Taliban Dreams (5): Obama's Revolving Door Strategy

I watched Obama's West Point speech the other night on NBC, and the thing that stands out in my mind was the look on John McCain's face afterwards when Brian Williams asked him for a response. You could see he was not all that comfortable about how to answer without trapping himself into defending something he would later regret. McCain liked the ramping up of troops (all too predictably), but not the suggestion of a date when we would leave. "It gives the wrong signal to the enemy." We already know the drill--this is neo-con speak for endless war.

Everybody has been waiting for three months now to hear what Obama would come up with in the face of impossible, no-win choices. The more I think about his declared strategy, the more it comes across as being a revolving door--at least, that's the image that sticks relentlessly in my mind: we're going in faster with more troops, but we're also getting out sooner. At one point Obama even looked straight into the camera and spoke to the Afghan people. "We do not want to occupy your country," he said, and seemed to mean it.

In the McCain view, once you're inside the revolving door of war, you keep going round and round until you "win." The way I see it, for Obama, a revolving door represents a metaphor with more options. If you get out at just the right moment, for instance, you will end up somewhere (i.e. inside the building). But if you stay in too long, you end up back where you started, having missed the exit and having gotten nowhere.

On the one hand, Obama seems like he has thrown Republicans their requisite bone--a "surge" in troops. But on the other, he has significantly dropped from the equation any talk of "staying the course" indefinitely, a la Bush-Cheney, in order to "prevail." Indeed, the words "victory" and "winning" were never used. I have to believe Obama feels, along with General McChrystal, that we somehow still have a decent shot at this "degrading of al Qaeda and the Taliban" and must try to use it--before we can justifiably admit, if we should fail, that the thing was finally not doable. "It's an expensive gamble," says the Democratic senator from Wisconsin, Russ Feingold.

He's right, of course, but the bottom line remains: we cannot allow the Taliban to have a state structure to spread Jihadism throughout the region. This is 'no idle danger," as Obama said, "no hypothetical threat." These are not just a bunch of guys with Kalashnikofs sitting around in caves. "We are in Afghanistan to prevent a cancer from once again spreading throughout that country."

I only wish Obama would have gone further in mapping out this threat, especially for those who would opt for an immediate withdrawal. He needs to educate us better and state the bottom line beyond the bottom line--namely, the real prospect of World War III being ignited in the Middle East by Jihadists in their quest to re-establish a 7th-century Caliphate across the entire Muslim world. After that, the plan is to do the same in Europe. We in America are still the "far enemy," so it may take a while before they get us infidels more fully in their sights. But if Jihadists succeed in regaining control of Afghanistan and then moving on to destablize and overthrow the nuclear-armed government of Pakistan, I fear we will all be staring, not just at the prospect of another 9/11 attack--a mere two cents on the dollar--but at Armageddon.

No-Win Situations

When I was in my late teens, I had a poet friend whose name was Arthur Gregor, who happened to be a well-connected dude in the art and literary circles of New York. He threw a big party once and invited me to come. I was very excited--until my mother rolled right over it and told me I couldn't go. The reason being that it was totally inappropriate for a young woman to go unaccompanied to a man's apartment. It didn't matter that there would be dozens of other people there. "What if he tries something?" my mother wanted to know.

The truth is that Arthur Gregor would never have "tried something" with me, because he was gay. But I didn't dare tell that to my mother, as it would only have made things much, much worse. My mother was the first person who taught me about no-win situations. And I was definitely afraid of her.

This week I've been thinking a lot about people who make you feel afraid, and people who don't--Sarah Palin falling into the first category, and Barack Obama into the second. Then I happened on a couple of random sentences while reading something: "He's ridiculous, and yet you have to take him very seriously." (Change the "he" in this case to "she.") And, "To be a leader, you have to make them fear you and love you at the same time." That really got me thinking. One thing I can tell you for sure about Sarah Palin is that, like my mother did, she scares me. She's got chutzpah, is punitive, and is on the attack. But she's also got a lot of fans who love her, and her neurotic lust for destruction is gaining the upper hand. In the Huffington Post, Ian Gurwitz confessed that Sarah Palin scares him, too. "She's the anti-Susan Boyle," he wrote. "She's physically appealing. But she can't fucking sing."

