General cluestickery:

"prima facie"

القاعدة: al-Qaida, al-Qa'ida, el-Qaida, or al Qaeda, never "Al Quaeda"

Cheers for the Latin up date. For a dead language it don't half keep changing its spelling a lot.

As for al Whotsit, I deliberately can't be assed to learn to spell correctly one of its variants because I'm not even sure I believe it actually exists except in the fevered imagination of the CIA. So I deliberately spell it wrongly.

However if it was you that supplied a refresher on the use of the term "gitmo" last night thanks a lot. That is of course pure mil slang and I for one will not be using it again just because I can't be assed to write out Guantanamo. That place must not be made light of by attributing it a nick name.

There's no right way to spell Al Qaeda in English. The Q is not a Q at all but a glottal stop. Most Americans can't say it and you certainly can't write it. There's also no correct way to write Omar--no O involved there either. It might even be more accurate to write it 'mar, because that's what an American hears. Or Ka-ah_Ayda. So ha!

Anywho. If your "goal" is to weaken non-Sharia governments, then I'd say you have no goal at all. Where would that stop? Which governments in what order? And according to what rubric? Is France a legitimate target? How about Switzerland? If you're goal is transnational, in general, I'd say you haven't a very good chance of accomplishing anything, and thus give no good reason for any group you oppose to consider your goals as legitimate. That was, I thought, in stark contrast to other groups that are Islamic national movements that I referenced. In his preface to the Iron Cage, Rashid Khalidi points out that the Israeli government was quite fond of giving visas to members of the Islamic Brotherhood in Palestine so that they could go fight in the Afghani resistance--those Palestinians had religious goals rather than political ones, and their jihad was open ended. A fact which sat well with Israelis, who were into the idea at the time that Islamic organizing would be a good way to disperse the political threat of secular Palestinian orgs. Specifically, because the goals of the former were so broad and their leaders so monomaniacal, that you could literally point them in any direction like a loaded gun.

My goal in bringing that up was to invite people to consider what an Islamic movement is, and how variable and diverse they tend to be and have been.

Damn. You have a point there. I can type Guantanamo almost as fast as the nickname. I think I'll join you in your boycott of that other name.

Well, I am off to read some more of one of the many, many different translations of .... (better not say it) ...

Well, I am off to read some more of one of the many, many different translations of .... (better not say it) ...

The clown has no class, he sneered at Alan Watts.

What the press, mainstream and otherwise, did not ever do was make Afghanistan, and post-Cold War international terrorism, a "conversation." A discourse, if you want to get fancy. I believe that many people discover things about the world, and then look around to see if anyone else is discussing those little nuggets. If not, if there is no discourse, they drop these uncomfortable facts and move on to something with more numbers behind it.

I re-read this paragraph 3 times to make sure I got everything in it. This is the essence. It makes no difference whether people are 'informed' if no conversation ensues, and if it doesn't, it's assumed that the story 'didn't have legs' as Dan Froomkin always says. But, just for the record, Carlotta Gall complained vociferously that her stories out of Afghanistan were not printed in the first place (it took several months to get one of them into print, I remember her saying), so some of the potential conversations died on the editor's desk, not in the public space.

There are two culpabilities here. First, it really is our responsibility, I agree with you, to make sure important stories get discussed and get noticed. But second, if the story is important, then it is the responsibility of those in the press to do what Carlotta Gall did with the above mentioned story, and fight hard and long to make sure it is brought to peoples attention whether they think it is titillating or not.

[Segue into omooex's complaint about not knowing what I think about Afghanistan:]

On the day I was born, the world had 2.6 billion people or so. Now it is approaching 7 billion. I saw Paul Erlich speak once (about 5 years ago), and he was asked what he thought the sustainable population of the world was. He noted that conflict becomes totally inevitable when the world is not big enough to accommodate all the lifestyles that people are comfortable with. Because of that, he put the sustainable population of the world, the population that would support a world without war, starvation, or destruction of nature, at 2 billion people.

My specialty by training is complex and chaotic dynamical systems. In system after system, when the networking ties become too inevitable and strong (when the coupling between non-linear degrees of freedom becomes inevitable), the system moves to a complex system generically (generic means something that is true on a dense intersection of open, dense sets in a Baire space but never mind, here it means typically, and usually (but not always) it means close to almost always).

I fundamentally do not believe that the world that people like heru-ur wish for, a world where no one disturbs each other and all live in harmony by virtue of that, can exist at all at 7 billion people. I don't believe economies can be un-global, I don't believe the climate or ecology can be ignored, I don't believe it is possible to have two cultures that don't affect each other. So for me, the question isn't whether or not to interact with Afghanistan, it's how to interact with Afghanistan.

I don't believe the U.S. invaded Afghanistan in 2001. The record says they did not, the ICRC even questioned whether or not the U.S. could hold enemy prisoners at all because it wasn't engaged in the conflict in a way that would permit it.

I believe that in December 2001, at a meeting being chaired by an Afghan working for the United Nations, a large number of countries signed a document ending the Afghan Civil War, and mapping out a regime of reconstruction and development for Afghanistan, which was considered a failed state at the time. That document, plus those that followed it, are the authorization for the ISAF forces, including those put under NATO joint command from the U.S. in 2006. That group of troops make up the majority of the troops in Afghanistan, and in that group, the U.S. soldiers are a plurality, but not a majority. Their authorization is backed by a consortium of 60+ "donor nations", and by U.N. Security Council resolutions.

There is another group of troops in Afghanistan, 11,000 U.S. forces who are operating under the authority of the September 16, 2001 AUMF. I am totally unsure what their mission is, since virtually all of the people they are authorized to fight in the AUMF are in Pakistan and have been there since December/January 2001/2002. As far as I can glean, they are the only forces in the world who are operating under that AUMF, and also as far as I know, the U.S. forces under NATO are not operating under any explicit invocation of the War Powers Act or any other explicit declaration of war from the U.S. Congress -- unlike almost all of the other nations operating under ISAF, who all got explicit authorizations from their parliaments.

I believe that the U.S., and the other nations in the donor nations group, gave their word to the Afghans that they would make it possible for the Afghans to fix their country and end the war there. I believe that in that part of the world, much as it was in the U.S. until the corpies destroyed that little bit of morality, giving one's word was a sacred thing, and that the obligation is to do or die on it, unless you go back to the person you gave it to and beg forgiveness and permission to do otherwise.

Because I believe in complex systems, I also believe that the only way to do these things is to get the facts at all times and be nimble about changing what isn't working and trying what seems to work. So no, I don't know how you state an exit strategy for a development program like the one in Afghanistan. But we're obligated, and the place isn't self-sustainable yet. So I don't believe in packing it in and letting them rot in hell.