The U.S. expressed regret for the airstrikes and has been quietly pressing Pakistan to reopen the routes over the last two weeks. Washington and NATO stepped up those efforts in recent days by making it clear Islamabad would not be welcome at the two-day summit beginning Sunday in Chicago unless it did so.

NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen phoned President Asif Ali Zardari on Tuesday afternoon to invite him to the meeting, according to a statement from the Pakistan government and NATO.

“This meeting will underline the strong commitment of the international community to the people of Afghanistan and to its future,” NATO spokeswoman Oana Lungescu said in Brussels, where the alliance is based. “Pakistan has an important role to play in that future.”

In Islamabad, Zardari’s spokesman Farhatullah Babar said the president would consider the invitation, which he said was not linked to any reopening of the supply lines.

The invite came hours ahead of a meeting in Pakistan of civilian and military leaders to discuss the supply line blockade. A lawmaker said participants would consider reopening the routes. Their recommendations would be sent to the Cabinet, which will meet on Wednesday to formally approve the decision, he said on condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive matter.

A NATO diplomat in Brussels, also speaking condition of anonymity for the same reason, said the invitation to Zardari was meant as an inducement to the Pakistani government to reopen the borders.

By maintaining the blockade, Pakistan’s teetering economy risked missing out on millions of dollars in international development and loans, as well military aid. It was also facing the prospect of being left out of discussions on the future of Afghanistan.

The blockade forced NATO to reorient its logistics chain to more expensive routes across Russia and Central Asia. While the war effort has not suffered, the Pakistani routes will be more important in coming months as NATO begins to pull out of Afghanistan, with a 2014 deadline for the withdrawal of all foreign combat troops.

Pakistan sought to use the deadly American air strikes in November to extract new terms from the United States in what has always been a tense and largely transactional relationship. The government has said it wants more money from the U.S. and NATO for hosting the supply routes, something Washington has indicated it could do.

The country’s parliament also demanded an apology from Washington for the border incident, and an end to America’s drone strike campaign against militants in northwestern Pakistan, but neither appears likely, U.S. officials say. Negotiators from both countries have been discussing the drone strikes, which are unpopular in Pakistan, but Washington has said it will not stop them because they are vital to keeping al-Qaida on the defensive.

Pakistani Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar said Monday that Islamabad had made the right decision to close the border, but strongly suggested that it was time to reopen it, saying that Pakistan couldn’t afford to alienate the world for much longer.

Pakistan has some bargaining power of its own because its cooperation is seen as important to striking a peace deal with the Taliban and their allies in Afghanistan that would allow foreign troops to withdraw without sending the nation into further chaos.

The weak government risks some backlash from nationalist and Islamist groups, as well as militants, by reopening the supply lines. But the powerful army, which has influence over much of the country’s media and some of its most firebrand politicians and clerics, is likely to tamp down the outrage.

More than 50 heads of state will attend the meeting in Chicago, including President Barack Obama who will be speaking in his hometown.

In Kabul, Afghanistan’s deputy foreign minister Jawed Ludin said there are “some positive signs from Pakistan.”

“It may be resolved today or tomorrow, but as it stands, it’s still unresolved,” Ludin told reporters on Tuesday.

___

Lekic reported from Brussels. Associated Press writers Deb Riechmann in Kabul and Munir Ahmed in Islamabad contributed to this report.

A State Department spokesperson explains lamely that the reward is meant for incriminating evidence against Mr. M that would stand up in court. The prime minister of M’s home state condemns foreign interference in his country’s internal affairs. In the midst of this imbroglio, the United States decides to release $1.18 billion in aid to the cash-strapped government of the defiant prime minister to persuade him to reopen supply lines for U.S. and NATO forces bogged down in the hapless neighboring Islamic Republic of Afghanistan.

Alarmingly, this is anything but fiction or a plot for an upcoming international sitcom. It is a brief summary of the latest development in the fraught relations between the United States and Pakistan, two countries locked into an uneasy embrace since September 12, 2001.

Mr. M. is Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, a 62-year-old former academic with a tapering, hennaed beard, and the founder of the Lashkar-e-Taiba (the Army of the Pure, or LeT), widely linked to several outrageously audacious terrorist attacks in India. The LeT was formed in 1987 as the military wing of the Jammat-ud Dawa religious organization (Society of the Islamic Call, or JuD) at the instigation of the Pakistani army’s formidable intelligence agency, Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). The JuD owes its existence to the efforts of Saeed, who founded it in 1985 following his return to his native Lahore after two years of advanced Islamic studies in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, under the guidance of that country’s Grand Mufti, Shaikh Abdul Aziz bin Baz.

