As we rapidly approach the ten year anniversary of the mass murderous jihad terrorist attacks on 9/11/2001, the complete lack of American geostrategic vision becomes more glaringly apparent, on all fronts, domestic and international, military and non-military.
We have failed miserably to identify the enemy ideology—classical jihad, a mainstream, living Islamic institution, and the major contemporary nation-states whose axis of jihad confronts America: Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Iran—soon to be joined, it appears, by heavily militarized (and re-Islamized) Turkey, as well as heavily-militarized and Muslim Brotherhood “spiritualized,” post-Mubarak, Egypt.
Two other expressions of this complete absence of vision in the decade since 9/11 are the failure to secure our borders, or exploit with appropriate urgency our vast untapped resources of natural gas, shale oil (witness the stark contrast vis a vis massive development of tar sands by our neighbor to the north, Canada), and offshore oil, or even develop “greenhouse gas neutral” nuclear power.
Now after ten years of almost meaningless dithering in Afghanistan—at great cost of US blood and treasure—our jihadist, still nuclear-armed enemy, Pakistan, is poised to impose its will on “our man Karzai’s” Afghanistan. MEMRI has the grim details:
The U.S. strategy to secure Afghanistan perhaps does not take into account the Pakistani drive to control Afghanistan. A U.S.-driven strategy to secure large parts of Afghanistan and a complete security transition cannot be achieved unless the issue of Pakistani militant sanctuaries is addressed effectively. The ISI-supported Taliban, especially the younger and ideologically committed of them, will further destabilize Pakistan and push it into a Somalia-like security crisis.