Here is a recent statement Palin made to Bill O'Reilly on her qualifications for the presidency (hat tip to The Daily Dish): "I believe that I am [qualified to be president] because I have common sense, and I have, I believe, the values that are reflective of so many other American values. And I believe that what Americans are seeking is not the elitism, the kind of a spinelessness that perhaps is made up for that with some kind of elite Ivy League education and a fact resume that's based on anything but hard work and private sector, free enterprise principles." The last line gets four stars. Three cheers for no education!

Well, to borrow this train of thought, Obama definitely knows how to "sing," and he is also physically appealing, but I am beginning to wonder about his ability to strike fear--and whether or not this matters in public life when you have to make deals and squeeze advantage out of tough negotiations. The verdict on his China trip is that he was too deferential. So far neither the Israelis nor the Mullahs in Iran have paid him much heed. And Republicans act like they are standing on his balls, waving the American flag. This week Obama's approval ratings slipped to just under 50%. It's not the end of the world by any stretch, but I can't help wondering if ultimately, this has anything to do with an absence of the fear factor fulfilling the laws of its being within the presidency.

Mercifully. we don't have suicide bombers over here; however, instead of loaded vests, we use lies as explosives to blow everything up, and believe me, it's working. (Has anyone seen the latest Republican ads against health-care reform?) Fact-checking organizations are working overtime to refute them, and believe me, it's not working. So far, I've never seen our President pound his fist on the table or the podium, demanding to know "Who said that?" or "Who did that?"--and glare at everyone. And I am beginning to wonder if being grown up and socially responsible and self-contained is going to be enough to keep the world from ending in communal failure. I desperately hope the President won't miss his cue, and that one day soon we'll hear the loud crack, as his fist finally meets the table.

Taliban Dreams (4): Political Suicide

I've suggested in previous posts that with regard to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Obama is having to make his moves on an already check-mated board. None of his choices--whether to escalate and "surge," or to de-escalate and withdraw, or to stick with the bare minimum and just contain--have any significant chance of success. In such circumstances, it is unbearable to be the person in charge of sending exhausted soldiers ever more deeply into the jaws of death--and you can see the president wrestling with kaleidoscopic feelings as he paces his cage like a trapped animal, trying to make sense of his rotten choices. Andrew Sullivan put it even more succinctly:

"The awful truth is what 9/11 revealed, and what it was designed to reveal, is that there is nothing we can really do definitively to stop another one." I didn't think it would be possible to sound a bleaker note than my own, but Sullivan manages it. "If you calculate the costs of that evil attack against the financial, moral, and human costs of the fight back," he writes, "9/11 was a fantastic demonstration of the power of asymmetry to destroy the West....Everything that has subsequently transpired has merely deepened that lesson. The U.S. is now bankrupt, trapped in Iraq and Afghanistan for the rest of our lives, unable to prevent the two most potentially dangerous Islamist states, Pakistan and Iran, from getting nukes, morally compromised and hanging on to global support only because of a new president who is even now being assaulted viciously at home for such grievous crimes as trying to give more people access to health insurance." So much for spitball politics and the art of the impossible.

I predict that when the bipartisan attacks explode over Obama's Afghanistan policy, once it has been officially announced, the health care debates will quickly seem like dry catarrh in comparison with a lethal case of swine flu. In other words, when it comes down to "vicious assaults," we ain't seen nothin' yet. "I am told by people I respect that Barack Obama cannot pull out of both Iraq and Afghanistan without becoming a one-term president," Garry Wills writes in the current issue of The New York Review of Books. "The charges from various quarters would be toxic--that he was weak, unpatriotic, sacrificing the sacrifices that have been made, betraying our dead, throwing away all former investments in lives and treasure. All that would indeed be brought against him, and he would have little defense in the quarters where such charges would originate."

What Wills is saying, in so many words, is that for Obama to quit Afghanistan at this stage would be to commit political suicide. Quite simply, it would make him into a one-term president.

"But what justification is there" he asks, "for buying a second presidential term with the lives of hundreds or thousands of young American men and women in the military?...I would rather see him a one-term president than have him pass on another unwinnable war to the person who will follow him in office."

