The War Does Not Go Well

….last week, anyway.

***Pakistan has quit the GWOT:

Pakistan's credibility as a leading ally in the war on terrorism was called into question last night when it emerged that President Pervez Musharraf's government had authorised the release from jail of thousands of Taliban fighters caught fighting coalition forces in Afghanistan.

Five years after American-led coalition forces overthrew the Taliban during Operation Enduring Freedom, United States officials have been horrified to discover that thousands of foreign fighters detained by Pakistan after fleeing the battleground in Afghanistan have been quietly released and allowed to return to their home countries.

Pakistani lawyers acting for the militants claim they have freed 2,500 foreigners who were originally held on suspicion of having links to al-Qa'eda or the Taliban over the past four years.

The mass release of the prisoners has provoked a stern rebuke to the Musharraf regime from the American government. "We have repeatedly warned Pakistan over arresting and then releasing suspects," said a US diplomat in Islamabad. "We are monitoring their response with great concern."

I hate that expression. "Monitoring their response with great concern" is a naked confession of passive impotence embraced. No wonder I can't stand diplomats.

The implications of Musharraf's surrender are....unpleasant to consider. "Pakistani lawyers" notwithstanding, it seems unlikely that the Pakistani strongman would have openly betrayed his patron – us – and turned loose thousands of jihadis unless he felt that his own position was sufficiently untenable as to leave him no choice. Taken in concert with the now evidently concurrent truce with the Taliban over the northwestern Pakistani province of Waziristan, it appears that, whatever the conditions on the ground in Afghanistan, it is Pakistan – nuclear Pakistan – which is in significant Islamist jeopardy.

The best case scenario is that we have several thousand theocratic psychopaths to round up again (or, better yet, just liquidated en masse). But this will be made a great deal more complicated by Musharraf’s de facto ceding of Waziristan to bin Laden. If we respect Pakistani territorial integrity, al Qaeda has a secure base of operations once more, and we already know how that tends to turn out. If we begin attacking into that province to try and clean it out once and for all, we either force Musharraf to turn against us to save his own ass or kiss his ass goodbye in an Islamist coup, yielding us the worst case scenario of twin Islamic nuclear theocracies, one Shiite, one Sunni, possessed of annihilation fantasies and competing against each other to see who can trigger Armageddon first.

Another delightful conundrum that does not lend itself to "diplomatic" resolution. A threat that, while perhaps not yet imminent, does, like Iran’s nukes, appear to be inevitable. And a fate that is going to require a helluva lot more from the Bush Administration than striped-pants hand-wringing. [Here, maybe, is a positive sign of presidential resolve.]

***What is the State Department’s idea of "diplomatic resolution"? Letting fifteen thousand more Saudi "students" into the country to "study" at our "cash-strapped" institutions of "higher learning." Which, in practice, means that any of these "students" who don’t come here hating America and the West will certainly depart wanting to kill us all – and many with the knowledge and wherewithall to do it, too.

***Meanwhile, the rumor mill – or what, in the intel biz, is referred to as "chatter" – is warning of a new devastating al Qaeda attack on the continental United States to coincide with the "holy" Islamic starvation festival of Ramadan:

Osama bin Laden is planning to carry out new, more destructive attacks inside the United States, and there is someone working on this terror plot currently in the US, according to Hamid Mir, the famed Pakistani journalist who obtained the only post-9/11 interviews with Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri. In an interview quoted on the website of the al-Arabiya television network, Mir spoke about his last trip to Afghanistan and his meeting with al-Qaeda members and Taliban leaders.

In his interview with Al.Arabiya.net, Mir said that the al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters referred to attacks targeting the US-led coalition forces during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan which begins on 24 September, and that the al-Qaeda leader, Osama bin Laden was in "good" health during a meeting he had recently with the Taliban leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar.

Mir also said that bin Laden has assigned a man named Adnan Al-Shukri Juma to carry out a new attack within the US which is intended to be larger than the 11 September, 2001 attacks. According to Mir, Adnan Jumaa has smuggled explosives and nuclear materials into the US through the Mexican border over the last two years and is hiding somewhere in America where the FBI has not been able to locate him...

