Obama responded to McCain’s snide accusations that he didn’t know about Iraq because he hadn’t been there in two years with customary grace and vision - by rising above them, and announcing he will not only be visiting Iraq, but Afghanistan as well.

Obama has said before he was considering a trip, but his comment to reporters Monday was his first clear confirmation. He said more details will be announced shortly, and that he also plans a visit to Afghanistan.

The inclusion of Afghanistan is politically wise for a number of reasons. The most obvious reason is that it raises the stakes with McCain. I considered it a foolish expectation that a candidate visit a war zone, but now that expectations game plays in Obama’s favor, demanding that McCain announce a trip to Afghanistan in order to keep pace.

More importantly, it underscores Obama’s message and strategic outlook that Afghanistan is as critical - if not more so - as Iraq in the War on Terror.

It has always struck me as somewhat ironic that the very personification of the War on Terror’s objective, Osama bin ladin, has been able to cool his heels and operate with virtual impunity in Afghanistan’s border regions outskirts, without raising the ire of the most fervid supporters of the war. Considering the tendency - even the eagerness - to invoke the specter of 9/11 when challenged in their foreign policy beliefs, the right-wing has been stunningly numb to Osama’s continued prosperity.

This best change. It has to. And yet, we do not see it changing with McCain.

First off, we don’t hear McCain’s rhetoric changing from the Bush administration’s standard saws. Just today, his campaign criticized Obama for a “September 10th mindset.” That is a profoundly empty statement, not only relying that the listener react emotionally rather than rationally, but requiring they not question it.

For instance, the particular issue McCain contrasts with Obama on was the matter of whether Guantanamo detainees should have Constitutional legal protections or not. Now mind you, all of our prisoners customarily do, foreign or not. And the administration has made plain that the Gitmo crowd were not covered by the Geneva Convention like an enemy army would be. Mind you, the majority of detainees have been found to have had no links to terrorism, instead having been turned in for money by mercenaries or rival governments.

So in essence, Obama was criticized for giving the captives some form of legal rights, whereas McCain considered the smart, proper thing to do was to give them no rights at all.

If this position wasn’t cynical and stupid enough, McCain’s comments on Afghanistan raise further questions as to how sensible he is about matters of war. Asked by conservative media figure Michael Smerconish why we couldn’t invade the Pakistan-Afghanistan border areas to pursue bin Ladin, McCain tried to sound erudite and reasonable:

“…there is a reason why [the Pakistan-Afghanistan border region] hasn’t been governed since Alexander the Great. They are ruled by about, as my understanding, 13 tribal entities and nobody has ever governed them.”

Unfortunately for McCain, that explanation is neither erudite or reasonable. In the first case, it’s not erudite because that area has, in fact, been effectively pacified, by rulers from the aforementioned Alexander, to Mahmud, to Tamerlane. In one form or another, it has proven it can be stable and prosperous.

Even more to the point is why it’s not reasonable: For while Afghanistan’s factious, backward and corrupt rulership might be a good reason not to invade in the first place, we passed that decision point awhile ago. Now we’re there, and we have a job to do.

That job is narrowly defined: Get Osama, and cut off the head of al-Qaeda. But even on that matter, McCain complains that we can’t just violate Pakistani sovereignty. To that, I ask, why not? The War on Terror was predicated on the notion that we couldn’t let little things like international law keep us from zapping the terrorists before they hit us with “another 9/11.” And while I actually refute most of that, I have to ask the question:

“If we marched some troops quietly into Pakistan’s border region for the sole purpose of hunting Osama, would Pakistan really complain all that much?”

Given that doing so would only make us isolate them further, cut off the oodles of aid money we fountain them in, and inspire us to beef up India, I doubt it. Obama does too, which is why, though McCain sneeringly accuses him of being out of touch with military matters, he remains firm on his policy that we would put boots on the ground in Pakistan whether they like it or not if it would bag us Osama.

Who’s got “September Ten Head” now, McCain?

This is precisely the kind of leadership we don’t need - the kind that so clouds the actual events of the war with the smoke of emotional drama that we don’t see that they, and not their critics, are the ones standing in the way of victory. For years under Bush, complaining about a lack of troops, armor or an exit strategy in Iraq was declared tantamount to treason, and a wide population of the American public accepted that. Now McCain is doing the same to mask his own mistakes.

