Afghanistan

When I visited Osama bin Laden's former base in Tora Bora a little more than a year ago, I climbed steep, scree-covered slopes to reach his Afghan house, perched high above the snow line and commanding views of verdant valleys several thousand feet below. The hamlet, known as Milawa, comprised several lookout posts strung out along ridge lines, a bakery, bin Laden's two-bedroom house and even a crude swimming pool, all of which had been destroyed by U.S. air strikes in December 2001. It is a place where bin Laden seems to have been very happy.

Osama bin Laden has haunted the popular psyche and stymied the world's mightiest military for the last five years. Despite President Bush's declaration that he wanted bin Laden "dead or alive," despite being one of the world's most notorious men, and despite the barrage of coverage surrounding him, Osama bin Laden remains at large -- and shrouded in a fog of anecdote and myth, rumor and fact.

Here's a safe prediction for 2006: The Mideast will continue to be the world's hot spot. And yet, Iran, which many think will heat up this year, may stay cold--but not get friendly.

When the United States started sending guns and money to the Afghan mujahideen in the 1980s, it had a clearly defined Cold War purpose: helping expel the Soviet army, which had invaded Afghanistan in 1979. And so it made sense that once the Afghan jihad forced a Soviet withdrawal a decade later, Washington would lose interest in the rebels. For the international mujahideen drawn to the Afghan conflict, however, the fight was just beginning. They opened new fronts in the name of global jihad and became the spearhead of Islamist terrorism.

Al Qaeda, which means "the base" in Arabic, lost its physical base in Afghanistan after Sept. 11, 2001, so now its ideological base can be found not in the training camps of the Hindu Kush but on the Internet and in the books that leaders of the movement serialize in Arabic newspapers. These Web sites and publications are aimed at reaching a wide audience in the Muslim world.

Since 9/11, American policy has focused far too much on changing other countries, and far too little on getting along with them. Too much talk of democracy, and not enough of diplomacy. This wouldn't matter if the United States were powerful enough to impose its will, but the war in Iraq has cruelly exposed the limits to U.S. military power, and the next phase in America's approach to global terror and national security must start by acknowledging these limits.

Edited by Karen Greenberg and Joshua Dratel, "The Torture Papers" is a compilation of the "torture memos" and reports written by U.S. government officials to prepare the way for and legitimize coercive interrogation in Afghanistan, Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. The authors of the memos and documents include Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and Counsel to the President Alberto Gonzales among others.

When you fly over the icy peaks of the Hindu Kush, which march in serried ranks toward the Himalayas, dividing Central Asia from the Indian subcontinent, you get a sense of the scale of the problem: Osama bin Laden may be hiding somewhere out there. Wherever he is, bin Laden continues to give substantial ideological direction to jihadist movements around the globe -- and so American forces are scouring the Hindu Kush to find him.

President Bush's May 2003 announcement aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln that "major combat operations" had ended in Iraq has been replayed endlessly. What is less well remembered is just what the president claimed the United States had accomplished. "The battle of Iraq is one victory in a war on terror that began on September the 11th, 2001," he declared.

IN A REMARKABLE SPEECH at the National Endowment for Democracy in November 2003, President Bush acknowledged 60 years of American error and announced a policy of encouraging democracy, not dictatorship, in the Muslim world. Whether this long overdue message is followed by an actual policy change or simply results from the short-term need to explain the Iraq war in the absence of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) remains to be seen.