As “War on Terror” dwindles in Afghanistan, the world (American citizens included) is asking where next and how long this (mostly American) effort will take us. I worry more about time than place, but both issues can be usefully explored in terms of what’s real and what’s not. Let’s start with place – the question of Where Next – and with the related matter of which countries on the face of this earth are real and which are artificial.

Likely candidates for Where Next include Pakistan (next door to Afghanistan and currently teeming with al-Qaida and Taliban escapees), Somalia (similar to Afghanistan in terms of warlord anarchy, and the 1993 setting for dead U.S. Marines dragged in the street), Sudan (sometime residence of Osama bin Laden, and [probably unwarranted] target of U.S. bombing in 1998), Yemen (ancestral haunt of the bin Laden clan, and site of the October 2000 attack on the USS Cole), and Iraq (home of Saddam Hussein, America’s most hated person prior to Osama’s ascendancy). Question: What, besides being Muslim

(see below), do all these nation-states have in common?

Answer: They’re not really nation-states. Not even our old/new ally Pakistan, held together since badly planned 1947 independence only by army force and the radically escalating rhetoric of Islamism.

The artificiality of Afghanistan and Iraq has already been plumbed in this column (“Two Bad Hands Played Differently,” Oct. 27-28). Both were concocted by European powers for Europeans purposes. Both were structurally flawed from the start. Neither, generations later, has managed to overcome the handicaps imposed by European imperialism.

Chief among post-colonial defects is the matter of boundaries. Time and again, the political map doesn’t fit – often doesn’t even approximate – the ethnic, religious and/or topographical territory. Somalia and Sudan are prime examples with flip-flop specifics. In terms of homo/heterogeneity, each is a negative mirror image of the other.

Somalia includes only Somalis (homogenous, at least on the macro-level, and in that sense good for nation-building) but does not include all Somalis (bad in that ethnic brethren in bordering “nation-states” like Kenya, Ethiopia and Djibouti act like Pashtuns in Afghanistan and Pakistan by ignoring/manipulating the borders whenever it suits). Sudan, arguably the flat-out worst of Britain’s many bad colonial legacies, has the opposite problem. It’s split latitudinally between Muslim Arabs who rule from Khartoum in the North, and animist-Christian Nilotic peoples in the South. (While walking/hitching from Cairo to Capetown in the mid-’60s, I stopped short at this bloody ethnic divide and detoured east into safer Ethiopia … only

to face similar problems south

of Addis Ababa.)

Yemen has at least a geographical core, the Arabia Felix of classical antiquity. This southernmost tip of Arabia is distinct from the rest of a desperately arid peninsula: not only mountainous but well watered by dependable rains. Thus its abundance of agricultural produce (including, as a Christmas present, frankincense and myrrh) and of people. Its surplus people leave. The first Muslims to invade Spain (711 A.D.) were largely Yemeni. Saudi Arabia’s first construction mogul, Mohammed bin Laden, came from Yemen’s Hadramut, and son no. 17, named Osama, may be headed back there. The Hadramut, be it noted, lies outside Yemen’s true core. Despite what the map says, it’s basically unbounded … like our 19th-century Wild West or like the 21st-

century “boundary” between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Lots of spots to hide from Texas Rangers.

That all these places are Muslim says two things. First, that European post-colonial mapmakers were especially hard on the Islamic world, specifically concerned that Islam not unite. We Westerners remembered from the Crusades that Islam, even when loosely united, could at least equal us militarily. And we Westerners had struck oil in Iran in 1906 … and kept on striking it in the Muslim Middle East: another reason to prevent united and viable statehood.

Second and also undermining the nation-state system is Islam’s own sense of socio-political territory. Scripturally, the whole concept of nation-state is illegitimate. Islamic doctrine speaks instead of one unitary worldwide Muslim umma or “community.” Here’s

why Saudis are helping Chechens and Uygurs to help Pakistanis in Kashmir … with training in Afghanistan. For the most strictly faithful, none of these national or regional identities is primary. More basic is their shared, urgent sense of membership in the umma, the universal Islamic community of belief and practice.

So where’s Osama? He could be in any of these conveniently ungovernable places or (less

likely) stone dead in some

still-unsearched Tora Bora tunnel. Ditto his al-Qaida associates. Ditto whatever other Islamist terrorists. As such, let’s move to our second question: How long does this War on Terror go on?

“As long as it takes,” says President Bush, wonderfully cast as Texas Ranger no. 1. His folksy, uncomplicated style is much better suited to crisis than my man in 2000, the good, intelligent, energetic, knowledgeable, but endlessly agonizing Al Gore. Given the decision to wage war, the president’s top people have waged it well. Even so – and before succumbing completely to W’s plain-talk twang – someone should ask, “As long as WHAT takes?” Put differently, what are the real aims of this exercise?

Here I must tread carefully. Far from home, to which I remain fiercely loyal, I’m not sure what’s welcomed as free speech in Ashcroft America. Or what’s at least tolerated as awkward but absolutely essential to democracy. Or, conversely, what’s considered treasonous. Here I trust not in

powerful individuals, less still in my own fool-prone wisdom. I trust in the Constitution of my country. And my (our) country, by the way,

is one of the real ones.

Now then, “As long as WHAT takes?” The stated real aim is “degrading” terrorism – or, more narrowly, Islamist terrorism. That’s good, but how far do you go and when is enough enough?

Getting Osama is a yes or no: you do or you don’t. Getting al-Qaida and associated groups is much harder to call up or down. This much for sure: You’ll never get them all, no matter how long it takes. (Especially if we persist in our

one-sided Middle East policy…)

Could that “it” – as in “as long as it takes” – entail other aims? Perhaps the Pentagon needs a good run in the park every decade or so. How else to test new weapons such as the BLU-118B “thermobaric bomb” which “scatters a wide cloud of explosive particles before detonating, and [works] on the same principle of physics as a mine-shaft explosion caused by coal dust”? This New York Times description comes with an unattributed reassurance: “Even if it’s not used [at Tora Bora], it will be ready for the next caves in the next war.”

Could “it” be biological and maybe economic? How else to expend a new generation’s urgent testosterone? How else to keep the military-industrial complex (and my retirement stock portfolio)

in robust condition?

Finally (but hopefully not) could one aim be political – as in the political elections of 2002 and, more crucially, 2004? Bush One made a big boo-boo, at least from the standpoint of narrow, partisan politics: The Gulf War was allowed to end a year and a half too soon, far too long before his 1992 re-election bid. Unquestionably honorable, George H.W. Bush stopped Desert Storm when he figured it was best for his country’s interests. His approval numbers were, at the time, around 90 percent. Eighteen months later we’d forgotten his (apparent) triumph. This experienced, principled president lost to an unknown from Arkansas with more marital problems than military record.

I’ve never voted for either Bush, but I admire the father. Now Bush the son has similar wartime approval … and an open-ended

target. His bargain-with-the-devil temptation: To keep the “War on Terror” going until the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November 2004. Let’s hope, to the contrary, that honor and transcendent national interest are still alive and well in this distinguished American family.

Dr. Whitney Azoy, a cultural anthropologist and former U.S. diplomat in Kabul, has worked for 30 years with Afghanistan and the Muslim world.