If these places are becoming the 'new Afghanistan', can't we just forget about the old one?

In the past few weeks I've read several analysis pieces claiming that not one, but two countries (Yemen and Eritrea) are vying to becoming the "new Afghanistan" - the new home base for al-Qaeda's terror operations. Meanwhile, Gen. Petraeus, the man leading America's 'War on Terror' stated last week that al-Qaeda's leadership has, in fact, abandoned Afghanistan in favor of Pakistan. And, according to Pakistan's President Asif Ali Zadari, al-Qaeda may very well have relocated without their most famous member, Osama bin Laden, whom Zadari, based on the intelligence reports he's seen, believes is actually dead.

So if al-Qaeda has given up on Afghanistan, why can't we just do the same?

Right now the United States is in the process of pouring thousands of troops into Afghanistan to prop up a shaky NATO-led security mission and to take the fight to a resurgent Taliban. The problem is that the Taliban wasn't the reason we got involved in Afghanistan; we went charging in to destroy al-Qaeda in the wake of their launching the 9/11 terror attacks. The Taliban found themselves the target of our military assault simply because they played host to al-Qaeda, and because they refused to turn bin Laden over to us in a timely manner (the Taliban, steeped in centuries of Pashtun custom requiring a host to protect their 'guests' asked for proof of bin Laden's involvement in 9/11 before turning him over, something at the time we weren't willing to give them).

Despite their 11th century worldview and their oppression of women, pre-9/11, the US didn't really have a problem with the Taliban. In fact in May of 2001 then-Secretary of State Colin Powell announced that the US was giving the Taliban a $43 million grant as a reward for their efforts in wiping out Afghanistan's opium-producing poppy crop - not the kind of gift you usually give to someone you plan to go to war with just a few months down the road.

No, the US went into Afghanistan specifically to wipeout al-Qaeda, that we had to go through the Taliban to get them was fine with our military leaders; but the Taliban was a sideshow, not the main event. But now nearly eight years have passed since the US began its Afghan mission, while our military commanders talk about engaging the Taliban, al-Qaeda is rarely mentioned anymore, and by most indications, including those from Gen. Petraeus himself, al-Qaeda seems to have left the building.

That's not surprising since if al-Qaeda is still dedicated to bin Laden's vision of a global jihad against the West, Israel and corrupt Islamic leaders in the Persian Gulf, Afghanistan - incredibly remote, with little infrastructure or contact with the global community - is just about the worst place to use as your base of operations. Al-Qaeda only wound up there because bin Laden imposed on some old connections he had from fighting in the Afghan-Soviet war and threw around a ton of cash after he was drummed out of his old base, Sudan. Given the chance it makes a lot of sense that al-Qaeda would look to relocate to Yemen (with easy access to Saudi Arabia), or Eritrea (with its long Red Sea coastline), or Pakistan (far more connected to the global community than Afghanistan).

Without al-Qaeda, the United States mission in Afghanistan is basically to be in the middle of a civil war between the incredibly fundamentalist Taliban and the somewhat less fundamentalist, but vastly more corrupt Afghan government of President Hamid Karzai. In seven years Karzai's government has shown little to indicate that they have the ability to either truly unite Afghanistan or decisively defeat the Taliban.

The military has a term for situations like this: "mission creep", it’s when one mission slowly transforms into another and it seldom ends well. We should get back to basics - we went to Afghanistan to eliminate al-Qaeda after their terrorist attack on America, if they've left Afghanistan for greener pastures, then perhaps so should we.