Sanman, you suffer from the defect of believing your own assumptions. I know one of the people on your list, and that person does not support the Islamists, as you say. You don't know what you are talking about.

elcid, did you see that press conference call by Brzinski yesterday? He used it to state how alarmed he was that Condoleeza Rice was touring the country, giving speeches in defense of Whitehouse national security policy. He said that this amounted to a Rice politicizing her position by participating in election politics. It shouldn't be a surprise that Brzinski of all people is mouthing off on this. Because he is very ardently opposed to the Bush policy. Think about it -- his political views are centred around containing Russia, and militant Islam would play a key part in achieving that. Therefore people like him will do anything they can to denounce the Bush administration officials. The Iraq invasion undermines Brzinski's goals, because Turkey is part of the containment of Russia, and any invasion or destabilization of Iraq naturally threatens Turkey's stability (especially because of the Kurdish issue). Because of Brzinski's particular ethnic slant, he's acutely aware of all balances of power surrounding Russia -- he's the guy who first got the US into bed with ISI to back the Islamists in Afghanistan. I'm not trying to merely single him out -- after all, he's just one member of a entire ethno-ideological bloc composed of people like him. Blood is thicker than water, after all. You have to learn to see the post-9/11 debates through an ethnic lens, since ethnicity is the basis for many of the "principled ideological" stands taken by the participants. When mass graves were unearthed in the Balkans, the "principled" people were yelling "Aha Serbs! Gotcha! Clinton was right about you!" but when mass graves are unearthed in post-Saddam Iraq, the same "principled" people snort "big deal, who cares?" For them, the glass will be called half-empty or half-full depending on whose glass it is.

elcid, I would point out in this case that supporting the Islamists has unleashed a very ugly peril that the US may not be able to contain. These people may be much worse than the Soviets ever were. That in itself may have been part of the attraction in supporting them, since it was felt that it takes a thief to catch a thief. But the Soviets never plunged airliners into metropolitan areas. At least Americans could go about their daily lives without threat of imminent attack, and the threat of nuclear war was always kept in check. At least there were rules to the Cold War game, that both sides largely adhered to. With the Islamists, anything goes and anything can happen. They are a highly dispersed and largely invisible threat. When you feel the safest, and when things are the quietest, that's when the danger of attack is greatest. There's no peace of mind that way. And while it was possible to disabuse and deindoctrinate people of their fantasy communist beliefs, how can you de-Islamize people? War of conversion? The US doesn't have the moral constitution to do that, whereas the other side has no similar restraint. If you're the only guy pulling his punches while the other guy isn't, then that's a recipe for the other guy's victory.

Regarding how to do things without Pakistan -- yes, I think the regional map would look much nicer without Pakistan. If Pakistan were replaced with its constituent ethnic states, the region and the world would be a lot safer. There could be the independent nations of Sindh, Punjab, Baluchistan, and Pashtunistan. Pashtunistan would incorporate the Pashtun-majority region of Pakistan's NorthWest Frontier Province as well as the southern half of Afghanistan (including Kabul). The northern portions of Afghanistan would go to Uzbekistan and Tajikistan respectively. This would provide the US and international community with more possible land routes into energy-rich Central Asia, and therefore less inclination to foment ground wars and other machiavellian games to capture pipeline routes. The Pashtuns, Uzbeks and Tajiks of a former Afghanistan won't have to fight, since they'd have their respective territories where each could assert their linguistic and cultural traditions. The artificial Durand Line created by the British which artificially imposed a partition of the Pashtun people needs to be undone. Half the Pashtuns are living in Afghanistan, battling to control the Tajiks and Uzbeks who chafe under their majority rule. The other half of Pashtuns are living in Pakistan, battling to protect their own culture and language, and chafing under the majority rule of Punjabis. Pakistan had tried to solve this problem by using pan-Islamic fundamentalism not just as a national glue, but also to take over neighboring Afghanistan to swallow it as well, making it into a satellite state. Well, that whole Taliban project gave AlQaeda and other pan-Islamists their launchpad, and resulted in 9/11. The key then is to end these battles surrounding the Pashtuns, by giving them their own homeland. Giving the Pashtuns their own sovereign territory and borders will keep the ethnic turf battles away, and will deny the Islamists any opportunity for entry there. Otherwise without this, then Pashtuns will continue to flock to the Taliban, out of bitter resentment at a Kabul govt that they fear will pander to the minority-dominated north at their expense. That's why southern Afghanistan is still a bastion of Taliban support. Likewise, Pashtuns in northern Pakistan will continue to be battle against domination by Pakistan's Punjabi majority. Here, the Taliban will capitalize on the anti-establishment resentment against the central govt of Musharraf. Pakistan has traditionally resorted to pan-Islamism as a natural glue to counter all its internal ethnic contradictions. That's why your combination of bribery and coercion towards Musharraf is unlikely to have a lasting effect in the war against Islamic fundamentalism. Compared to the forces which compel pan-Islamism, your aid packages and arms packages amount to "p1ssing into the wind".

