About Afghanistan. With President Obama shifting rhetorically and Candidate Romney remaining silent or  resorting to platitudes, the so-called "good" so-called "war on terror" in the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan is the political orphan of the 2012 campaign. Sniping over withdrawal dates is no substitute for grown-up discussion of the utterly and completely failed COIN strategy of nation-building on the backs of the US military, of strapping leftist, Kum-bay-a theories of "world peace" to the body armor of Americans and Australians and Brits and the rest, and sending them out into the IED-mined field of jihad. Really get to the know the people, said their commanders. Take off those ballistic glasses, and protect them from everything that can hurt them, said the generals. And dump hundreds of millions of dollars down the drain while you're at it.

The defective linchpin of this "strategy" is that there exists an imaginary Islam to which Americans and other Westerners must show fealty in order to win hearts and minds of "good" Islam, thus isolating the "bad" Islam of the fighting enemy. This is a defilement of reality that requires the widespread and permanent corruption of the thought process itself. The main result of this brainwashing has been to bring, as chronicled in this space for years now, the US military under the rules of Islam in our increasingly desperate efforts to win Afghan "hearts and minds."

What next? Our leaders simply have no idea. And they won't, until they decide to confront the facts about Islam and understand what animates the people of the umma, and figure out how to extricate ourselves as quickly as possible. The line in the sand is not Afghanistan; it is around the West. The goal is not to "nation-build" a Westernized base in the umma, but to ensure that Islamic law does not build a caliphate here.