The "right war?" Or not?

The Bush Administration has been pilloried for its naïve acceptance of US – and Israeli, and Russian, and French, and – intelligence reports of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Subsequently, those whose span of attention extends beyond today’s price of gasoline have learned that Saddam himself perpetrated and supported that charade to appear stronger than he really was to friends and foes alike, dismissing out-of-hand the danger that it might invite an attack from the United States. After all, fatal attacks on a US warship in the Mideast (17 dead, 39 injured), on US embassies in Africa (223 dead, 4085 injured), and a bomb attack on the World Trade Center in 1993 (6 dead, 1,042 injured), had gotten little response from the US administration, and all of that directed against “safe” targets. Certainly the dictator could assume – regardless of occasional bluster to the contrary – that an apparently powerful nation-state was safe from direct attack. The occasional small-strike-irritant in enforcement of the “no fly” regime, but nothing that might threaten his grip on power.

Those assumptions were reinforced by the prevailing policy among western democracies that attacks were crimes, not acts of war, so the laws (and rights) which applied to the perpetrators were the same used to prosecute convenience store holdups.

Given all that, the administration’s invasion of Iraq was initially more applauded than not by the likes of the New York Times' Thomas Friedman and our current Secretary of State. All “blood under the bridge,” (to mix a metaphor). We haven’t been very doctrinaire here in Peninsula Pen, nor have we been particularly angry…at anyone. But we are interested.

Now we’ve got a flat-out war between the Taliban and the Pakistani government (such as it is, or ever was). Barack the Pres. was fond of saying while running for office that we were “fighting the wrong war.” He often reminded us in soaring rhetoric that George Bush had not captured bin Laudin, that he’d failed to prosecute the “right war,” the war in Afghanistan. He told us that Obama “would go after Osama.” He made much political hay, especially when he told us he’d attack the Taliban in Pakistan – if that’s where they were. Well, here we are.

It’s perfectly clear the Taliban are in Pakistan. Really, that’s never been in doubt. Only two things really are. First, was the Bush administration right to pursue its Afghanistan/Pakistan aims carefully, even weakly? The Soviet Union's experience from December 1979 to February 1989 should strongly inform the answer, and current events provide the rest of what we need to know.

It seems clear now the bravado of the campaign has morphed into today’s tentative policy – as of course it had to. The previous administration was careful not to carry the fight in such a way that it might endanger the government of a nuclear power. Has this one been too quick to suggest pursuit of wider goals? Has that contributed to the widening of the conflict we now see? Could this end with a nuclear armed Islamic Republic – not in Iran, as expected, but in Pakistan? What happens if Pakistan falls to the fanatics, while the fanatics to their west achieve their weapons goals?

We know that the current United States government will “talk to them.” What happens after that?