Pakistan - Kevin Drum
By Kevin Drum
I see that Fred Kagan has a long piece up at National Reviewbunch of defeatist appeasers like Neville Chamberlain.
That’s a fresh approach, isn’t it? And it doesn’t get much better from
there. It’s mostly a phoned-in mishmash of straw men, race-baiting,
appeals to cultural solidarity (against the “hyper-sophisticates” who
oppose the war), chest thumping, semantic games, and, despite its
title, virtually no attempt to tell us “Why Iraq Matters.” arguing (surprise!) that liberals who want to withdraw from Iraq are a
However, credit where it’s due: Kagan does make one good point. At
the very end of the piece he takes on the argument that Iraq is a
distraction from the real war on terror:
Considering
[] that there are very few and very small al-Qaeda bases in
Afghanistan, that al-Qaeda in South Asia is mostly in Pakistan, and
that none of those insisting that the U.S. abandon Iraq to fight the
“real” enemy in Afghanistan have proposed any meaningful plans for
dealing with Chitral and Waziristan where that “real” enemy actually is
[...] how, exactly, is Iraq a distraction from the war on terror?
Now,
as it happens, I think most of us hyper-sophisticates believe that Iraq
is more than just a distraction from fighting al-Qaeda and the Taliban
in Afghanistan and Pakistan. There’s a much broader argument here about
the effective use of American military power that Kagan ignores. Still,
he’s got a point about Pakistan. That is where al-Qaeda is
mostly holed up these days, and no one — not liberals, not
conservatives, not anyone — really has any bright ideas about how to
root them out. Long story short, it’s not clear if the U.S. military
could do it even if we wanted them to, and in any case, no one wants to
start a war with Pakistan.
Obviously this isn’t a reason to stay in Iraq. If anything, it’s yet
another demonstration of the limits of military force. Still, it’s a
good question: what should we do about al-Qaeda in Pakistan? Nobody ever seems to want to talk very concretely about that.
Courtesy: Washington Mothly/Kevin Drum
