Afghan President Hamid Karzai said Wednesday that terrorist havens outside Afghanistan "must be destroyed" in order to halt what he called a "murderous campaign" against the Afghan people waged by infiltrators from abroad.
What Mr. Krazai is saying in not so clear words is that we are fighting an asynchronous war in Afghanistan (and also in Iraq), and he’s losing it.
“In his address to the U.N. General Assembly, Karzai did not specify who was to blame for the recent spate of attacks that have targeted schools, clinics, aid workers and international peacekeepers. But he noted that most of the attacks took place in southern Afghanistan — where it borders with Pakistan's tribal areas. "Terrorism does not emanate from within Afghanistan; Afghanistan is its worst victim," Karzai said. "Military action in Afghanistan alone, therefore, will not deliver our shared goal of eliminating terrorism.
We’re making the same mistakes we made in Vietnam and allowing the enemy to have sanctuaries that we are not allowed to touch. In September of this year, Bush said he uses lessons from Vietnam War in his leadership of Iraq war. "I remember the tactical decisions being made out of the White House during that period of time," Bush told conservative columnists. "I thought it was a mistake then and I think it's a mistake now." Whatever lessons he learned, they were the wrong lessons.
But Krazai finally gets it.
"We must look beyond Afghanistan to the sources of terrorism. We must destroy terrorist sanctuaries beyond Afghanistan, dismantle the elaborate networks in the region that recruit, train, finance, arm and deploy terrorists," he said.
We must allow the military to fight within the designated theater of war and prohibit the enemy from using sanctuaries where they can command and control safely and strike from these safe havens.
But the theater of battle is not just on the battlefield. It’s in the non-Muslim countries like our own; in our cities and neighborhoods. We sit quietly while local radical mosques are used as command and control, propaganda, and recruitment centers basking in the freedom of the asynchronous war and the support of the apologists and appeasers on the Left.
It’s time we recognize the asynchronous nature of this war and how the Islamists are using it to their advantage. If we are to win this war, we need to move the politicians out of the way and let the military fight in the entire theater of war.