aw. RE: The Nobel Prize for War 2009 goes to ...

[David Morris]

http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2009/12/the-bin-laden-strategy.php

In his thorough history of 9/11 The Looming Tower, Lawrence Wright
makes a pretty persuasive case that Osama bin Laden’s goal in planning
out terrorist attacks throughout the 1990s was to suck the U.S. into a
Soviet-style war in Afghanistan. Bin Laden had no delusions about
turning the U.S. into a Muslim country. Instead, he wanted to pull
America into an expensive, dispiriting, unwinnable war—the sort of war
nearly every power that has invaded Afghanistan has had to extract
itself from, tail between legs. Wright writes that bin Laden was
initially dispirited at the ease with which U.S. forces removed the
Taliban from power.

The good news is that the United States is a lot richer and more
powerful than the Soviet Union was, and the Taliban’s backers are a
lot poorer and weaker than the mujahedeen’s backers were. So at the
end of the day, actually bleeding us into submission isn’t going to
work. Even in our weakened post-Bush, post-Iraq, post-recession state
we can afford to be sloppy with our allocation of resources. But that
doesn’t make it a good idea. As Matt Duss pointed out yesterday,
that’s why one of the strengths of the administration’s approach to
Afghanistan is its determination to avoid a purely open-ended
engagement. The precise nature of that commitment is, however, pretty
vague and they’re under pressure from the right to move in the most
open-ended direction possible. It’s important to resist that impulse
and keep America’s interests in Afghanistan in perspective relative to
our many other interests at home and around the world.