Yesterday, on Fox News Sunday, Howard Dean stated:
You know, Afghanistan is turning against us, and that is where the fight on terror is. That's where Osama bin Laden is. Osama bin Laden has not been captured five years later. That's a big problem.
The "fight on terror is" in Afghanistan, but it's also in Iraq and in Africa, Europe, Asia and the Americas. The fight is "global," as Tony Blair explained a few weeks back: "No-one who ever half bothers to look at the spread and range of activity related to this terrorism can fail to see its presence in virtually every major nation in the world." Afghanistan became a terror state in the 1990s, when the Taliban took control and offered bin Laden and his terror cohorts safe harbor from which they trained "perhaps over 10,000 terrorists," according to Richard Clarke, before they dispersed to "probably between 5o-60 counties." Today, Afghanistan and Iraq are major fronts in the "fight on terror." Zawahiri explained Iraq's importance in his letter to Zarqawi: "The first stage," he wrote, is to "expel the Americans from Iraq." He also counseled Zarqawi to be prepared:
[T]hings may develop faster than we imagine. The aftermath of the collapse of American power in Vietnam-and how they ran and left their agents-is noteworthy. Because of that, we must be ready starting now, before events overtake us, and before we are surprised by the conspiracies of the Americans and the United Nations and their plans to fill the void behind them. We must take the initiative and impose a fait accompli upon our enemies, instead of the enemy imposing one on us, wherein our lot would be to merely resist their schemes.
Dean may believe that the only "fight on terror" is in Afghanistan, but the enemy who hit us on September 11 surely doesn't.