On its formation, the LeT joined the seven-year-old anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan, an armed insurgency directed and supervised by the ISI with funds and arms supplied by the CIA and the Saudis. Once the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, the Army of the Pure turned its attention to a recently launched anti-Indian jihad in Indian-administered Kashmir and beyond. The terrorist attacks attributed to it range from the devastating multiple assaults in Mumbai in November 2008, which resulted in 166 deaths, including those six Americans, to a foiled attack on the Indian Parliament in New Delhi in December 2001, and a successful January 2010 attack on the airport in Kashmir’s capital Srinagar.

In January 2002, in the wake of Washington’s launching of the Global War on Terror, Pakistan formally banned the LeT, but in reality did little to curb its violent cross-border activities. Saeed remains its final authority. In a confession, offered as part of a plea bargain after his arrest in October 2009 in Chicago, David Coleman Headley, a Pakistani-American operative of LeT involved in planning the Mumbai carnage, said: “Hafiz Saeed had full knowledge of the Mumbai attacks and they were launched only after his approval.”

In December 2008, the United Nations Security Council declared the JuD a front organization for the banned LeT. The provincial Punjab government then placed Saeed under house arrest using the Maintenance of Public Order law. But six months later, the Lahore High Court declared his confinement unconstitutional. In August 2009, Interpol issued a Red Corner Notice, essentially an international arrest warrant, against Saeed in response to Indian requests for his extradition. Saeed was again put under house arrest but in October the Lahore High Court quashed all charges against him due to lack of evidence.

It is common knowledge that Pakistani judges, fearing for their lives, generally refrain from convicting high-profile jihadists with political connections. When, in the face of compelling evidence, a judge has no option but to order the sentence enjoined by the law, he must either live under guard afterwards or leave the country. Such was the case with Judge Pervez Ali Shah who tried Mumtaz Qadri, the jihadist bodyguard who murdered Punjab’s governor Salman Taseer for backing an amendment to the indiscriminately applied blasphemy law. Soon after sentencing Qadri to capital punishment last October, Shah received several death threats and was forced into self-exile.

Aware of the failures of the Pakistani authorities to convict Saeed, U.S. agencies seemed to have checked and cross-checked the authenticity of the evidence they had collected on him before the State Department announced, on April 2nd, its reward for his arrest. This was nothing less than an implied declaration of Washington’s lack of confidence in the executive and judicial organs of Pakistan.

Little wonder that Pakistani Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani took umbrage, describing the U.S. bounty as blatant interference in his country’s domestic affairs. Actually, this is nothing new. It is an open secret that, in the ongoing tussle between Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari and his bête noire, army chief of staff General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, the Obama administration has always backed the civilian head of state. That, in turn, has been a significant factor in Gilani’s stay in office since March 2008, longer than any other prime minister in Pakistan’s history.

How to Trump a Superpower

Given such strong cards, diplomatic and legal, why then did the Obama administration commit itself to releasing more than $1 billion to a government that has challenged its attempt to bring to justice an alleged mastermind of cross-border terrorism?

The answer lies in what happened at two Pakistani border posts 1.5 miles from the Afghan frontier in the early hours of November 26, 2011. NATO fighter aircraft and helicopters based in Afghanistan carried out a two-hour-long raid on these posts, killing 24 soldiers. Enraged, Pakistan’s government shut the two border crossings through which the U.S. and NATO had until then sent a significant portion of their war supplies into Afghanistan. Its officials also forced the U.S. to vacate Shamsi air base, which was being used by the CIA as a staging area for its drone air war in Pakistan’s tribal areas along the Afghan border.  The drone strikes are exceedingly unpopular – one poll found 97 percent of respondents viewed them negatively — and they are vehemently condemned by a large section of the Pakistani public and its politicians.

Furthermore, the government ordered a comprehensive review of all programs, activities, and cooperation arrangements with the U.S. and NATO. It also instructed the country’s two-tier parliament to conduct a thorough review of Islamabad’s relations with Washington. Having taken the moral high ground, the Pakistani government pressed its demands on the Obama administration.

An appointed Parliamentary Committee on National Security (PCNS) then deliberately moved at a snail’s pace to perform the task on hand, while the Pentagon explored alternative ways of ferrying goods into Afghanistan via other countries to sustain its war there. By contrast, a vociferous campaign against the reopening of the Pakistani supply lines led by the Difa-e Pakistan Council (Defense of Pakistan), representing 40 religious and political groups, headed by Hafiz Saeed, took off. Its leaders have addressed huge rallies in major Pakistani cities. It was quick to condemn Washington’s bounty on Saeed, describing it as “a nefarious attempt” to undermine the Council’s drive to protect the country’s sovereignty.