I didn't say you were wrong about everyone on your list. Ziggy is not whom I meant. But you don't have him pegged exactly either. I agree with him that the Turks are allies, and I think we need to honor and respect them. I am impressed with the Turks on our side in Korea, and I know of some incidents in which the sight of Turkish uniforms was very welcome indeed. There are many kinds of Muslims in the world, and Turks are best not thought of as just like Arabs or Indonesians or Iranians or ... you get the idea. I think you grossly overgeneralize, and that is a major source of your problem. But I don't share Ziggy's politics on most occasions. I would take Condie any day over him. But it is not fair to charge him as you have done - it is simply not his position.

Maybe it helps to be old - and a veteran of the Cold War. I think you overreact and grossly exaggerate the threat of radical Islam. No one yet knows, but my impression is these people are much less dangerous than the USSR was. They are not doing very well in the war. I expect their cause will die from discouragement in a few years, much less than it took for people in general to stop believing in communism. Beyond your exaggeration of the size of the problem, I think you mistate the cause. We did not "unleash" radical Islam. Our limited support during the Soviet-Afghan war only contributed to what they were doing anyway. The provision of stingers was effective, but probably not decisive in itself. Anyway, if you must blame someone, it may be I am the guy. I certaily advocated the Stingers well before the decision was taken, and I have yet to meet another who says he advocated them sooner. It just does not make sense to say this sort of think "unleashed" the war OBL declared about 1992. There is little reason to think he would not have done the same thing absent our limited support in Afghanistan. I do not even think our abstention from that would have changed the Soviet defeat in that country or the year of their pullout.

El Cid wrote: "Maybe it helps to be old - and a veteran of the Cold War." I think you hit the nail on the head here. In general the fellows like you, myself, and a few others who are Cold War vets and a bit older than the norm hold an entirely different view. Of course I happen to think that our view of the world, the US, Europe, etc. is more accurate! But the reality is, we know what it is like to fight a decades long conflict and what it takes to do it. Both realism and idealism are called for, in an appropriate mix. This generation of warriors appears to me to go too far to one extreme or the other other. El Cid wrote: "I think you overreact and grossly exaggerate the threat of radical Islam." In my opinion the current "war" is another battle in the very long conflict between Western and Eastern (Middle Eastern, not Chinese) civilizations. It is also, in my opinion, a battle of desperation for the Eastern civilization, they have steadily lost for the past few centuries and what we are seeing is really a final attempt to stave off defeat.

The lesson I learned from the Cold War is that we can win. I have a poster over my desk showing the Berlin Wall being torn down 9 November of 1989. It was given to me by a former citizen of east Germany. I watched news reports about the Wall going up as a child. It, and the struggle it symbolized, seemed permanent and immutable. Through all my childhood and then years of miltary service I never thought it would fall. I never thought we could win. I thought that the best we would see was a tense truce with bloody brushfire wars for decades to come. I was wrong. The people who believed in victory were right. The people who believed that freedom was a universal desire were right. The people who believed that the ideals of our founding fathers are the most potent ideology in history were right. It was the naysayers who were wrong. The learned academicians, the activists and demonstrators, the news networks and papers. They were all wrong, and so were the trendy politicians. We could win, and we did. We won, and changed the world for the better doing it. We can win this struggle, and change the world for the better.

Timon wrote: "We won, and changed the world for the better doing it. We can win this struggle, and change the world for the better." Just remember, the same naysayers, including the French and German governments, Kerry and the liberal Democrats, and many more, are at it again. Don't confront evil, don't take the war to them, avoid confrontation, the best you can hope for is to return to the 80's and 90's when terrorism was a nusiance for other people.

Why? Why should we respect your mythology? Why should we respect your disfunctional and bloody-handed culture? Why should we pretend that hundreds of years of Islamic imperialism, invasions and sword-point conversions never happened? Let's talk about Abu Ghraib: Americans mock the tiny penises of Arab prisoners. Arabs slowly cut the heads off of defenseless prisoners. Tell us who's committing "outrageous atrocities" again?