Of course, rumors of a fresh al Qaeda mass strike have been floating around off and on ever since 9/11. I still remember bin Laden’s threat to unleash "a storm of airplanes" on us after we’d chased his worthless ass into Tora Bora. They got in their big lick on us and have been rototilled ever since. Bluff and bluster are all they have left.

Yet we now know that there have in fact been numerous plots that have been foiled by the Bush Administration using the anti-terror tools that have now been exposed and are under partisan left-wing/RINO assault from the press to the courts to the Congress. It seems inarguable that our government is significantly less able to disrupt terrorist attacks on the homeland today than it was even a year ago.

And note how the ingredients for a radiological attack are supposed to have been brought into the country – over the sieve-like Mexican border. Seems all too plausible, doesn’t it?

Who knows? Maybe this rumor is crap – the fact that bin Laden and his Number One are feeding it to a pet journalist suggests it is more of a psychological ploy than a bona fide threat – but if it is, there’ll always be another one. Nothing that we couldn’t have stopped in the past five years, but without penetration of enemy communications and financing and with any tough interrogation of captured terrorists effectively outlawed, for how much longer?

***On the bright side, two al Qaeda attacks on Yemeni oil facilities were repulsed. This was the kickoff of a Zawahiri-announced offensive against pro-U.S. Persian Gulf states. Looks like it’s not off to a good start.

Small potatoes, to be sure. Especially in light of what’s on the horizon:

The odds of Iraqi democracy surviving are less than 50-50 because it cannot be stable or secure while its neighbors are fully engaged in preventing that outcome. And we've still not made the tough decisions necessary to take the battle to the enemy's centers of gravity, so Iraq's situation cannot improve significantly in 2007. The President remains reliant on the UN regarding Iran, and the UN is doing what it always does, perpetrating endless diplomacy for diplomacy's sake. No decisions or action will be taken in the UN, and the emboldened Iran will take some action intended to provoke another war it can fight and win by surviving, just like the Hizballah-Israel war. Reliable reports say that Iran has leased enough oil supertankers to store about forty million barrels of oil - half the world's supply for a day - which could mean military action coupled with oil price manipulation. The next Iranian military adventure will pose the most important choice. We will either act decisively to topple the Ahmadinejad regime or allow it to achieve nuclear weapons…. By the end of 2007, th[e former] choice may no longer be available if the ayatollahs get much closer to achieving nuclear arms.

The choices of 2008 won't be any more attractive than those of 2007. Every enemy will try to influence our presidential election. If Hizballah doesn't attack Israel in 2007, it will in 2008. If Iraq survives 2007, Syria and Iran will do everything they can to bring it down in 2008 to prove the Bush policy a failure and prevent his successor from being tempted to continue. Most importantly for us and the world, we may not be presented with a choice of a presidential candidate who - regardless of Iraq - has a plan or a clue of how to prosecute this war.

It’s easy to speak bravely, as Victor Davis Hanson often does, about how our enemies, like those of the past, always underestimate us to their ultimate peril. That has certainly been true in the past, and was as recently as five years ago. I have to wonder if it’s still true today. Let’s say Adnan Jumaa manages to pull off a dirty-bomb attack in a major American city – will this galvanize the public into an implacable monolithic entity that demands that Pakistan and Iran be liberated regardless of the cost or "world opinion," or just transformed into irradiated parking lots? Or will the domestic Left go ballistic, blame it on "Bush’s war in Iraq" and demand that we quit not just Iraq but the entire Middle East, and thus making a prophet of OBL himself?

That is, of course, a rhetorical question. The truly frightening thing is that, unless this "post-post-9/11" mentality, this creeping September 10th-ism isn’t halted and reversed, the question of our survival will not be.

This is how Rome fell. Internal fiscal and cultural rot concurrent with external foreign incursions that lesser caesars, unable to muster first the will, and later the resources, to resist, tried repeatedly to appease instead until there was nothing left to trade, and nothing left to defend.

It took Rome four centuries to dwindle into oblivion. I rather think our defeat would be a lot quicker, but just as self-inflicted.