By Husain Haqqani,

The Washington Post Friday, November 2, 2012

Husain Haqqani was Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States from 2008 to 2011. He is a professor of international relations at Boston University and a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.

American foreign policy is not making enough of an effort to contain Islamist extremism, and the consequences are likely to roil not only Afghanistan and Pakistan but, eventually, the wider region and beyond.

In 1998, Osama bin Laden described U.S. soldiers as “paper tigers” and predicted that U.S. aversion to war would lead to the success of his ideology. “We have seen in the last decade the decline of the American government and the weakness of the American soldier,” bin Laden said in an interview. “He is ready to wage cold wars but unprepared to fight hot wars. . . . This was proven in Beirut when the Marines fled after two explosions. . . . This was then repeated in Somalia.”

Unfortunately, bin Laden’s followers and other extremists can add Afghanistan to that list. Al-Qaeda’s allies, the Taliban, have been neither decisively defeated nor forced to the negotiating table. The emergence of democratic governments in the greater Middle East has offered the United States opportunities to help its ideological allies confront the Islamist narrative of victimhood and revenge. Instead, the dictates of U.S. politics have reaffirmed that narrative.

In last week’s foreign policy debate, President Obama said that success against al-Qaeda can be achieved simply by tracking down and killing those identified as terrorists. This view is no doubt rooted in the U.S. electorate’s disapproval of distant wars. But this thinking fails to take into account how drones and other remote tactics are used to encourage extremism among the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims. Ideologically motivated radicals can recruit, train and regroup even after their leaders have been killed in drone strikes. And the American aversion to long wars fits into bin Laden’s prediction that the United States would withdraw from the greater Middle East rather than stay and fight.

Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney speaks in general of the need for a multidimensional strategy to marginalize extremists in the Islamic world. But he is seeking to get elected by war-weary voters in an environment of economic difficulty. There are no votes for either candidate in questioning the wisdom of fighting under a deadline.

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-us-needs-muslim-allies/2012/11/01/9a852950-22dd-11e2-8448-81b1ce7d6978_story.html