He needs to get the facts right. First off, lacking a permanent troop presence in Iraq isn’t “surrender,” it’s obeying will of the government we installed and saving us hundreds of billions. Secondly, the War on Terror’s answer isn’t to hem and haw about how many tribes Afghanistan has - it’s to see its mission through by getting Osama no matter what the cost. And in that second case, it would be high time, what with the Taliban hitting back hard as ever.

Afghanistan’s Ministry of Defense said Tuesday that between 300 and 400 militants _ many of them foreigners _ took over the Arghandab region 10 miles northwest of Kandahar. The offensive Monday came three days after a Taliban attack on Kandahar’s prison that freed 400 insurgents.

Facts seem obscured by McCain at every turn, though; not just the military affairs he seems so vapid about. His latest answer to the agony of soaring gas prices was to beat the old drum of off-shore drilling.

Whether you oppose the moratorium or not, hoping to increase America’s 3% share of world oil to 3.25% or even 4% at the expense of our ailing oceans is not going to affect oil prices much. Furthermore, it would be ten years before any major output from offshore drilling could be expected.

Waiting a decade to shift our control of the market by 1% isn’t a plan to help the economic pain of today. It’s pushing an agenda through a gimmick while letting people continue to get screwed.

That - on the Iraq he wants to occupy despite its people’s will and so claims no less will be victory; on the Afghanistan he ignores even though our greatest enemy lives there and attacks with impunity; on Constitutional rights, economy, immigration - seems McCain’s only strategy.

Meanwhile, Barack Obama will be heading for the war front, with a lead in the polls and the solutions to make it worthwhile.

How often have you been exhorted to “Remember 9/11″ , or told you live in a “Post-9/11 world”? Usually this statement is used to inspire resolve in the aggressive actions we have undertaken in the Global War on Terror, and to remind us that the caution in violence shown during the Clinton years is undue. Who doesn’t bristle a little when they hear of times when Osama bin Ladin was in CIA crosshairs - under Clinton or Bush - and prudence let him slip away?

The reason why we bristle is because it is an incident of a clear enemy, whose elimination would mean much, escaping because the world’s sole superpower held itself back. This, and because we suspect that no matter what the benefits of our prudence, the result of having such an enemy still alive and busy out there is far worse.

We are faced with a similar decision in Kurdistan today. The PKK, a party of no small power within the nation of our long-time ethnic allies - the Kurds - have been launching attacks from Kurdish land in Iraq against our definite ally, Turkey. As much as we like the Kurds, I assure you that we would strongly dislike a Turkish invasion inspired by fringe extremists in their ranks.

The response contemplated by the US Administration has been the one that many an American would love to see translated from an action film on the silver screen into reality: The idea of sending in United States Special Forces to eliminate the PKK leadership and surgically excise their mechanism of terror against Turkey. Bad guys dead, Turkey appeased, no one need know about it.

But of course we do know about it, given that I’m talking of it, since columnist Robert Novak - he of the Valerie Plame expose’ - decided to channel his latest White House leak into a story about it. Novak clearly disagrees with the plan. No doubt that played a part in his exposing it so that the Kurds and Iraqis of whose nation the Kurds are a part can be properly offended and on the look out for our troops.

Novak’s galling actions aside, the revelation of the plan has made us face the tough question behind “post-9/11″ logic. Do we go so far to fight terror as to disrespect other nation’s sovereignty when actionable intelligence demands immediate action?

Let me put it another way: If we had bin Ladin on a drone plane’s camera in Afghanistan, should we send in the Tomahawk missile or Special Forces soldiers to kill him? How about if he was in Saudi Arabia? How about Pakistan? How about Britain?

It seems that, as much as many sigh and shake their head at Clinton and Bush passing up supposed “sure things” to hit bin Ladin, there is a line they are loath to cross: The kind of “turn him over or die” mentality that inspired the whole invasion of Afghanistan simply doesn’t apply to nations we’re supposed to like.

Why this is can only be due to people either not knowing the situation or not thinking things through. Do people who cry outrage or inexperience when Barack Obama talks of acting on actionable intelligence about al-Qaeda if Pakistan will not act, realize that his is the exact mentality that they criticize Clinton for not having?

