The Extremist

Osama bin Laden plotted the toppling of the twin towers from Afghanistan. Overthrowing the Taliban regime that sheltered him was the right thing to do. If elected, Mr Obama promised to pull out of Iraq and concentrate on Afghanistan. As president, he has kept his word, though not as quickly as he said he would. “We will remove all our troops from Iraq by the end of 2011,” he reiterated this week, “and for America, the Iraq war will end.” At the same time, he is sending more troops to Afghanistan. Their mission, he says, is to “disrupt, dismantle and defeat al-Qaeda and its extremist allies”.Like George Bush before him, Mr Obama reckons that the best way to sell a war to Americans is to mention al-Qaeda early and often. But also like Mr Bush, his war is more complicated than he makes it sound. American troops are not really fighting al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, because they are not there any more. The group’s surviving leaders have mostly fled to neighboring Pakistan.