Courtesy of The Counterterrorism Blog:

The Washington Post’s Outlook section this week provided an extremely worthwhile look at why Osama bin Laden is still at large, and why it is a big deal. Some of this has been covered in earlier blogs, but are worth repeating.

Ahmed Rashid, a Pakistani journalist explains here what others from the region have explained to me recently—the war in Afghanistan is in danger of being lost. Ethnic Pashtuns in Pakistan have radicalized in recent years, President Musharraf has not been willing or able to crackdown on the spreading Islamic radicalization efforts and force reductions and transitions are coming when they are needed most.

The result is that “Bin Laden’s new friendship zone stretches nearly 2,000 miles along Pakistan’s Pashtun belt—from Chitral in the Northern Areas near the Chinese border, south through the troubled tribal agencies including Waziristan, down to Zhob on the Balochistan border, then to the provincial capital Quetta and southwest to the Iranian border. The region includes every landscape from desert to snow-capped mountains. Sparsely populated, it provides bin Laden an ideal sanctuary.”

This is hardly in line with the occasionally triumphalist rhetoric from political and military leaders, when they address the bin Laden issue at all.

John Brennan, fromer CIA head of the National Counteterrorism Center, eloquently describes a fundamental problem with the current conception of the war: confusing combating the terrorist tactic with combating militant, Salafist Islam as it spreads through preaching, conversion and desperation. The full blog is here.