And yet Clinton did have such a mentality - in Sudan, in Afghanistan, and in numerous other cases of violence, anti-terror intervention against states we were not at war at. And what happened? We are not at war with Sudan or with Liberia or with the Comoros. It’s funny - nations seem to be reluctant to consider our acts of limited, armed intervention aimed at covertly or surgically eliminating terrorists within their borders to be acts of war, even though, technically, they are. It’s like they don’t want to fight or something.

We are at war in Afghanistan, which Clinton bombed. Not because Clinton bombed them, though. We are at war in Afghanistan still because we had utterly shattered the Taliban and al-Qaeda in late 2001, but as soon as their bits and pieces bounced over the Pakistani border - likely with help from the Pakistani intelligence services who are closely tied with them - we did nothing to pursue them.

Let me emphasize this: We did nothing. We sent not one bomb into Pakistan, nor any troops. Oh, we fought the Taliban and al-Qaeda plenty whenever they were done with their time out, came across the border to Afghanistan, butchered several villages, attacked us, but then they just went across the border again and we let them have a little “me time” to recover unmolested. And, yes, we invaded Iraq, and now have to prevent al-Qaeda from ripping that country apart.

As much a statement of demogoguery “Remember 9/11″ may be and as vague its applicability to policy, we would do well to remember this much about it: Al-Qaeda was behind 9/11. Not the Taliban. Not Iraq. Al-Qaeda. And yet, though we scattered the Taliban and toppled Iraq, al-Qaeda has turned both of those locations into a crucible while still managing to carry out attacks in the West. And for nearly seven years we have let the perpetrators of 9/11 sit on the other side of the Pakistani border, amassing strength, while we relied on Pakistan - the original incubator and financier of the Taliban and al-Qaeda, and a government loath to intervene in the dangerous tribal areas of its country - to do something.

And what did they do - with our billions of aid and apparently inexhaustible patience? Technically, fought. In reality? A lot more nothing.

Such power was not at al-Qaeda’s disposal before hand.

Do you remember the world then? Al-Qaeda was not easy to find in the news. They blew up the USS Cole, the Nairobi embassy; surely they were dangerous, but did people worry about them much? No.

And how far they have come! They now are an enormous threat in Afghanistan, where nervous NATO nations are stamping their feet and queueing up to leave that quagmire. They are described as “the greatest threat” in Iraq today by the US Administration. Yearly we hear of multiple plots involving al-Qaeda in the US, UK, and European nations. How many people had al-Qaeda killed before 9/11? Around 300. They killed 142 people in Iraq on August 1st alone.

Bush recently called the notion that US actions inspire terrorism to be “flawed logic”, when someone recently pointed out that all evidence was that al-Qaeda was not killing people in Iraq before we invaded. Well then what the Hell has happened? How did we go from “around 300″ to thousands of Iraqis, thousands of Afghanis, hundreds of Saudis, thousands of Americans, and the situation in the place we first went to strike them, Afghanistan, going down the tubes, by way of the 3,000 on 9/11?

Two words:

Pakistanti border.

Consider whether risking not offending Musharraf - who doesn’t seem to be willing to do much to fight the foreign al-Qaeda presence, let alone declare war on us - is a good enough excuse for all the above.

There’s no doubt that Iraq is a significant conflict affecting the global war on terror, but it’s now time to take the temperature of the war that started of the now-disheartening “GWOT” - especially since it seems its starting all over again.

To quickly review the status of things in that nation - to be realistic about how politics actually work there, “borderless region of warring tribes” - we’ll look at each of the players and how they’re doing.

NATO
NATO is suffering some fierce casualties at a greater rate than ever before, tangling with both Taliban and local warlords who think they’re getting a little bit too interested in the opium fields that sprang up overnight when the country fell in ‘02. Many NATO nations contributing forces to the effort there are seriously considering withdrawal - most of them European nations with little to prove. Former Warsaw Pact nations have shown no sign of flagging support.

Taliban and al-Qaeda
While somewhat inappropriate to lump these two together, they nevertheless have developed such a tight operational bond during the GWOT that they may as well be treated as a single entity for the purposes of discussing Afghanistan. And both are doing much better there, thank you for asking, as their regrowth since fleeing the Safed Koh nearly six years ago has been practically unmolested. This is as much due to US complancency as anything - the kind of attitude exemplified by President Bush’s comments on the report linked above, saying that al-Qaeda is not as strong as before 9/11 when, in fact, that is precisely what the report says - but Pakistan helped too. But just as it is Pakistan’s protection and quiet support of the Taliban and al-Qaeda that has aided them, it is difference of opinion over what to do with the fickle, duplicitous military junta that has al-Qaeda reportedly undergoing an ideological split.

