By “them”, I mean the people yanking our chain. Is anybody on our side formulating our strategy with any idea of what those folks are trying to do? I don’t refer to “them” as al Qaeda, because, frankly, I suspect that getting us to take that construct seriously, as if it were an enemy basicly like us, with a command structure, an infrastructure, locations for any of these things, etc., is a big part of their strategy. Why should we play along?

Of course, the reason we play along is that this “al Qaeda” managed to kill 3,000 of us eight years ago. Right after that happened, it became literally an openly stated criteria of basic patriotism, that no Amercian could even formulate the question of why they did it, as if understanding would in some way carry some element of foregiveness. Since foregiveness was out of the question, the idea was that understanding was also streng verboten. So much for knowing your enemy.

What we got in the place of any thought-out strategy was national unanimity on invading and occupying Afghanistan to get rid of the al Qaeda sheltering Taliban. Now, given that the other side knocked off Massoud three days before 9/11, as a minimum, you would think that they fully expected us to do exactly that as response to 9/11, invade Afghanistan, and they killed Massoud because they either feared that he would be effective as a national leader after our invasion succeeded, or that his military leadership would enable us to win solely by proxy, without having to invade with actual US troops. Of course, any people on the globe will tend to think, “it’s all about us”, and maybe the people of the world’s sole remaining hyperpower can be excused for carrying that tendency to an extreme, but it really might be useful if we could leave that thinking behind long enough to see that 9/11 wasn’t done to kill the 3,000 Americans who died that day. It was done to get America to invade and occupy Afghanistan.

Why would the other side want us to invade and occupy Afghanistan? Well, if the phrase “al Qaeda” means anything, it certainly doesn’t refer to any organization. It stands for the idea, which these folks who go by that name think is foundational to any prospect for an Arab and Muslim resurgence, that the way forward for the Arabs and Muslims lies in recovering their old virtues by becoming guerrilla warriors fighting the decadent West. Their defeat of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, which led to the demise of the Soviet Empire, is for them the classic case and proof of concept. Lightning might not strike twice in the same place, but if they could only get the other great Western empire to repeat the folly of the Soviets and try to occupy Afghanistan, the same factors which let the mujahadin defeat an advanced Western military machine would allow them to defeat the most feared and respected such military machine.

It didn’t go smoothly for them at the outset. The US seemed on the verge of executing a successful overthrow of the Taliban and victory of a US-friendly Afghan coalition without the committment of US ground troops, without the occupation that was the whole purpose of 9/11 for the other side. When we did send in some of our own troops as our local coalition was already in control of Kabul and Kandahar, at first the smart money assumed that these were there purely to capture ObL, and would quickly leave the country after doing that. But, miraculously, the US snatched defeat from the jaws of victory, and we sent local forces of dubious enthusiasm for the project of catching ObL on that mission, while Western forces steadily expanded as a permanent occupation force. The rest has been history, has steadily been developing into a retelling of the same history that occupiers of Afghanistan always create.

The notion that al Qaeda has an HQ anywhere is as vaporous, as laughable as the notional “third in command of al Qaeda” that the US has been steadily killing in some sort of nightmare of the eternal return for the past eight years. What we call al Qaeda is an idea, the idea that the Arab and Muslim world will rise again to glory by successfully waging guerrilla war on Western powers. It’s not clear that you can beat an idea with anything but other ideas, but it should be clear that the least we can do is to stop going along with the idea of al Qaeda. Let’s stop occupying Afghanistan. That’s their idea, an idea that does only them any good. We may not have a better idea, but at least we should get a different idea.

It is about right wing incitement of the military to challenge Obama.

It is painfully absurd that the cost to the U.S. of murdering Afghan civilians prevents adequately funding our libraries, schools, health care, not to mention roads and bridges and internet service.