Time to rethink Afghanistan strategy?

Editor's note: Clifford D. May is president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a policy institute focusing on terrorism and Islamism.

(CNN) -- In the wake of the daring U.S. special ops strike that killed Osama bin Laden on Sunday, many critics are calling on President Obama to declare victory and pull out of Afghanistan. As they note, we got bin Laden in a suburban neighborhood of Pakistan, far from the border areas where the Taliban fighters regroup.

Yet it is not a coincidence that of all the lawless and under-governed regions of the world, al Qaeda took root in Afghanistan. Until we drove out the Taliban -- with which we have been at war ever since it refused to surrender bin Laden -- it gave al Qaeda the run of the land, because it shared the group's brutal Islamist vision for the world.

It is that vision that America and other free nations must challenge. That is the real war. Afghanistan is one front. President Obama's policies need to never lose sight of the goal. If they do -- and perhaps they have -- now would be an appropriate time to change them.

There is no question that keeping the Taliban out of power in Afghanistan will be a challenge. One of the wisest critics of our strategy there is my colleague at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, Bing West, a Marine combat veteran and former Pentagon official. In his 1972 book, "The Village," West chronicled the experiences of a small band of Marines doing counterinsurgency in Vietnam. That book stood on the Marine Corps Commandant's required reading list for almost 40 years. In "The Strongest Tribe,"
he explained how Gen. David Petraeus and his troops turned the situation around in Iraq.

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