If Obama is already in an implacable "no-win" situation regarding his choices in Afghanistan, the choices facing him right here at home are no less lethal. Wills is suggesting that some leader has to finally break the spell and give the military a break and a chance to recover, and that Obama is the best person to do that. It is unlikely, he thinks, that there will be another president in the foreseeable future with the moral and rhetorical force to talk us out of a foolish commitment that cannot be sustained without shame and defeat. "If it costs him his presidency, what other achievement can match it?" he writes.

Not being one more president willing to kick the can down the road would indeed be a major achievement, I agree. But if the cost of getting ourselves out of these unwinnable wars entails the predictable demise of our president, that is a staggering price to pay--one that, with a challenged Obama out of the picture, could be the final, ruinous checkmate for our country. Even in a world of long shadows, this would be a bitter trade-off. The very prospect makes me twitchy.

Of course there are just as many millions of Americans who have already determined that if Obama DOES decide to pour more troops and resources into Afghanistan--the biggest black hole ever--they will also withdraw their support of him forever. Either way, Obama is now a moving target: America's new scapegoat. Whatever he decides, he stands to lose major support, big time, either way. It's not a pretty picture. The saddest part is, if Obama loses, which seems to be how the internal politics of all this is aligning, every one of us will become a loser as well, right along with him. We have no viable replacement.

Taliban Dreams (3): The Jihadist in Our Midst

There was an amusing cartoon in The New Yorker several weeks ago of a male customer in a shoe store, examining the athletic shoes arrayed in rows along a wall. The shoe groups were sectioned off with labels above them, such as "Running" and "Hiking." The man was studying the final group, which was labeled "Blogging."

If there really were such a thing as blogging shoes, I'd head out and buy myself a pair, because being a blogger definitely makes you feel like you are always racing, away from the last blog and towards the next one, with no end in sight and no one handing out bottles of Gatorade along the way. Unless you decide to give it up and stop blogging altogether, or you happen to die, you will always have to keep slogging on, relentlessly, even when you have no idea what you are going to write about next, which is always the case with me. I'm forever hanging off the side of cliff when it comes to subject matter. Blogging, I can now say from acute personal experience, is a perfect fit for what Ken Wilber (the integral theory guy) calls "Mind Module Practice."

Mind Module practices include any activity (reading, studying, writing, etc.) that expands your ability to take more adequate perspectives. I read an interview in EnlightenmentNext magazine with Terry Patten, a co-author with Wilber of a new book called "Integral Life Practice: A 21st-Century Blueprint for Physical Health, Emotional Balance, Mental Clarity, and Spiritual Awakening," in which Patten says: "You have to be able to take very complex, nuanced perspectives. Sometimes you have to be able to relax and let go of those perspectives. You need the flexibility to meet a moment without any preconceptions, and to be able to generate a framework for understanding and seeing it in a way that's appropriate to the context. Our ability to be that flexible is the fruit of the practice of the Mind Module. Someone who's not actively practicing that process of taking and releasing perspectives misses something core in their whole life."

As mission statement for a blogger like me, this works. I've definitely tried, in the (most recent) case of Afghanistan for instance, to "take and release perspectives," when exploring a very complex situation. I didn't really have another "Taliban Dreams" "Mind-Module" in mind for this week, however, until that lone gunman tragically opened fire inside a medical building at Texas Army Base, Fort Hood, killing thirteen people and wounding thirty. Now everyone is busy searching for a motive.

What would have caused Major Nidal Malik Hasan, a devout Muslim and long-time counselor of soldiers suffering PTSD, to commit such an atrocity, randomly killing men and women preparing to deploy to Afghanistan? NB: it's the same question every American asked after 9/11: "Why do they hate us?" We didn't know the answer back then, and apparently we still haven't figured it out, even now.

Hasan, it seems, had been ordered to deploy in the Middle East, and was allegedly very stressed about it, having developed some sympathy along the way for suicide-bombers. It isn't rocket science to understand that being a devout Muslim and living comfortably in the U.S. while working for the military is one thing. But being mandated by your employer to go out and kill other Muslims--well, that is something that could become nervous-breakdown material. If you are a really devout Muslim, there is no way to cultivate a readiness for that. In fact, Hasan had asked to be discharged.

