Niall Ferguson e a queda de Roma na Europa atual (The Sunday Times)

Analogias históricas são sempre enganosas, mas não deixam de ser saborosas...

Grato ao meu colega Renato Marques que me enviou este artigo, e autor dos comentários iniciais.

Paulo Roberto de Almeida 

========

Para aqueles que (não) leram meu livro, capítulo Tempus Fugit, recordo que nele abordo o impacto da invasão desses "novos bárbaros" (na composição étnica, na identidade cultural e no quadro de valores das sociedades hospedeiras) e a estratégia ambígua e ineficaz até agora adotada pela Europa (ajuda financeira e/ou intervenção militar). Os EUA tampouco estão imunes a essa problemática, mesmo que à margem das grandes correntes migratórias (dado o antagonismo entre a agenda assistencialista favorecida por seus núcleos hispânicos e afroamericanos, cuja taxa de natalidade faz antever sua maioria em 2043). No Brasil, a proliferação na base da pirâmide torna o ambiente político refém de noções que vão na contra mão do desenvolvimento e da competitividade. Por distintas razões, os três estariam assim condenados a um futuro medíocre (Europa e EUA - de onde vêm os Nobel de ciências e medicina - teriam sua trajetória de grandeza interrompida; o Brasil sequer a realizaria).   

Mas o objetivo era enviar o excelente artigo de Niall Ferguson (caso você tenha chegado até aqui). Eu acrescentaria apenas um elemento novo dentre as causas do declínio do Império Romano, algo que o bom mocismo e o politicamente correto tem deixado de mencionar: a crescente introdução e propagação de valores cristãos, de solidariedade (somos todos irmãos), de rejeição à acumulação capitalista de riquezas (é mais fácil um camelo passar pelo buraco de uma agulha do que um rico entrar no reino dos Céus) e de apego ao trabalho (visto como uma punição pelo Pecado Capital). 

Dito isso, recomendo sobretudo a leitura do 13° parágrafo do artigo do Ferguson, por sua atualidade.
Renato L R Marques

Like the Roman empire, Europe has let its defences crumble 

Niall Ferguson

The Sunday Times, 15 November 2015

I am not going to repeat what you have already read or heard. I am not going to say that what happened in Paris on Friday night was unprecedented horror, for it was not. I am not going to say that the world stands with France, for it is a hollow phrase. Nor am I going to applaud François Hollande’s pledge of “pitiless” vengeance, for I do not believe it. I am, instead, going to tell you that this is exactly how civilisations fall. 

Here is how Edward Gibbon described the Goths’ sack of Rome in August 410AD: “. . . In the hour of savage licence, when every passion was inflamed, and every restraint was removed . . . a cruel slaughter was made of the Romans; and . . . the streets of the city were filled with dead bodies . . . Whenever the Barbarians were provoked by opposition, they extended the promiscuous massacre to the feeble, the innocent, and the helpless. . .”

Now, does that not describe the scenes we witnessed in Paris on Friday night? True, Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, published in six volumes between 1776 and 1788, represented Rome’s demise as a slow burn. Gibbon covered more than 1,400 years of history. The causes he identified ranged from the personality disorders of individual emperors to the power of the Praetorian Guard and the rise of Sassanid Persia. Decline shaded into fall, with monotheism acting as a kind of imperial dry rot.

For many years, more modern historians of “late antiquity” tended to agree with Gibbon about the gradual nature of the process. Indeed, some went further, arguing that “decline” was an anachronistic term, like the word “barbarian”. Far from declining and falling, they insisted, the Roman empire had imperceptibly merged with the Germanic tribes, producing a multicultural post-imperial idyll that deserved a more flattering label than “Dark Ages”. Recently, however, a new generation of historians has raised the possibility that the process of Roman decline was in fact sudden — and bloody — rather than smooth. 

