I just want to reiterate the fact that when we're fighting the al-Qaeda movement, we're an enemy of the al-Qaeda movement, we're seen as a soft target already, as the Liberia of immigration--I think that terminology was used by somebody. We have cells operating in Canada. Obviously they can operate more effectively against the United States if we're not too engaged in hunting them down. There is a psychological component of this, and if we do a “Somalia” with Afghanistan we're going to have all sorts of problems later on. The Americans learned this with 9/11. We will be viewed as weak; we will be viewed as much more vulnerable to manipulation, both in the information operations sphere and within our own society.
I could get into the regional implications around Afghanistan as well that relate to the Pakistani nuclear stockpile, people like A.Q. Khan, or what's going on in Iran. Do we really want to be the people who are going to facilitate the entry of a nuclear device onto American soil inadvertently? No, we don't. That's one of the reasons we're dealing with Pakistan. We've got to be very careful. One of the reasons we've been able to uncover some of the networks is through the cooperation of the Pakistanis. There is a link between the takedown of the A.Q. Khan nuclear Wal-Mart, the blocking of operations against airliners this summer, and what goes on in Afghanistan. These things are not delinked.
So this is why I'm talking about a fine line being crossed when we're dealing with this. You are correct in the sense that we are losing people because of part of this, but somebody is going to have to sit down and explain that this is for our greater good.