Meanwhile, the loss of the daily traffic of 500 trucks worth of food, fuel, and weapons from the Pakistani port of Karachi through the Torkham and Chaman border crossings into Afghanistan, though little publicized in U.S. media, has undermined the fighting capability of U.S. and NATO forces.

“If we can’t negotiate or successfully renegotiate the reopening of ground lines of communication with Pakistan, we have to default and rely on India and the Northern Distribution Network (NDN),” said a worried Lieutenant General Frank Panter to the Readiness Subcommittee of the Armed Services Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives on March 30th. “Both are expensive propositions and it increases the deployment or redeployment.”

The main part of the NDN is a 3,220-mile rail network for transporting supplies between the Latvian port of Riga and the Uzbek town of Termez (connected by a bridge over the Oxus River to the Afghan settlement of Hairatan). According to the Pentagon, it costs nearly $17,000 per container to go through the NDN compared to $7,000 through the Pakistani border crossings.

Moreover, U.S. and NATO are allowed to transport only “non-lethal goods” through the NDN.

Other military officials have warned that the failure to reopen the Pakistani routes could even delay the schedule for withdrawing American “combat troops” from Afghanistan by 2014.  That would be bad news for the Obama White House with the latest Washington Post/NBC News poll showing that, for the first time, even a majority of Republicans believe the Afghan War “has not been worth fighting.” A CBS News/New York Times survey indicated that support for the war was at a record low of 23%, with 69% of respondents saying that now was the time to withdraw troops.

In the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, the PCNS finally published a list of preconditions that the U.S. must meet for the reopening of supply lines. These included an unqualified apology for the air strikes last November, an end to drone attacks, no more “hot pursuit” by U.S. or NATO troops inside Pakistan, and the taxing of supplies shipped through Pakistan. Much to the discomfiture of the Obama administration, a joint session of the National Assembly and the Senate called to debate the PCNS report took more than two weeks to reach a conclusion.

On April 12th, the Parliament finally unanimously approved the demands and added that no foreign arms and ammunition should be transported through Pakistan. The Obama administration is spinning this development not as an ultimatum but as a document for launching talks between the two governments.

Even so, it has strengthened Prime Minister Gilani’s hand as never before. Furthermore, he has to take into account the popular support the Saeed-led Difa-e Pakistan Council is building for keeping the Pakistani border crossings permanently closed to NATO traffic. Thus, Saeed, a jihadist with a U.S. bounty on his head, has emerged as an important factor in the complex Islamabad-Washington relationship.

Squeezing Washington: The Pattern

There is, in fact, nothing new in the way Islamabad has been squeezing Washington lately. It has a long record of getting the better of U.S. officials by identifying areas of American weakness and exploiting them successfully to further its agenda.

When the Soviet bloc posed a serious challenge to the U.S., the Pakistanis obtained what they wanted from Washington by being even more anti-Soviet than America. Afghanistan in the 1980s is the classic example. Following the Soviet military intervention there in December 1979, the Pakistani dictator General Muhammad Zia ul-Haq volunteered to join Washington’s Cold War against the Kremlin — but strictly on his terms. He wanted sole control over the billions of dollars in cash and arms to be supplied by the U.S. and its ally Saudi Arabia to the Afghan Mujahedin (holy warriors) to expel the Soviets from Afghanistan. He got it.

That enabled his commanders to channel a third of the new weapons to their own arsenals for future battle against their archenemy, India.  Another third were sold to private arms dealers on profitable terms. When pilfered U.S. weapons began appearing in arms bazaars of the Afghan-Pakistan border towns (as has happened again in recent years), the Pentagon decided to dispatch an audit team to Pakistan. On the eve of its arrival in April 1988, the Ojhiri arms depot complex, containing 10,000 tons of munitions, mysteriously went up in flames, with rockets, missiles, and artillery shells raining down on Islamabad, killing more than 100 people.

By playing on Ronald Reagan’s view of the Soviet Union as “the Evil Empire,” Zia ul-Haq also ensured that the American president would turn a blind eye on Pakistan’s frantic, clandestine efforts to build an atom bomb. Even when the CIA, the National Security Agency, and the State Department determined that a nuclear weapon assembled by Pakistan had been tested at Lop Nor in China in early 1984, Reagan continued to certify to Congress that Islamabad was not pursuing a nuclear weapons program in order to abide by a law which prohibited U.S. aid to a country doing so.