For Bryan Ward-Perkins, what happened was “violent seizure . . . by barbarian invaders”. The end of the Roman west, he writes in The Fall of Rome (2005), “witnessed horrors and dislocation of a kind I sincerely hope never to have to live through; and it destroyed a complex civilisation, throwing the inhabitants of the West back to a standard of living typical of prehistoric times”. 

In five decades the population of Rome itself fell by three-quarters. Archaeological evidence from the late fifth century — inferior housing, more primitive pottery, fewer coins, smaller cattle — shows that the benign influence of Rome diminished rapidly in the rest of western Europe. “The end of civilisation”, in Ward-Perkins’s phrase, came within a single generation.

Peter Heather’s Fall of the Roman Empire emphasises the disastrous effects not just of mass migration but of organised violence: first the westward shift of the Huns of Central Asia and then the Germanic irruption into Roman territory. In his reading, the Visigoths who settled in Aquitaine and the Vandals who conquered Carthage were attracted to the Roman empire by its wealth, but were enabled to seize that wealth by the arms they acquired and the skills they learnt from the Romans themselves.

“For the adventurous,” writes Heather, “the Roman empire, while being a threat to their existence, also presented an unprecedented opportunity to prosper . . . Once the Huns had pushed large numbers of [alien groups] across the frontier, the Roman state became its own worst enemy. Its military power and financial sophistication both hastened the process whereby streams of incomers became coherent forces capable of carving out kingdoms from its own body politic.” 

Uncannily similar processes are destroying the European Union today, though few of us want to recognise them for what they are. Like the Roman Empire in the early fifth century, Europe has allowed its defences to crumble. As its wealth has grown, so its military prowess has shrunk, along with its self-belief. It has grown decadent in its shopping malls and sports stadiums. At the same time it has opened its gates to outsiders who have coveted its wealth without renouncing their ancestral faith. 

The distant shock to this weakened edifice has been the Syrian civil war, though it has been a catalyst as much as a direct cause for the great Völkerwanderung of 2015. As before, they have come from all over the imperial periphery — from North Africa, from the Levant, from south Asia — but this time they have come in their millions, not in mere tens of thousands. 

To be sure, most have come hoping only for a better life. Things in their own countries have become just good enough economically for them to afford to leave and just bad enough politically for them to risk leaving. But they cannot stream northwards and westwards without some of that political malaise coming with them. As Gibbon saw, convinced monotheists pose a grave threat to a secular empire.

It is doubtless true to say that the overwhelming majority of Muslims in Europe are not violent. But it is also true that the majority hold views not easily reconciled with the principles of our liberal democracies, including our novel notions about sexual equality and tolerance not merely of religious diversity but of nearly all sexual proclivities. And it is thus remarkably easy for a violent minority to acquire their weapons and prepare their assaults on civilisation within these avowedly peace-loving communities.

I do not know enough about the fifth century to be able to quote Romans who described each new act of barbarism as unprecedented, even when it had happened multiple times before; or who issued pious calls for solidarity after the fall of Rome, even when standing together meant falling together; or who issued empty threats of pitiless revenge, even when all they intended to do was to strike a melodramatic posture.

I do know that 21st-century Europe has itself to blame for the mess it is now in. Surely nowhere in the world has devoted more resources to the study of history than modern Europe did. When I went up to Oxford more than 30 years ago, it was taken for granted that in the first term I would study Gibbon. It did no good. We learnt a lot of nonsense to the effect that nationalism was a bad thing, nation states worse and empires the worst things of all.

“Romans before the fall”, wrote Ward-Perkins, “were as certain as we are today that their world would continue for ever substantially unchanged. They were wrong. We would be wise not to repeat their complacency.” 

Poor, poor Paris. Killed by complacency.

