Sort of. Depriving al Qaeda of training camps is something useful.
Useful, yes, but not as useful to us as we might like to believe. Not all of the people training at the Al Qaeda camps were terrorists. The majority, in fact, were simple footsoldiers receiving basic military training, after which they were sent back to be grunts in various insurgencies and wars. To do that sort of training you need fairly large facilities. The training needed for pure terrorist operations involves a far smaller number of people and is much easier to hide. If there are people training for a new assault on the US, they are as likely - or more likely -to be training in Europe or the US as in a large scale camp.
The risk in Afghanistan, of course, is the degree to which we are invested in the Karzai government, which is fairly high, despite the reluctance to actually invest substantial resources. If Karzai looks likely to fall, how far are we willing to go in support? The Islamists would love to see us sending troops.
We congratulated ourselves mightily on our conquest of the Taliban, and it was a well managed operation, but many powers before us have found Afghanistan easy to take and hard to hold. |
