More than a year before 9/11, veteran journalist and author Ahmed Rashid, wrote a book called Taliban. It described the rampant extremism in Afghanistan and asked the US to consider an immediate nation-building intervention. That warning went ignored --- with disastrous results.

His recent book, Descent Into Chaos: The United States and the Failure of Nation Federally Administered Tribal Areas Of Pakistan: Not really administered by PakistanBuilding in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia, is informed by nearly a decade observing and evaluating US policy in south and central Asia, and finding it baffling. Bin Laden is still free; the Taliban are expanding into Pakistan and Afghanistan; despite the increasing number of terrorists with verifiable links to the Federally Administrated Tribal Areas in Pakistan, nothing is being done to address the underlying issues there; and no one is paying any attention to Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Tukmenistan and Uzbekistan, despite the fact that these countries exhibit many of the same (and some unique) characteristics that led to problems in Pakistan and Afghanistan. None of these developments, in Rashid's reckoning, was inevitable. Mishandling and misjudgment by the Bush administration has abetted and enabled various ills that make the world unsafe. American failure to comprehensively defeat terrorism is America's own fault.

According to Rashid, the Bush administration's decision to project its power in Mesopotamia, at the cost of not attending to far more urgent issues in south and central Asia, is among the greatest strategic blunders any American president has made. Shifting the theater so quickly and suddenly after the invasion of Afghanistan --- for example, US troops that liberated Qandahar from the Taliban were moved to Iraq within three months --- led the US to outsource its job of eliminating terrorism to a disingenuous dictator in Pakistan and a still inchoate Afghan democracy. Both led to disastrous results. Pakistan's General Musharraf and ISI either turned a blind eye to terrorists or tried to co-opt them to advance their own agendas, while a better than token investment in nation-building in Afghanistan --- which would have cost a pittance compared to the war in Iraq --- could have stemmed many of the wounds that festered into security crises today. Instead, the US abandoned Afghanistan, thereby allowing the Taliban to mount a powerful insurgency that will cost huge quantities of money and human life to roll back.

Such errors of grand strategy were compounded by smaller-scale but non-trivial errors. As a Pakistani citizen who traveled widely throughout central Asia, Rashid can testify first-hand to the practical consequences of America's rubbishing and violations of the Geneva Convention, the imperial language of its officials; unnecessary maligning of the religion of Islam, and the usurpation of the State Department's customary prerogatives by Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon --- which played a direct causal role in the collapse of any serious commitment to nation-building well before any US soldiers touched down in Afghanistan.

Yet Rashid did not write this book to admonish. He is genuinely disturbed by the perpetuation of terrorist power, not to mention the continuing paucity of liberty, economic opportunity, and human rights that citizens of South and Central Asia face daily. His positive proposals for American policy are extensive in range, thoroughly grounded empirically, and ought to be required reading by members of the American foreign policy community.

I'll focus on just one of his positive suggestions. Rashid traveled through FATA --- Pakistan's Federally Administrated Tribal Areas --- with a Pashtun guide. He describes the region as "terrorism central," and not only the near certain secret redoubt of not only Osama Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, but also the base of operations of numerous terrorists and terror suspects spread throughout the world, whose identities Rashid lists. He argues that there are two possible ways of dealing with the threats based in FATA. The first is dispatching a military force to defeat the militants in an outright confrontation. This option has slim odds of success; the Pakistani military already tried it and failed, and external invaders are even less likely than Musharraf's army to have the requisite tactical and political support to succeed.

The second option --- the viable one --- highlights the indispensability of Rashid's book. FATA is one of those hinterlands of the globe that suffered through the transition from ethnic tribalism and economic feudalism to a nation-state paradigm. The literacy rate there is only 17% (3% for women!), there are no economic, opportunities, no legal system apart from an arbitrary mish-mash of tribal decision-making nominally supplemented by a statutory scheme inherited from the British Raj, and no educational system apart from whatever the mullahs could provide. There have never been political parties, much less a political culture, in the region. FATA exists outside of the sphere of international law and outside of the reach of the governments Kabul and Islamabad, its only political order the spiritual thrall of extremist religious leaders and the brute force of warlords. who use intimidation to impose themselves. In other words, it is the absolutely ideal sanctuary for al Qaeda and other stateless criminals gangs --- even better, arguably, than al Qaeda's other sometime homes in Somalia, Sudan, Afghanistan, and since the American invasion, Iraq).