Niall Ferguson is Laurence A Tisch professor of history at Harvard, a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution, Stanford, and the author of Kissinger, 1923-1968: The Idealist (Penguin)

To Drone or Not to Drone - Frank G. Hoffman, Evan Kalikow (FPRI)

To Drone or Not to Drone

Frank G. Hoffman, Evan Kalikow

Foreign Policy Research Institute, August 2013

That is the question.  Whether it’s better to stand idly by in the face of egregious violence or to contemplate costly interventions with American ground forces?  What’s a policy maker to do?  Accept the slings and arrows of terrorists with their outrageous terms or attack them with arrows and at a time of our own making?

The answer over the past few years has been to employ strike operations, generally by the use of remotely piloted aerial systems (aka “drones”).  The media has, typically, labeled this as “Drone Warfare” and many critics question the legal and moral justifications of their employment. 

Have we made it too easy for a President to order the killing of others?  The journalist Mark Bowden asks this question in the cover story of the latest issue of The Atlantic.[1]

Targeted killings against terrorist organizations are a generation old controversy, with origins dating back to when this tactic was being employed by Israeli security forces years ago. Dan Byman’s comprehensive evaluation in his investigative book, A High Price: The Triumphs and Failures of Israeli Counterterrorism, explored Israel’s debate and the strategic effects it garnered.[2]; Since Gaza was so small, contained, and saturated by intelligence sources, it was hard to think this was a case study that American strategists could generalize from.

We came to understand how strategically important such operations were, not necessarily as decisive engagements that would defeat militant forces.  But they served to keep the level of threat to an acceptable level by compelling the Palestinian resistance to stop their suicide attacks, and by convincing the Israeli populace that the state of Israel could do something in response to these attacks and extract a punishment.  Thus, the political and social dimensions of their strategy were intermixed.  Their adversary was compelled to shift tactics, and further time was acquired.

That brings us to today and Mark Bowden’s critical question.

The employment of strikes by remotely-operated aerial systems has increased markedly over the last decade.  During the G. W. Bush administration, open sources note the use of 50 drone strikes.  But as both the number of available platforms has increased and the intelligence needed to track and target a dispersed insurgency has grown, the Obama Administration has authorized well over 420 strikes.  This had led to advocates and opponents of the approach to describe these operations as “the centerpiece of U.S. counterterrorism strategy.”  Proponents of these attacks can claim, like Daniel Byman, that “drones have done their job remarkably well: by killing key leaders and denying terrorists sanctuaries in Pakistan, Yemen, and, to a lesser degree, Somalia, drones have devastated al Qaeda and associated anti-American militant groups. And they have done so at little financial cost, at no risk to U.S. forces, and with fewer civilian casualties than many alternative methods would have caused.”[3]

Not everyone agrees that a reliance on air strikes and kinetic force is the best way to defeat or degrade long established terrorist groups or dispersed insurgencies. Moreover, some critics argue that tactical expediency and short-term thinking may have crowded out or displaced strategic effectiveness over the long term. There has been a concern for some time that the U.S. was exploiting its technology in an effort to show some action, but without considering the role of drones within a larger strategy. No doubt U.S. officials reject the notion that tactical expediency was being sought over strategic effectiveness.  Tactics should not trump strategy, but the low levels of transparency allotted to the program have continued to hamper any objective appreciation of the program and impeded understanding its role within a larger and more strategic context.

Targeted actions are not new. We’ve used jet aircraft and Tomahawk cruise missiles in the past and with some volume against both states and terrorist groups. Operationally, we see a number of clear advantages to our current mode of operations, at least the destructive aspect of the U.S. strategy.

