In the Times, Gerard Baker tells us to “Cheer up – we’re winning this War on Terror“:
Until the US-led invasion in 2001, Afghanistan was the cockpit of ascendant Islamist terrorism… Between 1998 and 2005 there were five big terrorist attacks against Western targets – the bombings of the US embassies in Africa in 1998, the attack on the USS Cole in 2000, 9/11, and the Madrid and London bombings in 2004 and 2005. All owed their success either exclusively or largely to Afghanistan’s status as a training and planning base for al-Qaeda. In the past three years there has been no attack on anything like that scale. Al-Qaeda has been driven into a state of permanent flight.
I’m no expert but that looks like a Black Swan waiting to happen. The rest of his piece is equal parts hackwork and guesswork:
- “Afghanistan has been a signal success”! No actual metrics for success provided, of course – that would make it too easy for somebody to point out that it hasn’t been much of a success at all.
- The surge “has been a triumph of US military planning and execution”! Well, so was the initial invasion – but things didn’t go so well after that, which is why we needed the surge in the first place.
- The crazed head-choppers of al-Qaeda have caused “the discrediting of the Islamist creed and its appeal”! Well possibly, but it’s hard to see how we get to take any sort of credit for that.
And so on, and so forth, until we get to my favourite moment:
It’s only their apologists in the Western media who really failed to see the intrinsic evil of Islamists. Those who have had to live with it have never been in much doubt about what it represents. Ask the people of Iran. Or those who fled the horrors of Afghanistan under the Taleban.
Ah, the “intrinsic evil of Islamists”. They’re not like us, you know – they’re more like mutant nazis or alien demons, which means we can kill as many of them as we like. Oh, did you notice Baker cheekily slipping in the Iran = Taleban meme at the end there? Roll on the next installment of the Long War.