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While Iraq's relevance to the war on terrorism is in dispute, the effort to eradicate al-Qaida and affiliated groups is lagging in Afghanistan and elsewhere.
President Bush said again last week that the U.S. military intervention in Iraq was necessary "to win the war on terror." But the president and the other top administration officials gathered with him on his Crawford, Texas, ranch once again failed to explain exactly how Iraq represents the logical front line in the war to eradicate the terrorists who attacked the United States two years ago. Nor did the president and his advisers have anything to say about Afghanistan, Indonesia and other locations where the real war against al-Qaida and affiliated terrorist groups is not going well. At such times, the war in Iraq appears to be more a diversion from the war on terrorism than a decisive battle in what will be a long and complex conflict.
National surveys show that about half of American voters believe Saddam Hussein bears responsibility for the Sept. 11 attacks. The Bush administration has never explicitly made that charge, and not a shred of evidence has been produced to support such a claim. However, the White House consistently has used vaguer allegations of links between Hussein and al-Qaida to bolster its case for war in Iraq. But even the case for those indirect links, like the purported evidence of Iraq's illegal weapons, has been crumbling since the war began.
Meanwhile, little attention is being paid to disturbing evidence that al-Qaida and terrorist groups linked to it are regaining strength and priming for new attacks. In Afghanistan, President Hamid Karzai's government is virtually powerless outside the capital of Kabul. In Afghanistan's countryside, rival warlords battle for control. Even more ominously, remnants of al-Qaida and the former Taliban regime are operating with impunity in a broad region along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Osama bin Laden and several of his associates are believed to be alive and active in that area.
Bin Laden may yet be captured or killed, and Afghanistan may yet be transformed into a stable democracy. But U.S. authorities missed their first, best opportunity to crush al-Qaida and the Taliban in Afghanistan and build a better society in their place. Only a few thousand more troops and a few billion dollars - a fraction of what we have committed to Iraq - could have finished off the war in Afghanistan and given the Karzai government the resources it needed to establish itself. NATO this week took command of an international force of 5,000 troops in Afghanistan, but their mission is limited to keeping the peace in and around Kabul. Karzai's pleas for broader help are still being ignored.
Then there are countries such as Indonesia, where links to al-Qaida are, unfortunately, much more obvious than they are in Iraq. This week, authorities identified a severed head found at the site of this month's bombing of a Marriott hotel in Jakarta as belonging to a member of Jemaah Islamiyah, a terrorist group affiliated with al-Qaida. The group also was responsible for the horrific bombings at a resort on the island of Bali last October. Bringing those criminals to justice surely is a crucial element of winning the war on terror, but the Bush administration has almost nothing to say on the subject.
The war in Iraq may yet advance the war on terror in ways the White House has not emphasized. The fall of Saddam Hussein helped to create the conditions in which Israel and the Palestinians could engage in new negotiations aimed at ending three years of violence. Hussein's fall also could have a chastening effect on Iran, Syria and other state sponsors of terrorism, although the Bush administration has not yet agreed on a strategy for extracting more constructive behavior from those governments.
With about 150,000 American forces still in harm's way in Iraq, the safety of our troops and the success of their mission is understandably the focus of Americans' concerns now. However, Iraq is not the only, or even the primary, battleground in the war against terrorism. If Iraq continues to divert our government's attention and resources from efforts to destroy the terrorist groups directly responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks and other acts of war, Hussein's fall will do nothing to strengthen the security of the United States.