"Joe Public had no idea of the existence of an angry Mohammed Atta and a determined but patient Ziad Jarrah, both of them products of Jihadism," writes Walid Phares in "The War of Ideas." "In fact, average citizens in the West, including the United States, knew nothing about Jihadism at all." Eight years later, Americans still remain largely ignorant about the motives, intentions, and full reach of Jihadism to spread the word of Allah--not just within the Muslim world, but beyond. The massacre at Fort Hood last week, in terms of people's response, was not perceptibly different from the one immediately after 9/11. Once again, the hunt is on for "a possible motive."

I can remember being absolutely baffled, myself, the day it was reported that Taliban had blown up several huge, ancient, Buddhist statues in Afghanistan. Statues aren't dangerous, I thought; they can't fight. Why would anybody want to attack them? Anyway they're Buddhist, not Christian. I really could not fathom the destructiveness.

What we in the West have so far failed to understand is the total, relentless, and irreversible attitude of Islamic fundamentalism. It is not another ideological vision that can be accommodated under the democratic umbrella of freedom and pluralism. Jihadism, pure and simple, opposes all other viewpoints, worldwide. It wants to dominate the entire planet, destroy the "democratic state" and its political institutions, replacing the Western system of international laws with dar el Islam (house of Islam). Symbols of other religions must be destroyed. Jihadists are willing to kill and die for the idea of reinstating the caliphate as the hub of civilization everywhere.

The way I see it, last week's atrocity brings into sharp focus the pressing need to educate the American public about the true nature of Jihadism. We still cannot fathom, as a people, how a fanatical religious ideology could be more compelling to someone than a life lived in freedom and prosperity. Given this limitation, we have been unable to take the full measure of our enemy. To get to that place will require a massive effort of education and attention. Otherwise all our responses will continue to be shaped, and ultimately doomed, by the same implacable incomprehension of what we are really up against.

Taliban Dreams (2): Unfathomable Choices

I've watched Barack Obama edge and angle himself out of many tight corners with canny moves, but when it comes to Afghanistan and Pakistan, there are no canny moves. It's the equivalent of playing chess on a board that has already been checkmated, even before you start. Plus, in this case, the board sits on top of an intricate cat's cradle of crossbones and chicken wire--which is to say, a convolution of ideas so self-contradictory and incompatible--where, like tea going into a cup, escape is impossible. Let me try to explain.

By checkmating, I mean: whether we stay in Afghanistan or leave, either way we will end up destablizing the Middle East. All our presence there has really produced so far is a growing, seemingly unstoppable, insurgency; Osama bin Laden has used our occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan to convince potential jihadists that Islam is under attack by the West. On the other hand, even if we now draw down our troops, we also stand to grow the insurgency, as they will quickly close in to fill the gap and declare victory. So we are on a Saint Catherine's wheel, struggling to prevent what our presence there has already made inevitable--and landing, with froglike accuracy, on the same, unrelenting conundrum over and over again. It seems there is simply no right way to invade and transform a Muslim country without becoming a magnet for jihadists and furthering the cause of Islamist extremism.

I was struck by Tom Friedman's conclusions this week in his column in the New York Times. He casts a no-nonsense vote on the question of ramping up or drawing down in Afghanistan, as follows: "We need to be thinking about how to reduce our footprint and our goals there in a responsible way, not dig in deeper."

Friedman then argues that we simply do not have the Afghan partners, the NATO allies, the domestic support, the financial resources or the national interests to justify an enlarged and prolonged nation-building effort in Afghanistan. And he does not see any sign of a moderate Muslim majority ready to take ownership of its own future. So he bemoans having to watch our secretary of state plead with President Karzai to re-do an election that he blatantly stole, or beg intractable Israelis to stop building settlements in Gaza. "It is time to stop subsidizing their nonsense," he writes, like someone who has finally arrived at enlightenment. "Let them all start paying retail for their extremism, not wholesale. Then you'll see involvement...." Friedman claims we no longer have the resources we had when we started the war on terrorism after 9/11 and, even more to the point, we desperately need nation-building at home. "Yes, shrinking down in Afghanistan will create new threats," he says, "but expanding there will, too. I'd rather deal with the new threats with a stronger America." I felt substantially invigorated after reading his piece.

The next day, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof took a similar tack, stating that we have already increased our troop presence in Afghanistan, and the result has not been more stability but more casualties and a stronger insurgency. If the last surge of troops hasn't helped, why will the next one be any diffierent? In Kristof's opinion, building schools would be a better investment, and serve as a counter-force to the influence of all those Islamist madrassas.

