I find it a bit hard to believe that armed fanatics would lie low, only to be aroused from their slumber by U.S. war on Afg. Had they given up on their mission? Were they freshly inspired by B-52s? And why, if AQ is hot to kill Americans and destroy our property at home & abroad, why would the Bush admin not be serious about eradicating them? Just because they're using AQ as a pretext for larger imperial aims doesn't mean that crushing AQ isn't part of the imperial agenda. What's your evidence to the contrary?
Doug
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AQ focuses, and has focused, much more on Kashmir than on the U.S. The WTC attacks were mounted by a relatively small number of cells, directly involving a number in the dozens or small hundreds. The attacks on Kashmir involve training in dozens of camps, involving numbers in the thousands. Those camps, once again, are as prevalent in Pakistan as in Afghanistan. This was not news to Bush & Co.
AQ has always been responsive to the policies of its Pakistani patron in Kashmir. If they are launching unprecedented attacks in Kashmir - like those on the legislature in Srinagar and the parliament in New Delhi - you can be sure that at least some faction(s) within ISI is giving them the go-ahead. With the attacks, AQ signals that it is still very much alive. Faction(s) within the ISI supportive of AQ signal that Musharraf doesn't have the power to shut them down.
But the last question is the easiest: (1) Consider the immediate sequence of events after 9/11. The US announces a no-holds-barred war on terrorism, everywhere in the world. India is first out of the gate to align with the US. The US spurns India's offer to serve as a staging area for the coming war on terrorism, allies instead with Pakistan, and modifies its war on terrorism to a war on terrorism "with global capabilities" - excluding the "local" terrorism of AQ in Kashmir.
(2) Colin Powell travels to Pakistan ca. October 10, just days before the Srinagar bombing. During the visit he, in effect, endorses the Pakistani position that the Kashmiri conflict should be settled by plebiscite. This was front-page news in FT - the US media missed the story. The Srinagar bombing occasions only formulaic condemnation, but no real U.S. pressure on Pakistan to reign in this part of the AQ network. The December attack on parliament in New Delhi gets a similar response.
(3) The most recent AQ attack in Kashmir is timed to coincide with the visit of a US envoy to India, while India has troops massed on the border. As U.S. envoy, what do you do? (A) Quietly caution India against going to war. (B) Hold a press conference and announce that the struggle against AQ is one and indivisible, and that India has the right to retaliate against AQ no less than the US. The latter is consistent with the "war against terrorism" thesis. The former is what happened.
(4) Outside of Afghanistan, where are the AQ militants most strongly concentrated? In descending order of importance: Pakistan, Algeria, Egypt. Who is harboring bin Laden and Omar now? Pakistan. What happened when the U.S. lifted the siege of Kunduz long enough for the ISI to airlift out its officers? The ISI also airlifted out Taliban and AQ cadre. So tell me: if this is fundamentally a war against terrorism rather than extension of imperial might, then why isn't Pakistan denounced as part of the "axis of evil" rather than a country whose links with AQ are minimal if they exist at all (Iraq), a country violently opposed to AQ and Taliban (Iran) and a country which has nothing at all to do with this (N Korea)?
Hell, Doug, even capturing bin Laden has become a distinctly secondary objective. We know where the concentrations of AQ strength are, and NONE of them are the objects of the next phase of the war. It's clear that crushing AQ isn't part of the imperial agenda because we've stopped trying to crush AQ. As soon as we announced that Pakistan - AQ's creator and patron - was our "ally" in this war, it was entirely predictable that the AQ camps outside Afghanistan would go untouched.
Does anyone on this list have any evidence that the U.S. is now actively engaged in an attempt to crush the very substantial remaining capability of AQ, or that the new foci of our military mobilizations will do anything to degrade AQ's capabilities?
MM