Doug Saunders: 'The Afghanistan war should be over'
'Only 20 per cent of insurgents who form the core of the Taliban are fighting the idological war,' Ali Jalali told the Indian media recently. 'The rest are aggrieved tribes who have been mistreated by some government official or drug trafficker or some foreign intelligence operators or by the transnational al-Qaeda terrorists. It also consists of unemployed youth and criminal groups. All these are alliances of convenience. They are fighting for different reasons.' ...
'The Afghan rebellion remains mostly a homegrown affair.' Mr. Gopal wrote last month. 'Foreign fighters -- especially al-Qaeda -- have little ideological influence on most of the insurgency, and most Afghans keep their distance from such outsiders. Al-Qaeda's vision of global jihad doesn't resonate in the rugged highlands and windswept deserts of southern Afghanistan.' ...
To the extent that al-Qaeda and its supporters remain active in Afghanistan, how much is that because of and not in spite of our military presence there? Richard Barrett, the man who runs the UN agency that monitors al-Qaeda's activities, warned recently that the presence of large numbers of foreign troops is mainly serving to bolster the terrorist group...
If so, we have a stark conclusion: Al-Qaeda is gone, and not likely to return. To the extent that it is still around, it's because we're attracting it. If both those statements are true, then no matter how ugly it looks, the war's over.