Even while many are proposing it is finally time to reduce our footprint in the Middle East, others are arguing the precise opposite, with equal cogency and fervor. Christiane Amanpour, for instance, a highly respected and experienced international CNN correspondent who has been reporting from Afghanistan since 1996, deduces from her many conversations with Afghans on the ground that what they most want, after 30 years of war, is security and the chance to earn a decent living. They also crave release from the threat of more terrorist attacks. The majority want nothing to do with the Taliban, but they fear America will not have the will to stay around long enough to finish the job. Our history in the region has so far not been one of promises kept.

David Brooks also speaks to that same issue in his column this week, "The Tenacity Question." Brooks claims to have called around to a number of smart military experts he knows personally, to get their views on the choices facing the president. What concerns them most of all, it seems, is Obama's level of determination. They are unable to scope out his commitment to this effort, his willingness to persevere through good times and bad. "They do not know," Brooks writes, "if he possesses tenacity, the ability to fixate on a simple conviction and grip it, viscerally and unflinchingly, through complexity and confusion." Obama, they worry, might just prefer addressing the many pressing issues on the home front. Mostly their complaint centers on not being able to get a fundamental read on where the president really stands. (It's the same criticism that has been leveled at Obama's approach to health care reform.) In the matter of Afghanistan, Dick Cheney calls it "dithering"--and a threat to our national security. Brooks and Cheney both consider that Obama may just be deficient when it comes to having core convictions and raw determination.

I think about this a lot, myself. And I am reminded of those Cheyenne warriors I once read about, whose tracks were just so hard to read. They pointed in all directions so you were never quite sure which way to proceed. They preferred to create bafflement in their doings, so they could stay clear of any demands others might make of them. Obama, with his highly strategic basketball skills, is like a twenty-first-century version of that, keeping his intentions partly hidden while he prepares for an action, and keeping opponents at bay, so they can never be quite sure of his next move. It's the basic skill of the martial artist.

"The president is not a strong man." a blogger commented in the Times, responding to David Brooks' article, "I have determined, after supporting the President, that he doesn't really know what he thinks, or what he believes. He is just here, blowing in the wind, this way or that way, whatever happens to be the popular breeze. We can't know where he stands, if he doesn't know, himself." In this view, Obama is quintessentially faint-hearted, unwilling to really stick his neck out.

It's all in the eye of the beholder, as they say, isn't it?

And then there was Sting, wildly singing the president's praises this week, going so far as to claim that he might just be a divine answer to the world's problems. "In many ways, he's sent from God," he joked, "because the world's a mess." But Sting is altogether serious in his belief that Obama is the best leader to navigate the world's problems. "I found him to be genuine, very present, clearly super-smart, and exactly what we need in the world," he was quoted as saying in my local paper this week.

So where, exactly, am I in all of this? Still haunted by the memory of what Osama bin Laden's deputy. Ayman al-Zawahiri, said way back in 2003, about us being in Iraq: "If they withdraw, they will lose everything, and if they stay, they will continue to bleed to death." Given the two choices, which I believe are the ones actually at stake here, I am quite happy not being the person who is charged with making the deadly choice.

Stockpiling Lies and Judas Kisses

Last week, in our monthly salon group, a conversation spontaneously kicked off about the "balloon boy"--the wild story of Richard Heene and his son, Falcon, that had been gripping the media for several days. At that point, it was known that Falcon was not in the balloon, but it had not yet been established that the whole thing was a hoax designed to get the family a gig in a reality TV show. Everyone in my living room that night agreed, however, it was likely that the Heene family had probably made the entire nation their dupe.

Which led us then to an interesting discussion about hoaxes and about what it means to be duped. One saloneer, Bill, told us about how his brother has been making mysterious trips to England for the past year or so. After some Google sleuthing behind the scenes, Bill had discovered his brother was an active member of a psychic organization there that holds seances. He described being nonplussed when his brother asked him if he would like to have a conversation with a former U.S. president. The president in question turned out to be not someone living, but Thomas Jefferson. Bill described how his brother wept when talking about these conversations, and how they have changed his life. So, what do you say to a brother who has become obsessed with having conversations with dead people? Bill wanted to know.

