Just Politics

[hap0206]

How goes it in the quagmire == maybe it is important to know your enemy (now dancing in the streets)
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Kabul has fallen, Afghanistan is lost, but jihadism is far from finished with us. As the late scholar Bernard Lewis noted in 1990, the roots of Muslim rage run deep. Groups like the Taliban, al Qaeda, ISIS and now ISIS-K measure their grievance with the West in millennia, not decades. Our long war may be over. To them it was only a battle.

Bloodthirsty madmen don’t hate America because Americans were in Afghanistan—or Saudi Arabia or Lebanon. Fanatics never need an excuse. The U.S. military’s presence in the greater Middle East was merely a pretense. They hated us before all that, because we are allied to the Zionists, because in their eyes we are decadent and irreligious, and, above all, because our culture has left theirs in the dust. They hate us because of their failure to keep up. Our successes embarrass them.

Leaving Afghanistan hasn’t made us safer. Ten U.S. Marines, two soldiers, a sailor and nearly 200 desperate Afghans were killed outside Kabul’s airport on Wednesday by men motivated by the same evil that animated Mohamed Atta, the snake-eyed ringleader of 9/11. The troops who died were in Kabul on a humanitarian mission, to protect, to help our friends escape Taliban reprisals. They were murdered in cold blood, like the 193 slaughtered on Madrid commuter trains in 2004, the 165 murdered across four days in Mumbai in 2008, the 52 slain in London on July 7, 2005, the 89 concertgoers mowed down at the Bataclan Theater and the 12 cartoonists butchered at the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris in 2015.

That’s leaving aside the beheadings, the stabbings and the cars plowed into crowds during the past 30 years. Islamism’s butcher’s bill is long and bloody. They were trying to kill us before 9/11; they won’t give up now.

It may take months or even years, but al Qaeda, ISIS and all the others will figure out how to hit us again. They will kill and maim scores of ordinary blameless people in offices, schools, airports, train stations, restaurants, night clubs, theaters, homes. All that matters to the jihadists is that the bodies will be American—or British, French, Dutch, Indian. All that matters is that their victims are outside the house of Islam. Death will come suddenly and violently for no reason other than the apocalyptic nihilism of jihadism.


In the months after 9/11, it was common to refer to what transpired on that clear, blue morning as “the tragic events of Sept. 11.” The phrase never sounded right. “Tragic” wasn’t expansive enough; “events” made it seem as if no one was responsible. Planes don’t fly into buildings and 3,000 lives aren’t snuffed out in an instant unless someone makes it so. The men who murdered that day had homes and families of their own. They had names. So did, and so does, the ideology that consumed them. Call it fundamentalism, extremism, terrorism. Call it bloodlust. Call it evil. Whatever you do, don’t minimize or rationalize jihadism by assuming it has demands that can be satisfied.

Reports of al Qaeda’s demise were always greatly exaggerated. Osama bin Laden is dead but for all anyone knows his right-hand man, Ayman al-Zawahiri, is alive and plotting. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed writes letters from his cell at Guantanamo Bay upbraiding the U.S. for its behavior in “Vietnam, Korea, Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden and Latin America.” With the U.S. limping out of Afghanistan, tomorrow looks like a brighter day than yesterday for both of these monsters. As Neil Young observed, rust never sleeps.

So what happens now? Do we retreat back across the oceans as before, build walls across our land borders, peek through the gaps in our battlements, and hope evil forgets about us? That didn’t work before. Why should it work this time?

There will be more 9/11-style plots. Perhaps the perpetrators have already slipped into the country. Perhaps they are en route in a C-17. Wherever they are, they are jubilant, optimistic, fired up in a way they haven’t been for 20 years.

As with 9/11, the next attack will prompt questions. How could this have happened? People will demand official answers. Why didn’t you stop it? Some will make the familiar argument that it’s better to fight them over there than over here. The long war goes on.

Mr. Hennessey is the Journal’s deputy editorial features editor.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/afghanistan-war-jihad-radical-islamist-9-11-september-terrorist-attack-massacre-biden-11630095211?mod=e2fb&fbclid=IwAR2QcMZHygwPXsgogF6ToFs4ZvGSxgtD7RaaE7-LNLRX5oUabLrWSycwuD8