The War in Iraq Is No Distraction

Just ask Afghanistan's ambassador to the UN:

For more than five years the U.S. has waged war in that landlocked, mountainous country. And at least since the liberation of Iraq, the White House has faced criticism that it is distracted from the war on terror in the country that hosted Osama bin Laden when he planned the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The president is facing a fresh round of such attacks now that he is "surging" American troops in Iraq in an effort to stabilize Baghdad. And in the process he's watching as his case for using democracy as a weapon against terrorism is swept away.

Zahir Tanin, Afghanistan's ambassador in New York, isn't one of those critics. He stopped by The Wall Street Journal's offices Thursday and, in offering his thoughts on the current situation in his country, ended up presenting a counterargument to those who would discount the importance of establishing legitimate democratic governments as bulwarks against terrorism. The Afghanistan of his youth, he said, looked nothing like the chaotic nation that the world saw after the fall of the Taliban. Kabul, where he was born, was once a "cosmopolitan city," he said. But decades of war, including years of Soviet domination, left the country in tatters and ripe for terrorists and the Taliban to assert their supremacy. By 2001 Afghanistan had become "a disrupted state."

His choice of words is instructive. In the war on terror the U.S. is facing an enemy that's not moored to a civilian population and doesn't feel bound by international conventions. But it is an enemy with territorial ambitions and intentions of disrupting the normal operations of civil society. Mr. Tanin, who was living in London and working for the BBC when the Taliban fell, sees progress made over the past five years and isn't now one of the president's critics. Elections have been held, roads have been built linking some of the larger cities, a small national military is taking shape, and a commercial economy, though still tiny, is up and running. All are buffers against the Taliban's return and a strong argument against the voices who've said for years that democracy can't be "imposed."

Those with some honest interest in the military arts might wish to look up the principles of mass and central position at some point; they'll come away with a clear understanding of why the Democrats' surrender policy is so stupid.