The salon then zoomed on to Bernie Madoff--how did he manage to fool so many people? Did his family know what he was up to? And I brought up my old experience with psychic surgery, which I had witnessed years ago in the Philippines. Did that doctor's hand really penetrate deep inside the woman's stomach and pull out some diseased matter? I was watching him "operate" in his clinic, only about five feet away from the table, and I even took a couple of photographs. It certainly looked legitimate enough and real. But was it a fraud? What is "real" anyway? I have always tended to think that "real" is somehow equivalent to the truth of things. But these days, the truth of things is so hopelessly scrambled, it has become like a collection of useless, mismatched shoes.

Yesterday I woke up to warnings on NPR about counterfeit cures for swine flu being sold all over the Internet. Today it was news of students in Afghanistan protesting the desecration of a Koran by U.S. troops; the accusation was totally denied by the U.S. military, which claims that the event never happened but is a rumor being perpetrated by the Taliban to stir up hatred against the U.S. All summer long we had to endure attempts to derail health care reform by fabricated stories of "death panels," and protests by Medicare recipients demanding that government stay out of health care. These events were followed by two major fraudulent elections, in Iran and Afghanistan. This morning it was a report of toxic dry wall imported from China that is destroying the infrastructure of many houses and undermining owners' health. Everyday we hear about more banks failing, while those that were bailed out are suddenly making outrageous profits again.

I could of course go on and on with examples of the sinister way the world is moving from near nervous breakdown, to nervous breakdown. Whenever I think about what this breakdown might actually look like, it strikes me that maybe it won't be malign buccaneers arriving at the front door in the middle of the night, or global pandemic, or wandering the roads and eating grass. Maybe it will look more like the extinction of truth under a fire-hosing of fraud and deceit: a stockpiling not of nuclear weapons but of treachery, bad faith, lying, double-dealing, hoaxes, and unrelenting dishonesty.

A friend of mine wryly pointed out the other morning over brunch at my favorite restaurant that all my sentences seem to end in apocalypse. Yeah, I agreed, but pessimists tend to be right, although optimists probably live longer. Truth is, I really don't want to live in a world without truth: a world in which every single thing becomes an object of suspici0n. Admittedly, I have trust issues. But what's a girl to do? It just isn't a whole bag of fun watching the human race exterminate itself with a steady stream of Judas kisses.

Taliban Dreams

Interesting dreams have never been my forte. Usually I'm lost in a foreign land, can't remember the name of my hotel, and so I can't find my way back to where I came from. Sometimes my wallet's gone as well, and I have no money and no ID. Or, I return to where my car is parked, only to find that it's not there. I don't seem ever to have those luminous, revelatory dreams in which you meet up with an archetypal angel, or a Himalayan master who offers helpful advice.

Last night I dreamt I had a brush with the Taliban. I was with a good friend in an apartment building much like the one I grew up in in New York years ago. We knew Taliban were in the neighborhood because we had seen them. Despite the middle-sized green armchair (similar to the ones in my present-day living room) we put up against the door to block their entry, they showed up and managed to capture my friend while I was somehow outside in the hall bathroom. My friend yelled at me to run, and somehow I succeeded in getting on the elevator. "The Taliban are here," I said breathlessly to the elevator man. "Yes, I know,' he answered quietly. I hurried into the street to find help, even while I understood that this was impossible because it was already too late. Then I woke up, shaking.

While the Bush administration was busy conflating the Iraq War with the "war on terror," al Qaeda and the Taliban were busy regrouping and revving up in an ungoverned region on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, biding time while they watched America bleed its military and its economy over a misbegotten war in Iraq. Recovering at the time, myself, from a serious bout of illness, I spent a lot of time reading books about global Jihad, trying to understand what radical Islam was really about. That was when I learned they actually want more than to get rid of us--to get the West out of Muslim lands. Just as the U.S. wants to establish free-market democracies around the globe, Islamists have a similar ambition for 7th-century Sharia law to gain ascendency worldwide. They despise democracy. As I came to understand the real danger brewing in Waziristan, I would mention it to friends. Invariably I got the same response: "What's Waziristan?" And so I would joke back, "Have you gotten yourself a burka yet?"

