What the hell did we go to war for, then?

Madeleine Bunting, in a commentary in today's Guardian, offers these thoughts on our "futile campaign" in Afghanistan:

Afghanistan offered the perfect solution to September 11 - a massive expiation of US anger and, more subtly, guilt. Dropping all those bombs felt doubly good: it was retaliation for a terrible crime, but also getting rid of an evil regime. The emotional rush was everything; whether the latter actually worked has fallen off most people's radar screen. They're not interested. The selective memory means that what is remembered is that a few women in Kabul threw off their burkas in November, not that many more women in northern Afghanistan have been raped since then in a wave of ethnic revenge against the Pashtun. Nor is anyone much interested that since the fall of the Taliban, the old lawlessness of highway looting and illegal road tolls has re-emerged. Or that in the past few months there have been at least two major conflicts between warlords - in Mazar-i-Sharif and in Gardez - as an uneasy truce awaits the results of next month's loya jirga.

She goes on to conclude that "the war was a crude and clumsy intervention which did little for the wretched Afghans, and even less for the struggle against terrorism."

Juxtapose Bunting's words with a story from the AP today, which quotes FBI Director Rober Mueller in a speech to the National Association of District Attorneys saying, "There will be another terrorist attack. We will not be able to stop it."

Well, goll-ee. With the FBI Director conceding that there's little, virtually nothing, that can be done to thwart a terrorist attack, perhaps we would like to recall Bush's words from September assuring the American people that we can and will go to the ends of the earth to stomp out terrorism. Such words were bald-faced lies back then, but perhaps these admissions (also by Cheney) that terrorism is, essentially, unstoppable will force people to reconsider whether waging (or at least threatening) war against the world is the course of action that will most protect Americans from blowback. Maybe responding to terrorism without committing terrorism would have been just as prudent, if not more so.