• We’re degrading the near term effectiveness of the strategic leadership of these organizations from planning major attacks on us and our allies by negating their ability to plan and communicate easily.
• We’re degrading the competence and organizational coherence of operational elements of jihadist groups by eliminating tactical leaders, planners and skilled technical players, including bomb makers.
• We’re killing more high-value targets and fewer civilians than we would in a traditional ground combat. In his recent article for The Atlantic, Bowden came to the conclusion that “Ground combat almost always kills more civilians than drone strikes do. When you consider the alternatives, you are led, as Obama was, to the logic of the drone.”[4]
• We have taken the initiative away from the adversary in multiple locations, reduced their leverage by deciding when and where WE will strike.  Their attempt to seek sanctuary to plan, rehearse, and train has been denied.  As Mr. Obama noted recently, we’ve made sure “Their remaining operatives spend more time thinking about their own safety than plotting against us.”[5]
• We’re buying time for other tools, including partner capacity building in government, intelligence, law enforcement and security to catch up and overcome the threat.  In beleaguered states, this takes time and patient effort.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are powerful tools that can be used to augment and strengthen broader strategies; however, they must not be utilized as a replacement for a more grand strategy or, even worse, as a force that dictates strategy. Audrey Kurth Cronin warns against this danger, saying, “The problem for Washington today is that its drone program has taken on a life of its own, to the point where tactics are driving strategy rather than the other way around.”[6]

Letting UAVs drive or replace strategy can also lead to long-term strategic goals being spurned in favor of short-term gains.  Aerial strike operations can successfully eliminate specific targets, but may also be radicalizing a new generation of potential militants. As these operations have increased since 2009, particularly in Pakistan, influential voices like retired Admiral Dennis Blair and retired General James Cartwright have suggested that said strikes have been more effective as a recruitment tool for the Taliban than they have as a way to eliminate threats.[7] The pressure and sense of helplessness that these attacks place on civilian populations may produce a radicalizing effect that could haunt us in the long run. 

Whether or not we gain positive strategic effects from this effort remains to be seen.  In the long term, we could be creating more militants than we’re taking out. A strategic mindset thinks about the longer arc of history and the consequences of near term actions. While our political time clocks often focus on short horizons, American strategists don’t have that luxury.

So there are a number of operational objectives that appear to offer clear positive gains for U.S. security interests.  What we’ve not done is explain in layman’s terms, how the employment of these attacks fits within our larger strategy, which presumably includes more constructive components than lethal force.  Without such explanations, we are left with having to concur with Audrey Cronin.  Her conceptual counter, Dr. Dan Byman of Georgetown, has admitted that “Washington must remain mindful of the built-in limits of low-cost, unmanned interventions, since the very convenience of drone warfare risks dragging the United States into conflicts it could otherwise avoid.”[8]

Part of the pushback on these airborne kinetic operations is the misperception that this is all the United States is capable of or committed to.  Obviously this is an erroneous characterization of U.S. policy and our campaigns.  The President has made it clear in his address this past May at National Defense University that “the use of force must be seen as part of a larger discussion we need to have about a comprehensive counterterrorism strategy – because for all the focus on the use of force, force alone cannot make us safe.  We cannot use force everywhere that a radical ideology takes root; and in the absence of a strategy that reduces the wellspring of extremism, a perpetual war – through drones or Special Forces or troop deployments – will prove self-defeating.”[9]

The U.S. government should build on the President’s speech. This effort should explain the place of drones in our overall strategy while correcting the erroneous notion that these strikes are the centerpiece of the American approach. Additionally, we should consistently explain the application of appropriate international law in armed conflict. Whether a target is a lawful target is a matter of international law.  Whether a target is a prosecutable criminal who should be arrested and brought to trial is a different question.  The notion that conflict with a terrorist organization is simply a matter of law enforcement and that we are bound to capture, detain, counsel and try prisoners in a judicial setting is an illusion that should be examined with some caution if not outright debunked.  One can be, as the United States has been for more than a decade, in an armed conflict with a non-state. The Supreme Court has held that the United States was in a non-international conflict that crossed borders and that the law of non-international armed conflicts governed.  All that really meant was that the United States could identify and target those engaged in directing or carrying out terrorist attacks.  How much into the support structure—training, supplying, protecting, and financing—one could go with attacks is a matter of ongoing debate.[10]

On the practical side, Bowden concluded in his own Atlantic essay that drones may be imperfect but they are less risky to civilian populations than raids with ground forces.  In sum, there is no need to play the troubled Hamlet.  With prudence and strategy, as Shakespeare noted, we can “take arms against a sea of troubles, And by opposing end them.”