Today, there are an estimated 120 nuclear bombs in the arsenal of a nation that has more Islamist jihadists per million people than any other country in the world. From October 2007 to October 2009, there were at least four attacks by extremists on Pakistani army bases known to be storing nuclear weapons.

In the post-9/11 years, Pakistan’s ruler General Pervez Musharraf managed to repeat the process in the context of a new Afghan war.  He promptly joined President George W. Bush in his Global War on Terror, and then went on to distinguish between “bad terrorists” with a global agenda (al Qaida), and “good terrorists” with a pro-Pakistani agenda (the Afghan Taliban). Musharraf’s ISI then proceeded to protect and foster the Afghan Taliban, while periodically handing over al Qaida militants to Washington. In this way, Musharraf played on Bush’s soft spot — his intense loathing of al Qaida — and exploited it to further Pakistan’s regional agenda.

Emulating the policies of Zia ul-Haq and Musharraf, the post-Musharraf civilian government has found ways of diverting U.S. funds and equipment meant for fighting al-Qaeda and the Taliban to bolster their defenses against India. By inflating the costs of fuel, ammunition, and transport used by Pakistan’s 100,000 troops posted in the Afghan-Pakistan border region, Islamabad received more money from the Pentagon’s Coalition Support Fund (CSF) than it spent. It then used the excess to buy weapons suitable for fighting India.

When the New York Times revealed this in December 2007, the Musharraf government dismissed its report as “nonsense.”  But after resigning as president and moving to London, Musharraf told Pakistan’s Express News television channel in September 2009 that the funds had indeed been spent on weapons for use against India.

Now, the widely expected release of the latest round of funds from the Pentagon’s CSF will raise total U.S. military aid to Islamabad since 9/11 to $14.2 billion, two-and-a-half times the Pakistani military’s annual budget.

There is a distinct, if little discussed, downside to being a superpower and acting as the self-appointed global policeman with a multitude of targets. An arrogance feeding on a feeling of invincibility and an obsession with winning every battle blind you to your own impact and even to what might be to your long-term benefit.  In this situation, as your planet-wide activities become ever more diverse, frenzied, and even contradictory, you expose yourself to exploitation by lesser powers otherwise seemingly tied to your apron strings.

Pakistan, twice during America’s 33-year-long involvement in Afghanistan made a frontline state, is a classic example of that. Current policymakers in Washington should take note: It’s a strategy for disaster.

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Both headlines rely on the same data, but reach entirely different conclusions. Implicit in the Associated Press headline is the idea that the Pakistani public is being misled about the nature of America’s covert drone war, which is otherwise acceptable. The AP reporter visited the site of 10 recent drone strikes in Pakistan, and concluded after interviews with locals that out of a total of 194 deaths, 56 had been “civilians.” But even the second article, from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which emphasizes the reality of civilian casualties, does not quite capture the full story of what is going on.

Don’t worry, we are told by Attorney General Eric Holder, no American laws were violated in the process of killing U.S. citizen Anwar Al-Awlaki in Yemen. If America’s own citizens are not safe from drones, why do we expect Pakistanis to calmly sit and watch the missiles rain down on their kind?

The fact is, there is almost no oversight or accountability over the drone strikes in America, and certainly none in Pakistan, rendering the term “civilian” entirely useless in the discussion of any legal, ethical or strategic appropriateness of the targeted killing campaign.

The strikes chronicled in the AP report are merely the latest in a long campaign: at least 318 attacks since 2004, and 266 under President Obama. The United States publicly denied the drone campaign until January, when President Obama decided to use that most dignified of media venues — a Google+ Hangout — to tell his Pakistani allies in war that his country had, in fact, been bombing them for years. They should not worry, he said, because America was being careful about whom it killed.

The fact is, the American and Pakistani publics are entirely ignorant of a drone strike in Pakistan until after it occurs, and then we have little more than rumors. The hundreds of plausible drone attacks in Pakistan are documented by a handful of Pakistani papers or international press agencies in articles that, once stripped of their veneer explaining the political sophistication of the issue, are hardly longer than a Craigslist posting announcing the street corner where you can pick up a used bicycle.

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which has arguably the most detailed open-source database on drone attacks, lists some ranges of the toll: between 2,412  and 3,063 people reported killed. Of them, between 467 and 815 were civilians and 178 of them children. Between 1,158  and 1,263 people were injured.  Even the number of total strikes is actually unknown because we cannot definitively separate American and Pakistani conventional airstrikes from drone attacks.

An opaque network of security, intelligence and tribal officials, with the occasional terrified villager, provide us with some facts and many rumors about the aftermath of a drone strike.

