A week ago, a Taliban fighter detonated a car bomb near a police checkpoint in Kabul. Ten died, among them two members of the United Nations delegation. They were not engaged in military operations. Both the men were Afghans, as was their assailant. Over fifty Afghans were injured in the blast. The UN expressed its distress at the loss of life, but does not intend to close its operation in the Afghan capital. Life must go on as usual, it seems.

The attacks on the World Trade Center in New York on Sept. 11, 2001, triggered this war. When the US invaded Afghanistan it was to remove the ruling Taliban who had created a safe haven for al-Qaeda. Hamid Karzai was installed as president after the rapid defeat of the Taliban. The Americans, who have never dislodged Osama bin Laden’s terrorists, effectively bungled the operation, and are still—eight years later—fighting the Taliban and looking for bin Laden.

There is a clear winner in this conflict:

• It is not America and its NATO allies, led by Britain. They are mired in a war that threatens to kill increasing numbers of troops and, some commentators have said, could last 50 years at the rate things are going.
• It is not the Afghan people, who are dying in increasing numbers in a conflict that they never asked for and that causes great suffering.
• It is not the Pashtun ethnic group, which we simplistically identify as the Taliban. They call the border areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan their homeland. Pashtuns see the war as an unfinished struggle for freedom and self-determination.
• It is not Pakistan, which has seen its borders invaded by NATO’s army and is now suffering from a hail of deadly explosions in its urban areas at the hands of the Taliban insurgents.

The winner—already—is al-Qaeda.

Despite losing some of its top commanders, the influence of this fundamentalist Islamic group has seen its campaign strengthened immensely by this war. Intending to win more hearts and minds of radical Muslims throughout the world, it has more than achieved its objective in every month of each of the eight years of conflict. In mosques and madrassas, in big groups and little terrorist cells, the world has seen an enormous rise in acceptance among Muslims of al-Qaeda’s anti-Christian, anti-Zionist thinking and organization. Were the Americans to kill or capture Osama bin Laden today, the event would only strengthen the movement’s radicalism. The West is infinitely more in danger of terrorist hits by al-Qaeda now than it was eight years ago.

WODEN SAYS: Sir Francis Bacon once called revenge “a kind of wild justice,” and there is plenty of revenge in this tangled situation.

I am reminded of the story of the old French farmer who had a traffic accident with his horse-drawn cart and a much younger neighbor riding a modern tractor. The magistrate ruled in favor of the neighbor, although the farmer was without doubt the injured party. So the farmer dragged the broken cart into his driveway, where the neighbor would see it every day. For years the farmer looked upon the cart and seethed in fury, plotting revenge. For years the neighbor passed by the gate thinking, “That old, broken-down cart looks quite picturesque there.”

The farmer’s wife knew the anger that was in her husband’s heart, a desire for revenge that paralyzed and sickened him. Worrying about him made her so ill that she died. Their son, a businessman, came from Paris for the funeral. Seeing the driveway blocked by the cart, he asked a neighbor to pull it to the dump with his tractor—yes, same neighbor, same tractor.

Without the cart to remind him, the farmer forgot about the injustice and lost his desire for revenge. He felt better, and even struck up a friendship with the neighbor’s widowed mother, and in the fullness of time, they married.

The NATO forces in Afghanistan include the German army, formerly a sworn enemy of France and Britain, Poland and the Netherlands, all of which are also with Germany in the European Union. Japanese goods and people are welcomed in the United States, which formerly opposed Japan and dropped atomic bombs on her cities. Making peace can be done, and has been successful. The symbol of change is the Berlin Wall that fell 20 years ago this week.

Revenge is indeed a wild justice, and it motivates this impossible war in all its aspects. So, with all the power that an Anglo-Saxon deity can muster, Woden says: “Enough is enough. Mr. Obama, pull out of this war.”