Now President Obama has openly designated the border region as "the most dangerous place in the world," and by doing so, risks beating the hornet's nest with a baseball bat. Everyone has become aware of what Waziristan is, but, as a friend pointed out, we have only a not-very-large green armchair at this point with which to defend ourselves. It isn't working. Suicide bombers are currently fanning out all over Pakistan and only 37% of Americans, according to the most recent poll, are in favor of continuing this war.

After the U.S. had driven the Taliban out of Afghanistan, Bush's strategy for the threat emanating from Waziristan was to ignore it, and to rely on his "ally," then President Pervez Musharraf, also commander of the Pakistani army, to keep a lid on the "Islamofascism" breeding in the area. Unfortunately, it was a Faustian bargain, given that Musharaff's success depended on his hands-off policy: namely, we won't bother you if you don't bother us. It was always clear to Musharaff (and to me) that if ever he tried to go after the crowd in Waziristan, death-dealing insurgents would come after him and chop off his head. They would also begin suicide-bombing Pakistan. So, under his live-and-let-live approach, the danger continued to lurk and silently grow, like a toxic tumor in the body of the world. Bush considered the problem solved, and continued his war with the wrong enemy in the wrong place.

Now it seems we are stuck with yet another war--one that requires building a state, defeating the Taliban, defeating al Qaeda, and bringing economic activity to a country where there is none, except for international aid and the production of illegal narcotics. As Rory Stewart--the Scottish-born professor of human rights at Harvard who has lived and worked in Afghanistan--explains in his essay entitled "The Irresistible Illusion," this policy rests on "misleading ideas about moral obligation, our capacity, the strength of our adversaries, the threat posed by Afghanistan, the relations between our different objectives, and the value of a state." Is a centralized state, he wonders, even an appropriate model for a mountainous country with strong ethnic traditions of local self-government and autonomy? Besides, Osama bin Laden (as far as anyone knows) is hiding in Pakistan, a country that does have a strong central state government--one which has already made clear that it won't have its sovereignty violated by us, probably the main reason Osama prefers staying there.

Our attempt to modernize feudal, fundamentalist societies through building democratic nation-states has proved to be a thankless, witless task, especially in the face of adversaries who want, themselves, to remake the world through spectacular acts of terror. Just as technology can't stop climate change, it is proving impossible to stop a world network of terrorists with outposts in regions that no state controls. However, it is equally hard to accept that there are problems at the heart of American security that might have no solution. All of which brings me to precisely the point that I am hardly the first to make: in this new kind of unconventional war that is now being fought, THERE IS NO PROSPECT OF VICTORY. We are not winning now, and we are not going to win in any imagined scenario in the future.

Americans are particularly unwilling to believe that problems are insoluble or that a mission is impossible. Continuing the fight in Afghanistan is as much about the need to avoid being labeled a loser as it is about winning. No politician, as Stewart underscores in his article, wants to be perceived as having underestimated, or failed to address, a terrorist threat; or to write off the blood and treasure that we have already spent. Certainly they do not want to be the one to admit defeat. "The language of modern policy does not help us to declare the limits to our power and capacity; to concede that we can do less than we pretend or that our enemies can do less than we pretend; to confess how little we know about a country like Afghanistan or how little we can predict about its future; or to acknowledge that we might be unwelcome or that our presence might be perceived as illegitimate or that it might make things worse."

Recently I saw a section of the PBS documentary "Obama's War" as shown on Frontline. Stranded in the outer reaches of Afghanistan, our stalwart soldiers there function as "bait." Every day they get up and go out in search of an enemy they almost never get to see. They wander the streets and talk to ragtag bands of Afghans, who look at the them with mildly mocking smiles of curiosity, while the soldiers try to win them over and convince them that we are there to "help." Meanwhile, however, the Taliban have made it clear that anyone seen with the Americans should expect certain death, so I don't see any "Anbar Awakening" (like the one that took place in Iraq) happening in Afghanistan any time soon.

Obama's "Yes We Can" mantra may still be very much a work-in-progress in the U.S., whose final outcome is not yet clear. In Afghanistan, however, I don't think the phrase has much resonance or chemistry. It's more like when Tonto said to the Lone Ranger, "What do you mean 'we,' white man?" In this case, it really doesn't matter that our president is black, because the question still stands.