Where, exactly, did the attack happen? What, exactly, is meant by terms like “militant compound”? Are the compounds being attacked ever near other compounds, or perhaps near homes? Are they near mosques, or schools?

How many people are killed? What names do those bodies, often charred beyond recognition, bear? Were they carrying their Taliban, Haqqani or al-Qaida bomb-proof identity cards?  Or maybe there is some tracking device on their bodies that allowed the Hellfire to home in on a signal? Or is there some local informant, no doubt entirely objective and well-versed in international law, who attested to the nature of those being targeted? Did those killed ever take part in armed action against NATO or ISAF forces? Did they ever cross over the border to Afghanistan?

No one in America or elsewhere can answer these questions, at least not publicly.  The congressional intelligence committee members tasked with overseeing the Title 50 “covert” program are woefully understaffed. Leaders admit they have too little information to oversee the program during their quarterly closed-door meetings.

The “civilian” sham

To talk about civilian casualties in this context assumes that the people running the program are trying to avoid them. They are not. As the Wall Street Journal reported last November, there are two kinds of American drone targets: “signature” targets and “personality” targets.

Personality targets are faces with names, wanted men, maybe marked for death by some CIA analysts at a working lunch meeting in Virginia.  Signature targets are people who might be associated with bad people or who spend time with them. Maybe they hang out at the mosque far too often, or their beard is too long, or their eyes, when examined in a screen capture from a drone flying overhead, look too Uzbek for their own good. Maybe they are just wives or children. All that matters, in the words of American officialdom, is that they act “in a manner consistent with al-Qaida-linked militants.”

We know that American drones have followed up their kills by attacking rescuers and funerals. Locals are often afraid to offer aid to victims in the aftermath of a strike because the drones are still hovering overhead. Whether such attacks are personality or signature strikes, they are launched with full knowledge that civilians are likely to be killed along with the target.

We know that funerals are targeted, as in the June 2009 strike that struck a gathering of 5,000 people. A drone had earlier killed a low-ranking Taliban official, and it was hoped that the group’s leader, Baitullah Mehsud, would attend the funeral, but Mehsud escaped unharmed.  Instead, up to 83 people, including children and tribal elders, died in that failed baiting operation. In the end it took three tries and 130 deaths, including that of women and schoolchildren, to finally eliminate Mehsud. We know that American drones have targeted weddings and state-sanctioned anti-Taliban jirgas, like the one set up to solve a local dispute in Datta Khel in March 2011 where 53 people, including children and tribal elders, were killed.

In the same manner that the Bush administration’s use of the term “unlawful enemy combatant” muddied the waters enough to imprison hundreds of innocent men without trial, President Obama has legitimized a system of completely unchecked killing using the pretense of an “imminent threat.”  The underlying flaw in American strategy in the region continues to be the idea that there are a finite number of bad guys, and if they simply kill each of them, Americans will be secure once again. On the contrary, the drone attacks have wreaked havoc in Pakistan, and brought New York City the likes of Faisal Shahzad.

A country on fire

Now consider, for a moment, what the situation looks like to the 180 million ordinary people in Pakistan. Not privy to the secret meetings their military and civilian leaders have with American officials and journalists, they rely on the facts before them.

Ten years ago, Pakistan was not exactly a just and developed society, but since then it has been dragged through hell by inept generals and corrupt politicians who seem to keep picking the wrong side of an argument.  More than 40,000 of their countrymen, including at least 3,000 of their soldiers, have been killed in a war that has literally lit their cities on fire.  Nearly 3 million have fled the conflict, becoming refugees in their own country. With every bombing of a mosque, every gun battle, every video of their young men being beheaded like sheep, they ask themselves how things became so bad. No doubt, there are religious extremists in that region exploiting the situation, but Pakistanis know that is not the end of the story. Many attacks against Pakistanis are in direct retaliation for anti-Taliban military activity, including drone attacks.

Pakistanis, like their brethren in neighboring India, know what a foreign occupation looks like.  They are familiar with the British imperial project they were subjected to, and the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan they helped end. The West’s latest campaign may seem nuanced enough to be justified to us in America, but for many in Pakistan, it is the latest in a long history of foreign attempts to mold them into someone else’s image, and it is destined to fail.

