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" Now that we know the damn kid was sleeping in his attic, can we return to Topic A? As in Afghanistan (and, lest anyone in the administration forget, Pakistan), for which Vice President Biden has been getting a lot of attention: Arianna Huffington is calling for his head, Newsweek is hailing him as a soothsayer, and most of America is wondering when the hell President Obama&amp;#039;s going to make up his mind on &amp;quot;his war.&amp;quot; As I detailed here last week, it&amp;#039;s a dangerous path for Obama to tread somewhere between &amp;quot;all-in&amp;quot; (Stanley McChrystal&amp;#039;s method of controversy, with more troops, more nation-building, and more counterinsurgency) and &amp;quot;strategic disengagement&amp;quot; (Biden&amp;#039;s weapon of choice, with more drones, more nation-leaving, and a refocusing on counterterrorism). On the one hand, I can almost see why the president would side with his veep: By essentially shifting &amp;quot;the good war&amp;quot; from Afghanistan to Pakistan, Obama purportedly saves money, lives, and support from an increasingly frustrated electorate. And when you&amp;#039;ve got Pakistan looking like a Harrison Ford movie after a Saturday military siege, a Monday car bombing, a Thursday police assault, and this morning&amp;#039;s suicide attack as just the latest in a string of violence there, it looks good for an American president to ditch a Vietnam-like &amp;quot;quagmire&amp;quot; in Afghanistan for Al Qaeda-hunting in Pakistan. In effect, we&amp;#039;d be taking a &amp;quot;good-enough&amp;quot; outcome on one front for the promise for the limited liabilities of another front where the people don&amp;#039;t really want us and the army&amp;#039;s already going after the bad guys anyway. Trouble is, Biden&amp;#039;s logic ignores our past successes in Iraq, the current state of globalization, the future of Afghanistan, and, perhaps reinforcing all three, the haunting presence of Al Qaeda. If Obama submits to Biden, as I suspect he will, is there any reason to think America won&amp;#039;t simply preside over the rebirth of Al Qaeda? Probably not. Whether it&amp;#039;s Bin Laden and Co. or some successor entity, whether it&amp;#039;s doubling back to a faltering Afghanistan or reconstituting itself in Central Asia&amp;#039;s restive Fergana Valley or somewhere in the Islamic upper-half of Africa, it&amp;#039;ll be back. Why? Al Qaeda-style fundamentalism is fueled by globalization&amp;#039;s continuing advance into regions previously held off the grid from its revolutionary embrace (one woman&amp;#039;s liberation is another man&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;Westoxification&amp;quot;). And, no, even if America tires of its role as the world&amp;#039;s bodyguard, globalization will rumble on, driven on by the demands for a better life on the part of those three billion new capitalists in the east.  But with everything Obama&amp;#039;s currently got on his reform plate back home (not to mention the nuclear newbies North Korea and Iran abroad), is that such a bad strategic risk to endure? And given Al Qaeda&amp;#039;s increasing loss of popular appeal across the Islamic world, won&amp;#039;t its next iteration be a pale reprise? If continuing with this mafia-style warfare means that Tony Soprano gets replaced by his imbecile son, I like America&amp;#039;s odds over the long haul. After all, thanks to our vigorous, across-the-board efforts since 9/11, just about every national-security expert discounts Al Qaeda&amp;#039;s ability to create system-wide shocks to the global economy. Yes, bombs will continue to go off in bad neighborhoods. And, yes, Britain&amp;#039;s MI-5 will eventually suffer a major loss in its near-perfect record of policing that &amp;quot;wormhole&amp;quot; that connects Karachi to London. But what else is new? In the grand scheme of things, the continuing rise of a global middle class renders all such localized violence meaningless. We need to stay focused on the game-changing dynamics of being a world leader. So maybe Joe Biden&amp;#039;s right: maybe we shouldn&amp;#039;t obsess over the isolated drunks fighting in the stands.  So if America is to remain a global Leviathan, and make safeguarding globalization&amp;#039;s evolution its primary task, why not just go back to the pre-9/11, &amp;quot;limited regret&amp;quot; strategic management style? You know, we come, we kill, but we don&amp;#039;t clean up. But here&amp;#039;s the fly in the ointment: The primary reason why I&amp;#039;ve consistently rejected the &amp;quot;Afghanistan-as-Vietnam&amp;quot; analogy is that, as opposed to that Cold War struggle, we face virtually zero opposition from the region&amp;#039;s panoply of great powers \u2014 namely, Russia, Turkey, Iran, India, and China. None of them want to see us fail in Afghanistan and Pakistan, except to the degree that our continued involvement there keeps us distracted from any direct confrontations with them \u2014 Iran especially.  My argument has long been this: If America wants, in the classic counterinsurgency sense, to &amp;quot;win&amp;quot; in Afghanistan \u2014 and, by doing so, foreclose the doubling-back option for Al Qaeda while proving to Pakistan our staying power \u2014 we need to accept that the outcome there will constitute more of a proximate victory for the region&amp;#039;s great powers than for ourselves. In short, either our &amp;quot;blood&amp;quot; yields somebody else&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;treasure,&amp;quot; or we&amp;#039;re inevitably bled dry as a superpower. That&amp;#039;s where I come up against a stone wall on the Biden redirect, absent some effective finishing-up effort in Afghanistan. Historically, the regional great power that&amp;#039;s largely gotten its way in Afghanistan is Pakistan. If we help strengthen Afghanistan to the point of being able to control the territory that marks its fake border with Pakistan, then the only serious long-term solution would appear to be a &amp;quot;soft border.&amp;quot; That grants the Pashtun some real autonomy. But for that to work for Islamabad, a similar effort would have to be made in the south vis-a-vis India over the Kashmir \u2014 Pervez Musharraf&amp;#039;s old idea. Sound complicated? You&amp;#039;re getting the big picture.  My point: Joe Biden seems to be forgetting that this region maintains a colonial legacy as a cluster of fake states with unreal borders. So there can be no abandoning the responsibilities of nation-building there because, no matter where you choose to go &amp;quot;light&amp;quot; in your counterinsurgency efforts, you&amp;#039;re still reinforcing failed states somewhere else with your counterterrorism gunplay.  So if Obama rallies behind Biden&amp;#039;s somewhat precious definition of the &amp;quot;great game,&amp;quot; he better be ready to dispatch Hillary Clinton pronto to a host of great-power capitals \u2014 not those of our NATO allies, but to those of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation member states (Moscow, Beijing, and the &amp;quot;observers&amp;quot; in New Delhi and Tehran) \u2014 to determine the price they&amp;#039;ll be willing to pay to make this enduring problem go away for good. By that point, of course, Al Qaeda will already be back in the saddle in Kabul. Esquire contributing editor Thomas P.M. Barnett is the author of Great Powers: America and the World After Bush. RELATED STORIES:  LAST WEEK: Obama&amp;#039;s Big Afghanistan Problem  PLUS: Why Al Qaeda Is Vulnerable to Globalization  PROFILE: Behind the Scenes with Joe Biden  MORE BARNETT: Weekly Analysis in the World War Room   "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a6576/biden-afghanistan-strategy-101609/>