Pakistan
Yes, nobody really knows what to do with Pakistan these days, though growing public awareness of this in the US due to the report on al-Qaeda prompted the White House to state that “no options were off the table”, including invasion. Not that this is untrue, but it is a poorly timed statement. Firstly, I doubt it was as reassuring to Americans already wringing their hands over a ghastly, insoluble war and wondering whether their overstretched military will ever get out a country less than a fifth the size of Pakistan as it was disturbing to the people of Pakistan. It may come as a shock, but people generally react badly to when you say you’re seriously considering invading them. This is especially the case when President Musharraf and the army of Pakistan had been enjoying a surge in popularity as regards his policies of opposing Islamic militants with open force since the Red Mosque siege. But America has a right to be doubtful, what with Pakistan’s ISI being a long time supporter of Taliban, al-Qaeda and other Islamist groups it seeks to use as its foreign strong arm of plausible deniability. It surely makes policymakers in Washington eye some very long odds, and ponder whether to go all in on a bet that might be less of a sure thing than the support of Afghanistan’s people.

Afghanistan
Ah, yes. The people of Afghanistan are somewhat of a factor too. How’re they doing? They’re still locking their women up. They’re breaking records for opium cultivation, now providing 92% of the world’s heroin. And they’re getting a touch disgruntled over the increasing amounts of civilian casualties we’re inflicting on them. But by and large, they are the same “rustic” guys as ever, and as likely to side with whoever’s standing beside them at the moment as shoot him in the back when he looks away.

Of all the nations in the history of the world, Afghanistan is the one classically notorious for grinding armies down into dust with malaise, confusion and the stubborn unpredictability of the people. It happened to the Aryans, to Alexander the Great, and on and on, up to Russia and Britain playing their “Great Game” and both losing to the dusty house dealer, and, now, to us. This is not to say we should withdraw from Afghanistan. Al-Qaeda leadership is a tempting - albeit perpetually regenerating - target. Bagging bin Ladin would be a solid blow and some good PR for the GWOT. It would hardly slay the hydra and doesn’t even scrape the skin of curing Afghanistan’s ills, but it would be a mark of pride.

It is time, however, for the US to consider how expensive pride can be, and how many great empires found South Asia to be the collector of that tally.

At this moment, as we consider our relations with Pakistan and our stance against al-Qaeda, we might take another page from the books of Alexander and the British, and remember that getting the natives to do your fighting for you always ends up more cost-effective in the end.

A co-worker recently asked my opinion on the bloody outcome to the Red Mosque siege in Pakistan.

I noted I hadn’t commented on it because it lacked the kind of qualities that would drive American debate asunder on the issue. Democrats and Republicans alike would be resolved that the storming of a mosque that abducted citizens for “re-education” would be a good thing. But after a minute’s discussion, I realized it would be worthwhile to post something about how the West would do well to recognize it as not too good a thing.

Many might see the storming of the mosque as a sign that Pakistan’s President Musharraf is making a new effort to eradicate extremism in his country. It is not. It is a case of Musharraf and his handlers in the Pakistani intelligence network - the ISI, which has essentially brokered power in the country for the last three decades - protecting themselves. The Red Mosque was not a problem because it was an extreme religious voice, or a nexus of terrorist support, or a de facto theocracy in a major urban center.

It became a problem when it bit the hand that fed it. The ISI and the Red Mosque had collaborated on a number of matters and, as a result, the Mosque received a blind eye when it came to many of its misdeeds. But when some of its over-exuberant students burned down a government ministry and then sparked violence with the government pickets set up around the Mosque in response, things turned extreme. At that point, the Pakistani government surely wrote off the Mosque as more harm than good, and took a bold move in eradicating its influence in Islamabad.

This does not change the matters that Americans most care about: It does not jeopardize the resurgent, centralized leadership of al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Pakistan’s frontier provinces - a process the ISI at least abetted, if not entirely facilitated. It does not mean Pakistan’s power is shifting towards the Democratic. It is, in essence, little more than good vintage for bloody watercooler talk.