Meanwhile, the American machine publicly repeats tired cliches of mutual cooperation with Pakistan, but brazenly kills its supposed ally’s soldiers at border posts, and its young men in Lahore’s bazaars. America ships a third of the supplies for its occupation in Afghanistan through Pakistan, in thousands of trucks driven by poor men who become the victims of routine bombings and kidnappings, over highways that have suffered some $1.3 billion worth of damage. U.S. forces use Pakistani air bases for refueling and rely on Pakistani intelligence for their operations, but Congress and the State Department refuse to pay hundreds of millions in bills. Pakistani officials estimate the “war on terror” has cost the country some $67.9 billion in economic setbacks and infrastructural damage. Despite austerity-linked IMF loans and the carrot of U.S. aid, economic problems in Pakistan persist, largely a result of instability since the Afghan war.

Yes, Pakistan’s military has a hand in the Taliban, perhaps even al-Qaida, and some senior members probably helped hide Osama bin Laden. Rumors of Pakistan’s top civilian officials permitting American drone attacks are probably true. But this is not news to Pakistanis. It does not change the fact that Pakistanis are being killed with impunity by the United States.

Recent polls show that 97 percent of Pakistanis disapprove of drones, and 73 percent view America unfavorably.  Other polls show that public opinion in FATA is resoundingly against the drone campaign, and in favor of Pakistani ground troops. In this context, it is astonishing to read a journalist claim that “Pakistanis are deeply torn about the drones.” They are not. The tabulation of “civilian” deaths has little meaning for Pakistanis, and it shouldn’t for anyone else either. The problem isn’t that innocent people are being killed. The problem is the drone war itself.

How did this happen? In retrospect, the war in Afghanistan was the prime culprit. That endless, Sisyphean war was the thin end of the wedge. In that murky, shifting struggle, it was normal for the U.S. to arrogate to itself the right to kill the Taliban wherever they were in Afghanistan or Pakistan. Once that precedent was established, it was an small step to killing bad guys in Iraq, Somalia, Yemen and Libya. And so, by imperceptible steps we arrived at the place we are now, where 77 percent of liberals support President Obama’s vastly expanded killer drone campaign, where an American citizen can be remotely vaporized at the touch of a button and no one cares. The war on Afghanistan set the precedent that shaped the entire “war on terror” paradigm. The chimera of “safety from terrorism” led us by easy stages to begin waging dirty war across the globe — changing the definition of war, eroding moral and legal standards and greatly increasing the likelihood of ugly future consequences.

What makes this subject so tricky is that morally, legally and by any standard, the war on Afghanistan was completely justified. Recall the situation before we launched the invasion. 9/11 had just happened. The Taliban were in control of Afghanistan. They had aided and abetted Osama bin Laden, and refused to hand him over. This was an intolerable situation. As accomplices to mass murder, they could not be allowed to get away with their monstrous crimes. Moreover, if bin Laden remained at large he could plan another attack. Removing the Taliban was a matter of self-defense. We had to do everything possible to reduce the chances of another 9/11.

For all these reasons, I, like the vast majority of Americans, supported the war on Afghanistan. There did not seem to be any alternative. Were we really going to just sit there and let the Taliban remain in power? And once we toppled them, were we going to leave and let them return? What would have been the point of getting rid of them in the first place?

But if the war on Afghanistan was justified, that does not – in retrospect – mean it was wise.

It almost feels treasonous to raise doubts about the war. We have all been subjected to the red-white-and-blue “no price is too great to pay for national security” mantra for so long that we have forgotten that if trying to prevent a terrorist attack by launching a war results in more Americans being killed than would have been killed in the attack, the price obviously is too great. All we would have done in that case is trade more military lives for fewer civilian ones.

Of course, there is no way to ever know for certain whether the war in Afghanistan has cost more lives than it saved. (For what it’s worth, 1,896 U.S. troops have died in Afghanistan; almost 3,000 people died in the 9/11 attacks.) We don’t know if the war has saved any American lives. What we do know is that by every other measure, it has not been worth the cost.

Perform the following thought experiment. Imagine that 9/11 has not taken place. The corrupt and incompetent government of Afghanistan, a profoundly impoverished and backward nation with no tradition of democracy or civic institutions, riven by tribal loyalties and bearing the unpromising nickname “graveyard of empires,” has been locked for years in a bitter, bloody struggle with a radical Islamist group, the Taliban. The Taliban has strong support in southern Afghanistan and also has a safe haven in the tribal regions of neighboring Pakistan, another poverty-stricken, backward country whose government is almost equally corrupt and incompetent and whose intelligence service has deep ties to the Taliban. Other shadowy Islamist militants around the world are operating out of hidey-holes in various failed states and war-torn countries, trying to overthrow their governments and talking about attacking the U.S., but their capabilities are extremely limited.

Should the United States declare war on the Taliban and other militant Islamist groups around the world, send more than 100,000 troops to Afghanistan, spend more than $450 billion on the war ($113 billion this fiscal year alone), and launch hundreds of drone missile strikes against suspected militants in five different countries?

