It's a stretch to imply that that the international jihadi movement wouldn't be even stronger if one of its main governmental sponsors was still intact.
Chris Doss:
FWIW the US operation in Afghanistan was and is completely supported by everybody who lives around Afghanistan, with the exception of parts of Pakistan. Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Russia, India were all for. Moscow proposed a joint strike on the Taliban to Washington in 1999. The Talibs were destabilizing the whole area and trying to colonize Chechnya.
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All of which seems very logical and sensible and right.
The Talibs were indeed mad and bad by many reliable accounts and were surely providing shelter to al Qaeda - for the moment, the planet's most discussed terrorist organization (though who knows what wild innovations the future holds?).
And yet, there's a problem.
Although geo-politics is often treated like a branch of temporal engineering - something only the loftiest of minds can grasp - it's possible to create models based upon very common, everyday events.
So, by replacing *Taliban* with gang and *Afghanistan* with neighborhood you can imagine the following scenario.
...
A ruthless gang has taken control of a downtrodden neighborhood. Residents welcomed them at first because they seemed to bring some amount of order. Soon, it's clear they're psychotic.
Nearly everyone wants them to go.
The police intend to take decisive action. If you were to ask people threatened by this gang the following:
* Do you want the police to arrest or otherwise neutralize this gang?
The answer would be a resounding yes.
And as long as you limit your description and discussion of the police's action to the successful removal of the gang you're likely to see only praiseworthy activities.
But let's add a bit to the question.
* Do you want the police to arrest or otherwise neutralize this gang, even though, in the course of doing so many of you will be killed and, after it's all over, they'll leave a lot of lesser gangsters in charge of your lives? And oh, by the way, you'll be living in the rubble left behind from the operation (along with that created by decades of neglect and violence) though they do pledge to rebuild things...at some point.
Now it all becomes murkier and what seemed, at first, easy look, to be a sterling operation to remove a threat morphs into the clearing of the stage of one set of bad actors in preparation for the arrival of another.
Or, to put it another way, the accomplishment of not much really, in the long view.
...
Even by the very narrow measure of removing Afghanistan from the list of *terrorist havens* the US invasion will, unless that country receives the full attention it deserves, be seen by future historians as only a brief interruption of a powerful trend.
al Qaeda will be replaced by some other, even sharper group or groups and the lethal game will continue.
.d.