---

[1] Mark Bowden, “The Killing Machines.” The Atlantic, September 2013.http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/09/the-killing-machines-how-to-think-about-drones/309434/

[2] Daniel Byman, A High Price: The Triumphs & Failures of Israeli Counterterrorism (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2011).

[3] Daniel Byman, “Why Drones Work.” Foreign Affairs, July/August 2013, p. 32.

[4] Mark Bowden, “The Killing Machines.” The Atlantic, September 2013.  Accessed athttp://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/09/the-killing-machines-how-to-think-about-drones/309434/

[5] Barack Obama. “Remarks by the President at the National Defense University.” National Defense University, May 23, 2013. http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/05/23/remarks-president-national-defense-university

[6] Audrey Kurth Cronin, “Why Drones Fail.” Foreign Affairs, July/August 2013,p. 44.

[7] Doherty, B. (2013). A Weapon Failing to Keep Peace on Any Side. Retrieved Jul 12, 2013, fromwww.smh.com.au/world/a-weapon-failing-to-keep-peace-on-any-side-20130405-2hc6z.html.

[8] Daniel Byman, “Why Drones Work.” Foreign Affairs, July/August 2013, p. 33.

[9] Barack Obama. “Remarks by the President at the National Defense University.” National Defense University, Ft. McNair, DC, May 23, 2013. http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/05/23/remarks-president-national-defense-university

[10] Nicholas Rostow, “The Laws of War and the Killing of Suspected Terrorists, False Starts, Rabbit Holes and Dead Ends, Rutgers Law Review, Vol. 63:4, 2011, 1215–1233.

Both Mr. Hoffman and Mr. Kalikow work at the National Defense University in Washington DC.  These remarks are their own and do not reflect the policies or position of the National Defense University, the Department of Defense or the U.S. Government.

US obsession with terrorism - George Friedman

9/11 and the 9-Year War
By George Friedman
Stratfor, September 8, 2010

It has now been nine years since al Qaeda attacked the United States. It has been nine years in which the primary focus of the United States has been on the Islamic world. In addition to a massive investment in homeland security, the United States has engaged in two multi-year, multi-divisional wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, inserted forces in other countries in smaller operations and conducted a global covert campaign against al Qaeda and other radical jihadist groups.

In order to understand the last nine years you must understand the first 24 hours of the war — and recall your own feelings in those 24 hours. First, the attack was a shock, its audaciousness frightening. Second, we did not know what was coming next. The attack had destroyed the right to complacent assumptions. Were there other cells standing by in the United States? Did they have capabilities even more substantial than what they showed on Sept. 11? Could they be detected and stopped? Any American not frightened on Sept. 12 was not in touch with reality. Many who are now claiming that the United States overreacted are forgetting their own sense of panic. We are all calm and collected nine years after.

At the root of all of this was a profound lack of understanding of al Qaeda, particularly its capabilities and intentions. Since we did not know what was possible, our only prudent course was to prepare for the worst. That is what the Bush administration did. Nothing symbolized this more than the fear that al Qaeda had acquired nuclear weapons and that they would use them against the United States. The evidence was minimal, but the consequences would be overwhelming. Bush crafted a strategy based on the worst-case scenario.

Bush was the victim of a decade of failure in the intelligence community to understand what al Qaeda was and wasn’t. I am not merely talking about the failure to predict the 9/11 attack. Regardless of assertions afterwards, the intelligence community provided only vague warnings that lacked the kind of specificity that makes for actionable intelligence. To a certain degree, this is understandable. Al Qaeda learned from Soviet, Saudi, Pakistani and American intelligence during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and knew how to launch attacks without tipping off the target. The greatest failure of American intelligence was not the lack of a clear warning about 9/11 but the lack, on Sept. 12, of a clear picture of al Qaeda’s global structure, capabilities, weaknesses and intentions. Without such information, implementing U.S. policy was like piloting an airplane with faulty instruments in a snowstorm at night.