Clearly, therefore, an effective means of shutting down terrorism in south and central Asia is to integrate regions like FATA into the international economic community. And indeed, Rashid notes that there were proposals in recent years for a referendum in FATA which would have allowed it to either become an independent province associated with Pakistan or choose to become part of the NWFP province. Naturally, those entreaties were shunted aside by Musharraf, the man the Bush administration foolishly treated as their number one counter-terrorist.

The US could begin to address to the challenge of FATA today by reviving discussion about FATA's provincial status with the democratic parties now in power in Pakistan, who are completely befuddled by the problem of what to do with the region, and are passively allowing the tribal leaders there to extend Sharia law over secular legal opposition.

That proposal for FATA is only one of many constructive ideas in Descent Into Chaos. Rashid's long-standing relationships with the leading political figures of south and central Asia, his fluency with US policy, and his decades-long experience with the region, make the a necessary resource for anyone interested in the post 9/11 world. It should be slipped onto the essential reading lists of the foreign policy experts advising John McCain and Barack Obama.

Apologist For Islamism?: Well doesn't he look like one? Writing at Pajamas Media, New York Post film critic Kyle Smith gives Jon Favreau's new Iron Man movie 3 out of 4 stars. Which is a pretty generous rating, considering that Smith has discovered that Iron Man and Iron Man --- both the film and the character --- are rooting for our defeat in Iraq, Afghanistan, and who knows where else. That's right ladies and gentlemen, the tentacles of the Islamofascist octopus stretch farther than you thought; indeed, they've poisoned the #1 grossing movie in America. Fortunately Smith was able to recognize the threat and sound the alarum --- otherwise Ali Jon al Favreau bin Omar might have succeeded in corroding the will of armchair amateur warriors that's so crucial to maintaining neoconservatives' paranoid cocoon our struggle against Islamic radicalism.

And how did Smith manage this startling deduction? Iron Man is "another America-as-root-of-all-evil message" because at some point along the way, Robert Downey, Jr./Tony Stark/Iron Man, a weapons manufacturer, decides to get out of the biz when he "realizes his products can't be kept out of evil hands." And not to give anything away, but the comic book Iron Man is basically an ally of the US government, and the film in no way makes any radical revision of the character.

That's. It.

Iron Man doesn't even weakly imply that the terrorists are anything but bad guys. It doesn't imply that Americans are anything but good guys. It doesn't imply that US foreign or military policy is in any way objectionable or even flawed; it doesn't imply that US private citizens are involved in objectionable enterprises. It merely suggests that if terrorists were to get hold of weapons that happen to be made by an American, they would do bad things with them.

So apparently, unless you agree that anything made in the USA is so pure, holy, and righteous that it'll repel Islamofascists like garlic on vampires, or perhaps melt them like Nazis in front of the Ark of the Covenant, then you, my friend, lack moral clarity. Don't despair though: There's no shortage of people who have the moral clarity to see that waterboarding isn't torture, and who will be more than happy to set you right.

Observing the wreckage of Smith's review, Julian Sanchez writes: "What’s intolerable is any hint of ambiguity, any hint of doubt. This is the fragile insistence of a movement that has lost its confidence."

But has the mishmash of neoconservatism, psychopathological vicarious living through soldiers in the field, and apolitical belligerent nationalism that constitute Bush Republicanism ever tolerated a hint of ambiguity or doubt? I distinctly remember the roll call of the Ships of the Decent in 2002, embarking on their Iliadic journey to Baghdad by sacrificing former comrades who voiced doubts about the wisdom of the enterprise to appease Artemis Ahmad Chalabi. (I remember because I was part of that cadre.) And I remember the Glorious Summer of War in 2003, when it was pretty much the same story, except with more smugness and premature triumphalism.

