform the government of Saudi would have been accepted by the American people as a practical or appropriate response, and as Dayuhan wrote below the reason for the attack was to draw us into battle to begin with. If we didn’t respond, they would have hit us again.

In my opinion we went in too light, and although our forces assumed great risk they didn’t assume enough risk and we allowed AQ senior leadership to escape into Pakistan. Our mission was to defeat AQ, then the mission morphed into developing a “legitimate” government, but it was only legitimate in the eyes of the coalition, not the Afghan people. The nature of the conflict has changed, it now has very little to do with AQ, and we have created our own mess by trying to rebuild the country, while AQ is establishing safe haven elsewhere. There is a certain beauty to punitive military operations, and that IMO is what we should have done in Afghanistan, go in hard and leave. If they come back we go back. You may find that amusing, but is it more amusing than what we’re doing now?

Attempting to reform the governments in the Middle East, unless you are suggesting we help AQ build the caliphate, will not undermine AQ’s motivation. Are we going to get rid of Israel? Are we going to withdraw from the Middle East completely after we install Islamist regimes?


Posted by Dayuhan,

I personally believe that the purpose of the 9/11 attacks was to draw the US into punching the tar baby and initiating military actions that could be dragged into wars of attrition. That was not a response to US actions or policies, but a carefully calculated proactive gambit aiming to simultaneously reinforce the narrative of Western aggression against Muslims (a narrative that was at the time becoming rather weak) and engage the US in a military action that would exploit our rather notorious unwillingness to maintain expensive and unpleasant long term actions. If I'm right, we gave AQ an abundance of what they wanted.
This was UBL's stated intention in open source documents long before 9/11. They defeated the Soviets in Afghanistan and believed they could do same with the U.S. through a form of economic and political attrition warfare. What a victory if they could defeat the world's two super powers. 9/11 wasn't the first attack, others were conducted in an attempt to drag us into Afghanistan, but I think you would agree that at least initially the fight went very bad for AQ. They didn't truly appreciate the power of our military and CIA or our national commitment (at the time) to crush them. IMO we didn't pursue it hard enough and lost our asymmetric advantage of brute military power against a consolidated enemy trying to fight us head on, BUT when we over stayed our welcome the nature of the fight changed to our disadvantage, the fight AQ wanted, although AQ only plays a small role in that fight now.

It's frustrating, but I'm confident we'll still triumph in the end. Agree with Bob's World that our current strategy is still off track, but we'll eventually get right (probably out of necessity).