The president had to do three things: First, he had to assure the public that he knew what he was doing. Second, he had to do something that appeared decisive. Third, he had to gear up an intelligence and security apparatus to tell him what the threats actually were and what he ought to do. American policy became ready, fire, aim.

In looking back at the past nine years, two conclusions can be drawn: There were no more large-scale attacks on the United States by militant Islamists, and the United States was left with the legacy of responses that took place in the first two years after 9/11. This legacy is no longer useful, if it ever was, to the primary mission of defeating al Qaeda, and it represents an effort that is retrospectively out of proportion to the threat.

If I had been told on Sept.12, 2001, that the attack the day before would be the last major attack for at least nine years, I would not have believed it. In looking at the complexity of the security and execution of the 9/11 attack, I would have assumed that an organization capable of acting once in such a way could act again even more effectively. My assumption was wrong. Al Qaeda did not have the resources to mount other operations, and the U.S. response, in many ways clumsy and misguided and in other ways clever and targeted, disrupted any preparations in which al Qaeda might have been engaged to conduct follow-on attacks.

Knowing that about al Qaeda in 2001 was impossible. Knowing which operations were helpful in the effort to block them was impossible, in the context of what Americans knew in the first years after the war began. Therefore, Washington wound up in the contradictory situation in which American military and covert operations surged while new attacks failed to materialize. This created a massive political problem. Rather than appearing to be the cause for the lack of attacks, U.S. military operations were perceived by many as being unnecessary or actually increasing the threat of attack. Even in hindsight, aligning U.S. actions with the apparent outcome is difficult and controversial. But still we know two things: It has been nine years since Sept. 11, 2001, and the war goes on.

What happened was that an act of terrorism was allowed to redefine U.S. grand strategy. The United States operates with a grand strategy derived from the British strategy in Europe — maintaining the balance of power. For the United Kingdom, maintaining the balance of power in Europe protected any one power from emerging that could unite Europe and build a fleet to invade the United Kingdom or block its access to its empire. British strategy was to help create coalitions to block emerging hegemons such as Spain, France or Germany. Using overt and covert means, the United Kingdom aimed to ensure that no hegemonic power could emerge.

The Americans inherited that grand strategy from the British but elevated it to a global rather than regional level. Having blocked the Soviet Union from hegemony over Europe and Asia, the United States proceeded with a strategy whose goal, like that of the United Kingdom, was to nip potential regional hegemons in the bud. The U.S. war with Iraq in 1990-91 and the war with Serbia/Yugoslavia in 1999 were examples of this strategy. It involved coalition warfare, shifting America’s weight from side to side and using minimal force to disrupt the plans of regional aspirants to gain power. This U.S. strategy also was cloaked in the ideology of global liberalism and human rights.

The key to this strategy was its global nature. The emergence of a hegemonic contender that could challenge the United States globally, as the Soviet Union had done, was the worst-case scenario. Therefore, the containment of emerging powers wherever they might emerge was the centerpiece of American balance-of-power strategy.

The most significant effect of 9/11 was that it knocked the United States off its strategy. Rather than adapting its standing global strategy to better address the counterterrorism issue, the United States became obsessed with a single region, the area between the Mediterranean and the Hindu Kush. Within that region, the United States operated with a balance-of-power strategy. It played off all of the nations in the region against each other. It did the same with ethnic and religious groups throughout the region and particularly within Iraq and Afghanistan, the main theaters of the war. In both cases, the United States sought to take advantage of internal divisions, shifting its support in various directions to create a balance of power. That, in the end, was what the surge strategy was all about.

