What's the name of that game? The one where you have a tower of blocks or sticks and you pull one out at a time until the tower falls? Welcome to the war against terrorism.

We are approaching the war against terrorism, the first campaign of which is a war against Afghanistan , with remarkable trepidation. This has been remarked upon again and again. I think I know why, in some detail, and I'm going to try to work through the thought process of Colin Powell and company. And then I'll talk about what's wrong with the approach.

To get Bin Laden, and the Taliban, will require conquering Afghanistan . We can try to do this through proxy forces (the Northern Alliance ) or with our own troops. Arguably, the NLA will never be able to successfully control Afghanistan . There are a variety of reasons for this but most of them come down to the fact that they already peed in that well good and hard. It's not mentioned much, but the NLA is despised and hated throughout the Pathan zones of Afghanistan , mostly due to their wanton raping and looting in the civil war.

So, arguably, if we want to get the Taliban out and ensure that Afghanistan goes away as a breeding ground for terrorism, we should use American ground forces to enter the country and subjugate it. Then we stick occupation forces in place while we rebuild it as a liberal democracy. Very hard, but it can be done; look at the Philippines .

I'm going to ignore for the moment the political and sociological issues with this premise and concentrate on the diplomatic and logistical problems.

The first problem is a combination of readiness and logistics. To do it right, to put more or less simultaneous "boots on the ground" in force throughout all of Afghanistan with sufficient special operations to run down all the mujaheddin hiding out in the mountains would require fifteen or twenty divisions. That doesn't mean much to most Americans but that's pretty close to three times the current US force.

Supplying such a force is a non-trivial exercise. As has been repeatedly mentioned, Afghanistan is land-locked. You don't supply a force like that by air; it will require trainloads of supplies per day, everything from beans for the chili-mac to Playboys. Which means we have to have a sea-port to get the stuff from the US (or Europe ) to the region then a more or less dedicated train and road-line to the fighting area.

Which means we have the choice of going through half of Asia ( Black Sea through Georgia and Russia to Uzbekistan then up into Afghanistan ) or, much more easily, through Pakistan .

As most of us know, Pakistan is right on the edge of a civil war over having a few planes in the country. If we started pushing divisions up to Afghanistan , it would erupt.

Pakistan has nukes. They would probably be used.

Suddenly we find ourselves in a nuclear war with a former ally.

Let's take a look at some of the other ramifications. Saudi Arabia is looking pretty similar to Iran just before the Shah got overthrown. If we push hard enough in the region, it's likely that the House of Saud will either "voluntarily" change to an enemy (after having been armed and trained by us to a fairly high state of readiness) or it will fall to Islamic Fundamentalists, although in Saudi Arabia that's already the condition. These fundamentalists, though, will be fully and openly supporting the mujaheddin. (As opposed to covertly supporting the mujaheddin.) They'd probably start by turning off the oil. The same thing would happen if the House of Saud turned. Invading Pakistan to force our way to Afghanistan would be a sure-fire way to cause all of the above to occur.

Then there's Iraq and Syria to consider. If you think Iraq wouldn't take every opportunity to knife the US as hard as they could, you're not paying attention in the class of life. Having most of the Islamic countries in the world suddenly switch to the anti-American side would suddenly make Saddam and Osama the "Good Men" who stood up to the Americans for all these years. Dual Hitlers with Saudi oil, Iraqi bio-chemical weapons, Pakistani nukes and thousands of mujaheddin. Put that together and shudder.

Each action that we take pulls one of the sticks out of the tower. And each action that Al Quaeda takes does the same, both by increasing Osama's popularity and by making us mad. Eventually the tower is going to fall. The question is whether it would be in the best long-term interest of the United States of America to simply smash the tower and go on from there. I'll talk about that tomorrow.

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