I've been listening to various discussions, on the radio, or rather not discussions but exchanges of firmly held non-negotiable views, about Obama and his speech on Afghanistan. No one seems fully satisfied.

Those who support Obama's decision to send 30,000 more troops mostly dislike the announced pull-out of all American troops from Afghanistan after eighteen months, though since the speech was delivered, that promise has been glossed by Secretary Gates and others. Admiral Mullen, for example, on CBS News, said this: "It's very clear that the president has given us guidance that in July of 2011, we'll start to transition security responsibility to the Afghan national security forces," Mullen told "Early Show" co-anchor Harry Smith. "There's no determination of how long that will take... There's no specific guidance with respect to how many. It could be very few, it could be a large number."

So all those worries about a definite date when the American troops absolutely, positively have to be out, that "date certain" (lots of people love saying that phrase - to them it sounds so Covington-and-Burlingish), are perhaps not necessary. For those who think the Afghan game worth the American candle, and judging by Mullen, Gates and others, the gloss to be put on Obama's phrases admits of such flexibility about the phrase that not even W. C. Fields should bother his pretty little head and spend time "looking for loopholes." The "loopholes," Gates and Mullen assure us, are already there.

And then there are those who have had the opposite reaction, who are made furious by Obama's decision. Many of these are his original, true-blue supporters. What do they talk about? They talk mainly about money. They are horrified - rightly - that another one or two hundred billion dollars is going to be spent in Afghanistan. They are well aware of what that money could do.

Why, just $400 million of it would restore the cuts in Medicare that the Senate approved the other day. There would be no debate, there would not have to be any debate, about health care if the sums squandered in Afghanistan and Iraq had been kept at home. Nor would there be a problem with paying for road and bridge repairs all over the country, for tuition assistance for practically everyone, for energy projects. Oh, they have a point all right, those who talk about the money.

But they would be in a stronger position if one did not suspect that many of them also, at the same time, have no great interest in resisting, or even in recognizing, the Jihad. No one I have listened to who is against continuing the effort in Afghanistan has suggested all the other, much less expensive, more effective ways, to divide and demoralize the enemy, and to weaken the hold that the ideology of Islam has on its adherents.

No one, in fact, mentions Islam at all, mentions the ways in which both the outcomes in Iraq and Afghanistan are irrelevant to the instruments of Jihad that really count, above all in the historic heart of the West, Europe. No one mentions the Money Weapon, and how it makes no sense to keep spending money - any money at all -- on Muslims in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan.

No one mentions the need, if indeed one were to believe (no one should) that "jobs" would lessen the recruitment rate for the Taliban - for Saudi Arabia, and the U.A.E., and other fabulously rich Arab sheikdoms to be contributing billions and tens of billions to those states. For it was they who funded, they who diplomatically recognized, they who gave every assistance, through institutions and individuals, to the Taliban, and then the Taliban gave succor and refuge and aid to Al Qaeda.

So on the one hand, there are the Republican loyalists, the people who still implicitly must think (do they think?) that Muslims are essentially swell, that Islam itself is not a problem, that only some "violent extremists" are the problem -- though no one, ever, has come up with a single text, a single passage, that those "violent extremists" rely on that is not from the Qur'an, Hadith, or from the example furnished by Muhammad in the Sira. No one has dared to define the ideology of "violent extremists" that somehow is supposed to set them apart from the ideology of Islam itself. And of course they can't. What they could do is instead ask themselves another question: in what ways do those who are not "violent extremists" manage to pursue the same goal, using slyer methods, especially in the Western world?

And what are those instruments of Jihad - the very same Jihad, with the very same goals, but pursued through qitaal, or combat, and terrorism, by those "violent extremists" whom we all agree are very bad? If the ultimate goals are the same, shouldn't we look to see not only how to diminish terrorism, but to deal with all the other weapons of Jihad - the Money Weapon, campaigns of Da'wa, demographic conquest? This is something about which the Republican Senators and Congressmen are silent.

They think they can continue to claim to be "tough-minded" by supporting troops, and more troops - that is, by supporting the squandering of men, money, materiel, and morale, both civilian and political. And they are opposed by people who won't discuss Islam, as an ideology, at all, but will only talk about all the money that could be spent on other things.

