Is it the right or wrong war?

By Joel Brinkley

Federal court papers made public Sunday related an amazing piece of news, but it was remarkable for reasons that many people may not have immediately appreciated.

FBI agents in New York arrested Najibullah Zazi and his father on charges of planning a terror attack in the United States using sophisticated home-made bombs. The agents argued that the case was important because it showed terrorists wandering freely in the United States as they made their plans, just as the Sept. 11 hijackers had.

But that overlooks the most frightening feature of this escapade. The defendants, investigators said, received extensive instruction in bomb making and terrorist strategies from al-Qaida — at a training camp in the tribal areas of Pakistan. And yet all the debate today is about Afghanistan.

Washington is locked in intensifying arguments over the military’s request for a large troop increase in Afghanistan, while other Western leaders are trying to fend off ever-more vitriolic calls to bring their troops home.

On Monday, Italy staged a state funeral for six soldiers killed in Kabul last week. Thousands of people lined the Roman streets in somber ceremony to greet vehicles carrying the coffins. Italy has 3,250 troops in Afghanistan.

Germany has 4,400 troops there. Now, in the final days of a national election campaign, Afghanistan is a volatile issue because the state just received two threats, allegedly from al-Qaida, warning of violent reprisals if Germany does not withdraw its troops.

Familiar debate

In London, Prime Minister Gordon Brown is locked in a familiar debate with his own military commanders over their plan to send 1,000 more troops to Afghanistan — on top of 9,000 already there. At least 217 British soldiers have died there, and Brown wants to start bringing the troops home.

“We are not a squeamish people,” Paddy Ashdown, a British legislator, told BBC radio. “We can take sacrifice and pain — if we are convinced we know what the war is for, and there is a reasonable prospect of success.”

And there’s the rub. The prospects for success in the Afghan war are quite low. The goal is to rid the state of Taliban militants and remove the possibility that Afghanistan could be used once again as a terrorist haven, as it was before Sept. 11. We’ve been at that, off and on, for almost eight years, and the chances for victory are now more remote than they have ever been. Gen. Stanley McChrystal warned last week that without a significant troop increase the war will be lost.

But let’s just suppose that McChrystal got his troops. The United States and NATO achieved their goal. Afghanistan became a peaceful state with an ever-vigilant military that prevented the Taliban or al-Qaida from establishing another safe haven and terrorist training ground.

OK, unlikely, but just suppose. Would that actually accomplish anything? Probably not because, as that federal court case shows, al-Qaida already has a safe haven and terrorist training ground — in Pakistan.

For eight long years now, the United States has been pushing Pakistan to take control of the western provinces where Taliban and al-Qaida leaders live. Osama bin Laden is still believed to have a home there. And yet, today, those Pakistani training camps are still churning out terrorists. In at least one case, graduates have been sent to the United States once again.

Predator drones

Pakistanis are reluctant to take on the militants even when they threaten the Pakistani state, and they don’t want American help. Frustrated, the United States took up a new strategy, using Predator drones to fire missiles over the border. That’s not much better than throwing a rock over a wall and hoping it hits something. But even that brings angry protest. Pakistanis remain primarily concerned with their own prideful sovereignty.

Meantime, on Tuesday the Taliban blew up an empty girls’ school just outside Peshwar in northwestern Pakistan — only the latest in a string of similar attacks. The attackers then retreated to their tribal-area safe haven.

Aren’t we fighting the wrong war?

X Joel Brinkley is a former Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent for The New York Times and now a professor of journalism at Stanford University. McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.