"the people who will plan the next attack inside the United States are those who are in Afghanistan and Pakistan"

Michael Scheuer, former head of the CIA's Bin Laden unit, on Countdown last night:

We've always overestimated the damage we did to the Taliban in Afghanistan. We didn't close the borders there, we won the cities, but the Taliban and al-Qaeda escaped basically intact, and they've been rebuilding and re-equipping over the last five years...

This is a very strange administration, sir. But we really don't take the transnational threat seriously, the terrorist threat. We're pretty good at nation-states, but on al-Qaeda, we still have a government that as a whole, both parties, doesn't take this threat very seriously. The idea that we're going to try to do with 40,000 troops in Afghanistan what the Soviets couldn't do with 150,000 troops is a bit of madness...

The central place in terms of an attack inside the United States is Afghanistan and Pakistan. When the next attack occurs in America, it will be planned and orchestrated out of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Al-Qaeda values Iraq primarily for the entre it gives them into Jordan, into Syria, into the Arab Peninsula and into Turkey. For example, we've really signed Jordan's death warrant through the war in Iraq. But actually, the people who will plan the next attack inside the United States are those who are in Afghanistan and Pakistan...

This administration, sir, seems to be afraid of almost anything that moves. And certain Iraq was a containable country. The Iranians are no threat to the United States unless we provoke them. They may be a threat to the Israelis, they're not a threat to the United States. The threat to the US inside the US comes from al-Qaeda, al-Qaeda is in Afghanistan and Pakistan, if you want to address the threat to America, that's where it is....

...we don't treat this Islamist enemy as seriously as we should. We think somehow we're going to arrest them one man at a time. These people are going to detonate a nuclear device inside the United States and we're going to have absolutely nothing to respond against. It's going to be a unique situation for a great power, and we're going to have no one to blame but ourselves.

So when the next attack in the U.S. occurs (and somehow I think it's going to happen right before the 2008 election, to either give the Bush Junta an opportunity to declare martial law and refuse to leave, or else give Benito Giuliani a chance to be elected, because we KNOW that HE's perfectly willing to cancel elections), I hope Americans will think back on how George W. Bush almost completely abandoned the effort to fight al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, because instead of going to counseling for his father issues like normal people, he had to invade a country that was no threat to us, had nothing to do with September 11, and certainly had nothing to do with al-Qaeda.