If we are talking about Al Qaeda and the whole reason for why we are in Afghanistan allegedly is this threat from Al Qaeda which has been severely exaggerated, then at least understand their motives. Their chief motives are the Indian occupation of Kashmir, the Israeli and American backed occupation of Palestine. These are the motives. If your goal is to weaken Al Qaeda, understand their motives, address their grievances. This is not some James Bond villain the wants to attack the U.S. for no reason. These people who have grievances, the same grievances that have been troubling people around the world for decades. They were once explained using a secular Marxist nationalist discourse, today it has become a more religious discourse; but the grievances have remained the same. So why, if your goal is to weaken Al Qaeda, are you attacking the Taliban? The Taliban being a local movement with a very limited and unsophisticated ideology. Al Qaeda exists to much larger extent in Pakistan yet there are no American troops in Pakistan, so why do you need such a huge military footprint in Afghanistan were there is no Al Qaeda really if they are coming in from Pakistan?

In Pakistan you do not have this American presence and yet you have been relatively successful. There been no attacks on America thanks to intelligence, interdiction, heightened security. Al Qaeda isn’t really a threat. You have a couple of hundred relatively unsophisticated guys. They used their A team on September 11 and it was tragic, but it wasn’t that significant and didn’t really affect the U.S. What affected the US was the American response internally and abroad. Al Qaeda isn’t really a big deal, but even if you think it’s a big deal, even if you think this is a huge threat that really deserves so much of our resources, understand their grievances and address them.

If your remove Palestine and Kashmir, you’d have way less people in the world who support Al Qaeda, who want to join it. Instead, what we are doing is increasing the occupation of a Muslim country. Although Obama mentioned the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, he mentioned Al Qaeda presence in Afghanistan, what about the American occupation of Afghanistan? What about all the innocent people who being killed there today thanks to American counter-insurgency, counter terrorism operations only further increasing ethnic tensions? You are going to have a civil war in Afghanistan between Tajiks and Pashtuns at some point. It is going more and more in that direction.