Anyone who said “yes” to that question would be a lunatic. Why on earth would the U.S. step into such an obvious quagmire? We would have everything to lose and almost nothing to gain.

Of course, that thought experiment included a huge counterfactual: In it, 9/11 never happened. But that omission only highlights the significance of the fact that today, most Americans no longer believe that the war in Afghanistan is worth fighting, even though everyone knows that our departure will dramatically increase the possibility of the Taliban taking power again. The connection between the Taliban and 9/11 no longer seems worth fighting a full-scale war over: Americans just want us to get out. The administration agrees: Defense Secretary Leon Panetta just announced that some U.S. combat troops will come home in 2013, a year earlier than originally planned.

Of course, the war on Afghanistan can’t be undone. I only raise the subject of whether it was worth fighting because that question is directly relevant to something we do still have control over: the endless global dirty war against alleged terrorists that George Bush started and Barack Obama has not just continued, but greatly expanded. If we’re willing to abandon Afghanistan to its fate, why do we insist on continuing the war on terror elsewhere? With the end of the official war finally coming into sight, it is essential that we begin a national discussion about whether we really want to continue the unofficial one forever.

It’s understandable why the dirty war has few critics. Drone attacks and special forces operations are cheap, out of sight, and involve low casualties (none, at least immediately, when drones are used). Politically, the dirty war inoculates Obama against GOP charges that he is “soft on terrorism:” not only is he continuing to prosecute a renamed version of Bush’s “war on terror,” he has significantly escalated it. And now that the dirty war has been launched, it is politically almost impossible to stop it: what president, Democratic or Republican (Ron Paul is the exception, but he is not going to win the election) would dare to stop blowing up alleged militants, knowing that if there was subsequently a successful terrorist attack, he or she would be held responsible?

Moreover, the dirty war has been tactically effective. It has killed significant numbers of top Taliban and Al-Qaida leaders, including bin Laden himself, and forced other radical jihadists underground, disrupting their command and control and generally making their lives difficult.

Finally, dirty war has a proven historical track record. Agents of the American OSS and the British SOE, fighting behind enemy lines, carried out major acts of sabotage and subversion, tied up Axis troops and provided invaluable support to resistance groups. (I should know: I wrote a book about the SOE.) Dirty war tactics helped win World War II.

So why stop using such an effective instrument?

The answer is simple: Because it is not effective. Far from making us safer, the permanent dirty war is endangering our national security. It may be tactically effective, but it is strategically disastrous. Unfortunately, there’s no way to prove this. But there are some compelling arguments for why it is true. And it would be a start if progressives and Democrats would at least start to question the wisdom of the U.S. playing God all over the world.

The first point to be made is that this isn’t World War II. We’re not fighting Hitler or Tojo, national leaders commanding huge armies and controlling vast amounts of territory and resources, but a bunch of ragged fanatics in caves. By treating these puny adversaries as if they were more formidable than they are, we’re squandering resources that would be better used trying to improve the lives of the people living in their countries. By employing the same tactics the terrorists use, we are descending to their level. In a fight against terrorism, which ultimately is a fight for hearts and minds, this is a losing proposition.

Second, dirty war is still war. By pursuing an endless war, we are opening a Pandora’s Box – for war, no matter how low-level, is always a Pandora’s Box. War is the ultimate generator of chaos. And chaos produces unexpected consequences –what spooks call “blowback.”

There are a number of reasons to fear blowback. The places we are fighting are murky and unpredictable. Their governments could fall as a result of anger over our dirty wars – a real possibility in Pakistan — and chaos within their borders can spill over into neighboring countries, destabilizing them as well. Nor are the players clear-cut. As the Iraq “surge” proved, which succeeded because we paid off Sunnis we considered “terrorists” yesterday to fight al-Qaida today, the line between good guys and bad guys is blurry. Some of the people we are blowing up are Salafi jihadis who want to destroy the Great Satan, but others are insurgents resentful of foreign troops, and still others are farmers in the wrong place at the wrong time. Every one of these people has survivors who may or may not vow to take revenge on us. And one thing we know is that the people involved have long memories. One of the reasons Iraqis were suspicious of their American occupiers’ idealistic pronouncements, as the late Anthony Shadid pointed out in his superb book about the Iraq war, is that the Iraqis remembered that when the British occupied Iraq in 1917, they uttered the same pretty phrases – and then remained in control of Iraq and its oil for decades.