Suppose, at any time from the moment the dust of the towers settled, until... --- what time is it now? --- you suggested that invading sovereign states under conditions of dubious international legitimacy, occupying them in a manner indistinguishable from what someone seeking to stoke a nationalist uprising would have done, and establishing a regime of torture in lieu of a functioning judicial system, weren't the awesomest and decentest ideas ever. In that case, you can be sure some self-righteous scrivener would be only too happy to accuse you of cheering for our defeat.

On the other hand, there is plenty of independent evidence for Julian's claim that the war party has lost its confidence, cf. their apparent determination to run the principal exponent of their ideology for president not on any platform, not for any positive program, not against any presidential candidate, but against a few irrelevant petrified relics of the 60s radical left.

Debbie Almontaser is a Yemeni-American educator who spent a career trying to build bridgesDebbie Almontaser between Muslim and non-Muslim Americans. With backing from the Gates Foundation and a secular Arab-American community organizing group, she chartered and became founding principal of an Arabic-immersion public school in Brooklyn, the Khalil Gibran International Academy, named for the famous Lebanese Christian poet. That would have been a worthy culmination of her decades of service to her own community and the broader community of New York City, had she not almost immediately become the target of a campaign of defamation that led to her widespread portrayal in the New York media as a closet jihadi, forced her to resign her position at the school, and which hobbled the operations of the KGIA from before its first day of classes.

As is often the case in apparent instances of paranoid popular uprisings against basic liberal freedoms --- see the Intoonfada --- the none-too-deeply buried truth is that the disgusting libels to which Almontaser has been subjected, and the larger effort to shut down her school, are the product of resentment and outrage fabricated and stoked by cynical elites. In this case, the editorial board of the New York Post, which deliberately warped Almontaser's words in order to slander her as a supporter of the Palestinian intifada, and the soi-disant middle East expert Daniel Pipes, are substantially responsible for wrecking the reputation of an innocent, honest, productive woman, and for harpooning her attempt to offer New York City public school students an education in a language perhaps more important than any other for Americans to learn.

All that Pipes knew about Almontaser last April was that she had said of the September 11 attacks, "I don’t recognize the people who committed the attacks as either Arabs or Muslims. Those people who did it have stolen my identity as an Arab and have stolen my religion" --- i.e., that she explicitly repudiated those within her community who support terrorism --- and that she had once received an award from CAIR. What else was a propagandist to do but launch an actionably dishonest editorial in the New York Sun, describing KGIA as a "madrassa" in its headline, and featuring a truncation of Almontaser's thoughts about September 11 to just that first sentence about not recognizing the perpetrators as Arabs or Muslims, thereby implying that she is a 9/11 conspiracy theorist.

But then, Pipes didn't feel he had to know anything at all about Almontaser or KGIA to claim publicly that she is an Islamist and the school would be. Almontaser is an Arab offering to teach Arabic, and that's all he cares about: "In practice...Arabic-language instruction is inevitably laden with pan-Arabist and Islamist baggage...[L]earning Arabic in of itself promotes an Islamic outlook."

Never mind Pipes' extraordinary racism and xenophobia, loathsome though they are. Never mind that Pipes himself claims to have studied Arabic, and Islamism is one pathology from which he certainly does not suffer. Never mind that Pipes' evidence for the inevitability of education in Arabic being "laden with pan-Arabist and Islamist baggage" consists in one example from America published in Pipes' own preposterous journal, one example from Cairo, and one example from Algeria at the height of Franco-Algerian antipathy.

There is perhaps no cheaper, easier way to foster understanding and cultural exchange between the Arab and Muslim world and the west, bolster American national security, and improve long-term economic prospects all in one fell swoop, than to massively encourage and support American students studying Arabic, Persian, and other western and central Asian languages. Pipes and his lackeys claim to be home-front foot-soldiers in the struggle against Islamo-fascism. What they have accomplished, in the name of pursuing their vendetta against anyone who prays out of the Koran --- apart from destroying the reputation of an innocent woman, ruining at least one academic year in the lives of 60 New York City students, stifling academic freedom, and creating huge disincentives to chartering schools that teach important but politically sensitive material --- is to make the United States demonstrably less safe and more vulnerable to Islamist (or any other kind of) terrorism. Well done.

