The importance of Afghanistan and more recently the tribal regions of Pakistan to AQ has been mostly as a safe haven. AQ needs its rear areas where it can train and plot and live without much fear of being shot in the streets. The time that Afghanistan stood as a symbol for AQ is past.

The war in Afghanistan has been a symbol for everyone who was against the war in Iraq. Every one of them has been saying since 2003, we shouldn’t be in Iraq, we should be getting bin Laden in Afghanistan. This is a cudgel to be used against GWB and the war in Iraq.

I think that AQ fights against the US in Afghanistan because they are like the scorpion in the fable. It’s their nature. They are nearby and they fight anyone who comes near them. Yeah sure they’d like to humiliate the US in Afghanistan and maybe they have some hope that if they could force the US to retreat from Afghanistan then it could become a symbol for them but I don’t see how they can really hope for this.