Canada has already threatened to pull out its troops from Kandahar province in a year's time if other Nato countries don't contribute more. We must assume that if Britain were to begin to talk about a draw-down, then Canada would carry out this threat. British forces would then be exposed in Helmand and, presumably, would also withdraw. Let us suppose that an angry and abandoned US follows the “lead” offered by its allies, and itself pulls out, leaving itself only an air-to-ground interdiction capability.
Here are the likely consequences of such a pattern. The Afghan Government would collapse, to be replaced by an overt civil war fought between the Taleban and local governors in the various provinces. A million or more Afghan refugees would again flee their country, many of them ending up in the West. Deprived of support from the US, as recommended by our commentators, President Musharraf or a successor would effectively withdraw from the border regions, leaving a vast lawless area from central Afghanistan to north central Pakistan. Al-Qaeda and other jihadists would operate from these areas as they did before 9/11. This time these forces - already capable of assassinating a popular democratic politician - would seriously impact upon the stability of Pakistan, which is a nuclear state.
Jihadists everywhere, from Indonesia to Palestine, would see this as a huge victory, democrats and moderates as a catastrophic defeat. There would hardly be a country, from Morocco to Malaysia, that wouldn't feel the impact of the reverse. That's before we calculate the cost to women and girls of no longer being educated or allowed medical treatment. And would there be less terror as a result?
Pakistan has failed to bring their frontier territories under control. So now we have a general Taliban Campaign being fought across the Afghan-Pakistan border. Unfortunately, it is one theater for our enemies but our forces can't cross the border except secretly with deniability. We can train Pakistanis to fight more effectively but direct operations are "sensitive":
The number of U.S. forces in Pakistan is a sensitive issue. Many Pakistanis openly support or sympathize with al-Qaida, the Taliban or militant groups and would view a sizable American presence in their country as an unwelcome intrusion.
That means the United States won't conduct military operations on its own inside Pakistan unless President Pervez Musharraf's government requests such direct support.
"We have to be careful conducting operations in a sovereign country, particularly one that's a friend of ours and one that has given us a lot of support," Dell Dailey, the State Department's counterterrorism chief, said last month. "The blowback would be pretty serious."
And while we try to squeeze out a battalion here and a helicopter there from our NATO allies to send to Afghanistan, our NATO allies edge toward getting out entirely. And al Qaeda in Iraq is heading for the Taliban Campaign after their defeat in Iraq:
Many of the Iraqi al Qaeda operatives have been showing up in Pakistan. This has always been a refuge for Islamic terrorists. The Taliban in Afghanistan got all the attention in the 1990s because the Islamic radicals ran the entire country. But these fanatics never lost their control of the Pushtun tribal areas along the Pakistani-Afghan border. With Iraq lost, the war on terror is moving to the Pakistani side of this Pushtun terrorist sanctuary.
We'll soon have to follow the jihadis using troops pulled from Iraq as we win that war. And then the Iraq War critics will finally get what they've always claimed they really wanted--a good war against al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan. If the Pakistanis won't periodically decide to opt out, of course.
But hey, there will be some fun involved. Want to bet how long our loyal opposition remains committed to fighting the "good" war once it is the primary war? Even though the West can't afford to lose the war against al Qaeda?
