Staying in Afghanistan Is a Recipe for More Terrorism

Barack Obama is daring the terrorists. He's standing in their front yard. He's calling them out.Of course, that's not how it's reported. "US troops may stay in Afghanistan until 2024," was the understated headline in The Telegraph. Under negotiation is an agreement keeping 25,000 American troops in Afghanistan a full decade after the current withdrawal deadline. Also on the table are military bases that the United States doesn't want to give up...ever.This is madness. "If the job is not done," said the Russian ambassador to Kabul, "then several thousand troops...will not be able to do the job that 150,000 troops couldn't do."The only thing worse than the hopelessness of this plan is the backwardness of it. In an effort to prevent terrorism, we are continuing the very thing that creates terrorism: our presence!  Al Qaeda "has been precise in telling America the reasons [it's] waging war on us," according to CIA analyst Michael Scheuer, who tracked Osama bin Laden from 1996 to 1999. "None of the reasons have anything to do with our freedom, liberty, and democracy, but have everything to do with U.S. policies and actions in the Muslim world."In his book Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism, political scientist Robert Pape analyzed every known case of suicide bombers from 1980 to 2005. He found that "what nearly all suicide terrorist attacks have in common is a specific secular and strategic goal: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from territory that the terrorists consider to be their homeland." Specifically, he discovered that "al Qaeda is today less a product of Islamic fundamentalism than of a simple strategic goal: to compel the United States and its Western allies to withdraw combat forces from the Arabian Peninsula and other Muslim countries."The Obama administration can't pretend that it doesn't know this fact. In 2004, the Pentagon concluded that "American direct involvement in the Muslim World has paradoxically elevated the stature of and support for radical Islamists, while diminishing support for the United States to single-digits in some Arab societies. Muslims do not 'hate our freedom,' but rather, they hate our policies. [In] the eyes of the Muslim world, American occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq has not led to democracy there, but only more chaos and suffering."Firsthand accounts confirm these conclusions. British journalist Johann Hari interviewed former Islamic militants who had since rejected jihad. He probed them, in independent interviews, about what made them join the cause in the first place. "Every one of them said the Bush administration's response to 9/11 -- from Guantanamo to Iraq -- made jihadism seem more like an accurate description of the world." One of them put it this way: "You'd see Bush on the television building torture camps and bombing Muslims and you think -- anything is justified to stop this. What are we meant to do, just stand still and let him cut our throats?"New York Times reporter David Rohde saw this attitude up close when the Taliban held him hostage for seven months. Looking back on his captors, he remembered, "Commanders fixated on the deaths of Afghan, Iraqi and Palestinian civilians in military airstrikes, as well as the American detention of Muslim prisoners who had been held for years without being charged."These are the sad facts of a desperate region. We do not condone their violence, but we must understand their motives.American troops and bases in Afghanistan will only make it easier for terrorists and insurgents to recruit angry young men to fight and die for their cause. By extending the withdrawal deadline, we are not stopping terrorism at the source, as President Obama would have us believe. We are multiplying their ranks. We are taunting and humiliating them. We are endangering our nation.==========This op-ed was published in today's Hazleton Standard-Speaker.