People of sense are dismayed. It is one thing to have someone in public life, anyone at all, at least present, sensibly and soberly, the facts about the ideology of Islam, and about the major theatre of the Jihad, which is not in Iraq, or Afghanistan, or Pakistan, but in the countries of Western Europe.

We've all been so busy creating a new America. That new America is now run by people who did not, as did an older political elite, travel to Europe and learn - really learn, not merely take a few courses in - the languages of Europe. They were at home with, if not everyone in Europe, at least with some in England or in France, who might have made a kind of grand tour of the Italian museums, who might be aware that whatever happened, America remained -- in its language, its literature, its art, its science, its political theory -- a child of Europe. And that did not change, could not change, no matter what changes in demography occurred because, say, of the changes in immigration laws passed too unthinkingly back in 1965.

The war in Afghanistan is based on a notion that because Al Qaeda was located there when the attacks of 9/11/2001 took place, that somehow Afghanistan retains pride of place, that without it Al Qaeda cannot exist, that it is the main refuge of "violent extremists" who apparently "just happen" to be Muslim.

The other day I heard Andrew Bacevich make a telling remark. He noted that this fixation on Afghanistan was akin to Americans thinking that in order to prevent assassination attempts on American presidents, that the School Book Depository in Dallas would till the end of time have to be massively guarded. It makes no sense. Where, after all, have the terrorists been who attacked the London Underground and busses, or the metro station at Atocha in Madrid, or who have been responsible for thousands of terrorist attacks (see Fort Hood, just a few weeks ago) all over the Western world?

It's absurd that Afghanistan should be made so much of. Let it slip back into the tribal society it was, where people enjoy making war on one another. If the Three-Cups-of-Tea Mortensen, if Sarah Chayes and her projects for women, can somehow continue, let them, but don't make the mistake of holding onto Afghanistan at the cost of hundreds of billions of dollars, to make sure that Mortensen and Chayes and others feel good about "giving hope" to the people of Afghanistan.

The people of Afghanistan are held back by Islam. If one were sincerely interested in their welfare, one would be cruel only to be kind, and realize that the best way to decrease the fatal hold of Islam on the minds of men is to allow things to degenerate, to longer try to improve things, no longer to try to prevent internecine warfare, no longer to try to rescue this or that Muslim society from the violence and aggression that are natural to peoples raised on the texts and tenets of Islam (some more so, and some less).

Afghanistan had a kind of brief period, under the Afghan King in the 1930s who so admired Ataturk, and as long as everyone stayed away, and Afghanistan remained a state in name only, with the writ of the King hardly extending beyond a few cities, things were semi-okay. The disruptions brought about by the Soviets, and by the Arabs who came in to fight the Soviets, have unsettled Afghanistan. We can't and shouldn't try to settle it. We are Infidels, and are incapable of doing so.

Those who now will tell us "but the surge worked in Iraq" don't realize that it did not work, or rather, it worked only in the sense that Sunni Arab tribesmen in Anbar Province, who for good reasons of their own wanted to settle scores first (before moving on to the Shi'a in Bahgdad and the south) with members of Al-Qaeda, were happy to receive American money and American weapons, and to fight Al Qaeda. But that had nothing to do with being willing to accept the new dispensation in Iraq, nothing to do with accepting rule by the Shi'a Arabs, or domination, in northern Iraq, by the non-Arab Kurds (even if most of them are Sunni).

The constant repetition of this phrase "the surge worked" misreads that situation. Iraq will inevitably relapse into some kind of hostilities, based on ethnic and sectarian tensions that will not go away, that were not created by the Americans but have a long history. It is not the Americans who made the Sunnis despise the Shi'a, and also now to fear them, as possibly being successful in efforts to convert Sunnis (this at least is a fear expressed by Sunni political and media figures in Egypt and Jordan).

It is not the Americans who caused Arab Muslims to treat with contumely the non-Arab Kurds, and to acquiesce or even support the mass-murdering of Kurds by Saddam Hussein - and the Kurds are not going to give up the autonomy, in the north, that they have enjoyed for almost twenty years, ever since 1991, when the Americans kept the skies over Kurdistan free from Saddam's Arab air force.