Finally, there is the fact that our dirty war tactics are increasingly hard to distinguish from the terror attacks they are intended to forestall. (There is a bizarre and disturbing parallel between the destruction of the World Trade Center by planes that suddenly slammed into it, and the equally apocalyptic death from above that rains down upon the victims of drone strikes who are incinerated in their cars without ever even hearing the sound of the incoming missile. I am not equating the morality of the two attacks, only their shared spectacle, but many people in Middle East make no such distinction — and some will burn to replay the spectacle on American soil.) Obama’s extra-legal assassination of the radical cleric and American citizen Anwar Awlaki tacitly accepts the terrorist credo that might makes right and morality is simply a fig leaf covering naked power. This makes it impossible for America to take the high moral ground, and puts us on a slippery slope: if it’s OK to kill Awlaki today, why shouldn’t it be OK to kill some foreign scientist we deem dangerous to our national security tomorrow? By embracing the law of the jungle, we have opened the door to hell.

The question Donald Rumsfeld, of all people, asked about Iraq is still the central one: Is our dirty war creating more terrorists than it’s killing? And there is every reason to believe that it is.

It is tempting to see our new way of waging war as having no consequences. A functionary sitting in a mountain in Colorado pushes a button, blows up three people in a field in Pakistan, and then goes to the bathroom. Suppose the brothers of those three guys are mad at America – so what? They’re in Pakistan. What are they going to do? If they start to make trouble, we’ll blow them up too.

This complacent attitude towards the consequences of war has deep roots both in American history and contemporary culture. Because of geography and military strength, America never been subjected to the horrors of foreign invasion. (The War of 1812 doesn’t count.) Our virtual culture of video games and disembodied online interactions, in which “communities” can be composed of people who have never met and messy, all-too-human consequences can be avoided or erased with the touch of a mouse, turns war into an electronic game of whack-a-mole. And, of course, fewer and fewer Americans have ever served in the military or even seen a dead body.

All these factors make war weightless. For Americans, “fighting terrorists” on a permanent basis by blowing people up here and there across the globe is just something a responsible country does, the same way that a good dog owner remembers to give his pooch his flea medicine.

But war isn’t weightless. War means exploding bodies, and guts hanging out, and bloody scraps of flesh, and brains spattered on the ground. The people on the receiving ends of drone attacks are no more two-dimensional than the people in the World Trade Center. Their relatives and friends and acquaintances will not see them as pixels.

There are dark, primordial, psychological reasons why Americans support the dirty war. It is driven by the dream of perfect safety. Like all terrible traumas, 9/11 instilled in us an overpowering desire to protect ourselves. In an ambiguous and threatening world, the knowledge that we are fighting our enemies, that we are doing something, is reassuring. And it cannot be denied that remaining in a constant state of war may result in some short-term gains. Covert operations could kill someone up who might at some point launch a terrorist attack against us. And it could prop up governments that take our side against jihadis. But those successes are not only ephemeral, they set off chain reactions we cannot control. Endless war is much more likely to result in the slow, inexorable growth of hatred against us. Until we abandon the illusion that we can make ourselves completely safe, we will only succeed in making ourselves less so. As a great president said when facing an infinitely more dangerous adversary than we face today, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

Like frogs placed in slowly boiling water, we have been lulled into seeing our current situation, in which we arrogate to ourselves the right to kill without formally being at war, as normal. But it is not normal. It represents a radical break with the way we have made war throughout our entire history. After 9/11, George W. Bush rashly launched a “war on terror,” Barack Obama, in his folly, continued to prosecute it, and the American people accepted it. This permanent, undeclared war may appear innocuous, but it is a ticking bomb.

No one knows when that bomb will go off. The risk is not quantifiable. But that is precisely the point. War, no matter how small and sanitized, is the most unquantifiable thing in the world. We have, in effect, decided to play God, reaching down from our high-tech heaven to kill whoever we want, whenever we want, wherever we want. We have gotten away with it so far. But if we know anything from human history, it is that bad things happen to people who try to become God.

Had those endeavors been undertaken, Pakistan’s subsequent actions and double-talk might have been foreseen. For, while America might demand subservience and unqualified support for its campaign against al-Qaida and the Taliban, Pakistan has its own concerns. These include staying strong in a mortal struggle with India; reckoning with climate change (and the possibly related massive flooding); managing the uneasy tension between scores of different ethnic groups; and maintaining the difficult relationship between the powerful military and the civilian government.

Destabilizing Pakistan is the worst option of all. It is a large nation with nuclear weapons, situated between Afghanistan, China, India and Iran, with a sizable contingent of anti-American sentiment. Few things should be more disturbing to American minds than the prospect of Pakistani disintegration.