DE BORCHGRAVE: Connecting geopolitical dots

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By Arnaud de Borchgrave

COMMENTARY:

As the United States teeters on the brink of a disaster not seen since the Great Depression, two wars are also headed south.

Yemen, a hotbed of pro-al Qaeda sentiment in the war on terror, ruled out any further crackdown on extremists. And as crime increases in Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, so does sympathy and nostalgia for Taliban rule when crime was virtually eliminated by amputation of hands.

Another dot is the erosion of support for the U.S. drive to tighten the economic screws against Iran for its ongoing refusal to come clean on its secret drive to join the nuclear club. Russia made clear its refusal to cooperate with the United States and the European Union against Iran was in response to the U.S. drive to isolate Moscow for its military intervention in Georgia.

North Korea provided another dot in the global jigsaw puzzle. Perceived U.S. weakness, as seen from the hermit kingdom, provided an opportunity to bar U.N. inspectors from its main plutonium reprocessing plant. At the same time, it reactivated the plant that provided the fissile material for its first atomic explosion. And in public opinion polls, South Korean youth appeared more in tune with Pyongyang than the Bush administration.

Pakistan is yet another dot connected to perceptions of the American Gulliver tied down by millions of subprime Lilliputian mortgages held by Wall Street's overcompensated "Masters of the Universe." Some commentators have suggested U.S.-Pakistani relations are at an all-time low. Not that bad. But bad enough to question whether U.S. and NATO objectives in Afghanistan can still be met.

Taliban is edging closer to the Afghan capital while Pakistan tells the Bush administration it cannot bomb or raid known Taliban and al Qaeda safe havens in the tribal areas along the border. That was the Pakistani army's job, said Pakistan's new leaders. But Pakistan's military has demonstrated time and again it's a regular army without credible Special Forces capabilities. And Defense Secretary Bob Gates said he had overruled Pakistani restrictions and the United States would now move against any target identified by U.S. intelligence.

To punctuate the decision of the world's only Muslim nuclear power, Pakistani guns peppered two U.S. reconnaissance helicopters patrolling the joint border. Pakistan's new president, in Manhattan for the U.N. General Assembly and his meetings with President Bush and geopolitical student Sarah Palin, claimed it was not gunfire, but red flares to shoo the choppers back to Afghan air space.

The terrorist suicide attack that gutted the Marriott hotel in Islamabad, killing 53 and injuring 200, demonstrated that Pakistan's principal concern is Taliban in major Pakistani cities. And the more the Pakistani Army responds to U.S. requests to suppress Taliban in the tribal areas straddling the Afghan border, the more aggressive homegrown jihadist terrorists will get in major cities.

NATO believes more troops in Afghanistan are needed to restore the initiative. France agreed and is sending 100 more of its elite troops, bringing the French total to 2,700. France, which lost 10 soldiers killed in a Taliban ambush last month, its largest military loss in 25 years, is also urging its European partners to lift all political caveats against putting their troops in harm's way. But French opinion polls show two in three French people want their soldiers home. French lawmakers appeared to be out of sync with their voters when they approved 343 to 210 a resolution to keep their troops fighting in the war on terror in Afghanistan.

The allied troop total is still just more than 70,000, including 33,000 U.S. troops, for a dirt poor country the size of France. The outgoing NATO commander said 400,000 troops are needed if Taliban is to be defeated. U.S. commanders in Afghanistan requested 15,000 additional U.S. troops to be transferred from Iraq. Pentagon planners could only spare 7,000. The British commander, with 8,000 troops in southern Afghanistan, said he needed another 4,000 for Helmand Province alone, where much of the opium poppy is harvested.

At the time of President Kennedy's 1963 assassination, 16,500 U.S. military advisers in Vietnam had already morphed into fighting soldiers. And more were already in the pipeline

When President Lyndon B. Johnson decided he would not run for re-election following the 1968 Tet offensive, U.S. boots on the ground had escalated to 546,000. And the war was lost - in the media and in Congress.

In both Afghanistan and Pakistan, the feeling is widespread that the capture or death of Osama bin Laden would trigger appeasement in both the media and in Congress to make a deal with Taliban for a coalition government - and go home.

Many veteran geopolitical thinkers fear either one of the two U.S. presidential candidates will go down the same escalator in Afghanistan. In their campaign pronouncements, both John McCain and Barack Obama are in favor of taking troops out of Iraq to put them into the Afghan war against Taliban. Some call it doubling down, throwing good money after bad.

The new dimension is the $700 billion bailout needed to take an avalanche of bad loans off the books of the financial system - and save Wall Street from a total collapse. This will severely curtail what a new president can do in the first year of his administration. The $200 billion Mr. Bush committed to take over the nation's two biggest mortgage companies boosted the national debt to $10.6 trillion. Add to that the latest rescue package, and you're up to $11.3 trillion.

So doubling down in Afghanistan may no longer be an option in 2009.

• Arnaud de Borchgrave is editor at large of The Washington Times and of United Press International.