In the global discussion about Islam, words matter. The US government apparentlyThe Artists Formerly Known As Jihadists agrees, and has begun a review of some of the words that it had been using since 2001. The AP reports that "Federal agencies, including the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security and the National Counter Terrorism Center, are telling their people not to describe Islamic extremists as 'jihadists' or 'mujahedeen.'" Bad news for fans of "Islamo-fascism": that's out, too.

According to the AP, the government has caught on to the fact that particular inflammatory terms "may actually boost support for radicals among Arab and Muslim audiences by giving them a veneer of religious credibility or by causing offense to moderates."

The decision seems to be a recognition and affirmation of the position on language of CENTCOM General Abizaid, who must have acquired his appreciation of how language affects diplomacy and relationships with Muslims during his time in Iraq. At a CSIS event last September, Abizaid said:

I mean, even adding the word Islamic extremism, or qualifying it to Sunni Islamic extremism, or qualifying it further to Sunni Islamic extermism as exemplified by government such as Bin Laden, all make it very, very difficult because the battle of words is meaningful, especially in the Middle East to people...[snip]...

The key is to figure out how we don't turn this into Samuel Huntington's Battle of Civilization's and we work toward an area where we respect mainstream Islam. There's nothing Islamic about Bin Laden's philosophy, there's nothing Islamic about suicide bombing. I believe that these are huge difficulties that we need to overcome, this notion of Christianity versus Islam. It's not that, it doesn't need to be that.

Abizaid is right, and so, in this case, is the Bush administration, whose decision is sound both politically and intellectually. It will go a long way towards warming up many of the Muslim moderates --- even many in the US --- who felt that the odd experiments with purposefully controversial language that the Bush administration was engaged in were detrimental to any foreign policy not aiming at antagonizing Muslims pointlessly.

It seems absurd on its face that for so long our government, which ostensibly seeks to advance a more secular worldview in the middle East, would have purposefully advanced terms that were chosen by and utilized by extreme religious fanatics. Ownership of language --- what lawyers and PR people call "framing the issue" --- is very important in adversarial confrontations about information (which the war on terrorism certainly is). With this decision the Bush administration is opening up the possibility of the US government devising a lexicon that allows it to evaluate terrorism, religious fanaticism, and Muslim violence on its own terms.

When the government plays fast and loose with language, the political ramifications can be severe, so the news that the Bush administration is finally adopting responsible linguistic principles guided by attention to the actual outcomes of policy, as opposed to various kinds of oneupsmanship in sanctimony, is welcome.

Having said that, we, average people, are not the government, and we ought to resist the impulse to standardize or check our use of language. Certainly we should try to employ language as accurately as possible and attend to important distinctions --- for example, that between political theocrats and violent theocrats. By the same token, we should be clear in our definitions, avoid unnecessary hyperbole, and do our best not to use language illogically or ahistorically. But it would be futile to hope for a single lingua franca in discussions of terrorism, and would do little good to have one in the first place.

The fact is that the term "jihadism" has become part of the English language, just like "fatwa," "intifada," and "ayatollah." The term "Al-Qaeda" will always be associated with a conspiratorial movement engaged in violence, the same way we associate certain collectivist criminal characteristics with the Sicilian word "mafia." For the average Joe, these terms are useful means of conveying ideas, which is good enough reason to keep them around.

Perhaps most importantly of all, we should be vigilant in not allowing the government to dictate what is and is not acceptable when it comes to words. The fact that the world of 1984 and Newspeak is remote from our own isn't reason to ignore its warnings. Expressions like "un-good" and "double plus un-good" might seem unlikely to take purchase any time soon, but there is a long history of governmental and military euphemisms crowding out and eventually replacing equivalent, vivid ordinary language expressions, with the ultimate effect of making it far more difficult to talk about matters of war and peace, life and death, except in an abstract manner far removed from any actual lived experience.

Hence, at the same time we recognize that tactical and strategic imperatives obligate a responsible government to be judicious and frequently euphemistic in its use of language, that obligation on the part of the government clearly underscores our own obligation to defend and maintain our ordinary language, in all its varieties, vagaries, and vividness. A certain amount of vagueness, anachronism, regional variation, and even confusion, in addition to being a token of the health of a language, is also a vital bulwark against authoritarian politics.