The American obsession with this region in the wake of 9/11 is understandable. Nine years later, with no clear end in sight, the question is whether this continued focus is strategically rational for the United States. Given the uncertainties of the first few years, obsession and uncertainty are understandable, but as a long-term U.S. strategy — the long war that the U.S. Department of Defense is preparing for — it leaves the rest of the world uncovered.

Consider that the Russians have used the American absorption in this region as a window of opportunity to work to reconstruct their geopolitical position. When Russia went to war with Georgia in 2008, an American ally, the United States did not have the forces with which to make a prudent intervention. Similarly, the Chinese have had a degree of freedom of action they could not have expected to enjoy prior to 9/11. The single most important result of 9/11 was that it shifted the United States from a global stance to a regional one, allowing other powers to take advantage of this focus to create significant potential challenges to the United States.

One can make the case, as I have, that whatever the origin of the Iraq war, remaining in Iraq to contain Iran is necessary. It is difficult to make a similar case for Afghanistan. Its strategic interest to the United States is minimal. The only justification for the war is that al Qaeda launched its attacks on the United States from Afghanistan. But that justification is no longer valid. Al Qaeda can launch attacks from Yemen or other countries. The fact that Afghanistan was the base from which the attacks were launched does not mean that al Qaeda depends on Afghanistan to launch attacks. And given that the apex leadership of al Qaeda has not launched attacks in a while, the question is whether al Qaeda is capable of launching such attacks any longer. In any case, managing al Qaeda today does not require nation building in Afghanistan.

But let me state a more radical thesis: The threat of terrorism cannot become the singular focus of the United States. Let me push it further: The United States cannot subordinate its grand strategy to simply fighting terrorism even if there will be occasional terrorist attacks on the United States. Three thousand people died in the 9/11 attack. That is a tragedy, but in a nation of over 300 million, 3,000 deaths cannot be permitted to define the totality of national strategy. Certainly, resources must be devoted to combating the threat and, to the extent possible, disrupting it. But it must also be recognized that terrorism cannot always be blocked, that terrorist attacks will occur and that the world’s only global power cannot be captive to this single threat.

The initial response was understandable and necessary. The United States must continue its intelligence gathering and covert operations against militant Islamists throughout the world. The intelligence failures of the 1990s must not be repeated. But waging a multi-divisional war in Afghanistan makes no strategic sense. The balance-of-power strategy must be used. Pakistan will intervene and discover the Russians and Iranians. The great game will continue. As for Iran, regional counters must be supported at limited cost to the United States. The United States should not be patrolling the far reaches of the region. It should be supporting a balance of power among the native powers of the region.

The United States is a global power and, as such, it must have a global view. It has interests and challenges beyond this region and certainly beyond Afghanistan. The issue there is not whether the United States can or can’t win, however that is defined. The issue is whether it is worth the effort considering what is going on in the rest of the world. Gen. David Petraeus cast the war in terms of whether the United States can win it. That’s reasonable; he’s the commander. But American strategy has to ask another question: What does the United States lose elsewhere while it focuses on the future of Kandahar?

The 9/11 attack shocked the United States and made counterterrorism the centerpiece of American foreign policy. That is too narrow a basis on which to base U.S. foreign policy. It is certainly an important strand of that policy, and it must be addressed, but it should be addressed through the regional balance of power. It is the good fortune of the United States that the Islamic world is torn by internal rivalries.

This is not dismissing the threat of terror. It is recognizing that the United States has done well in suppressing it over the past nine years but at a cost in other regions, a cost that can’t be sustained indefinitely and a cost that could well result in challenges more threatening than a rising Islamist militancy. The United States must now settle into a long-term strategy of managing terrorism as best as it can while not neglecting the rest of its interests.

After nine years, the issue is not what to do in Afghanistan but how the global power can return to managing all of its global interests, along with the war on al Qaeda.

9/11 and the 9-Year War - STRATFOR