Sept. 15 (Bloomberg) -- The Obama administration’s deepening quagmire in Afghanistan can be traced to a delusion of its own making, which began with the notion that this is a “good war.”

It was good because it was moral: They hit us, so we hit them back, in keeping with the rules of a just war. It took us three weeks in the autumn of 2001 to push al-Qaeda, masterminds of the Sept. 11 attacks, out of Afghanistan and to oust the Taliban, their hosts, from power.

So how, eight years later, is this still a good war? U.S. President Barack Obamasays the mission harks back to Sept. 11. We must defeat a resurgent Taliban in order to prevent al-Qaeda from reclaiming Afghanistan as a staging area for terrorist attacks ever again.

But wait. Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda lieutenants are almost certainly in Pakistan, not Afghanistan. And the Taliban, who may be brutal and corrupt, has never directly engaged in international terrorism and isn’t even on the U.S. State Department’s Foreign Terrorist Organizations list.

If this is a counterterrorism operation, maybe there is a better way to go about it than sending as many as 100,000 U.S. and allied troops to a country with an excellent record at repelling foreign invaders, dating back to Alexander the Great.

With every passing day, and each botched air strike, the danger that Afghans will look on U.S. and allied troops as occupiers, rather than liberators, becomes greater, which could doom the country and the mission as well.

Dead or Alive

If it is al-Qaeda that we want, then we should focus on its leaders. Keeping them from slipping back into Afghanistan is a valid goal, but it surely isn’t the most important: What counts most is stopping them from carrying out their evil missions or better yet, catching them, dead or alive.

It is galling, and even incredible, to think that both bin Laden, and his top henchman, Ayman al-Zawahiri are still at large. Clearly, penetrating their sanctuary in the mountainous regions along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border has been a daunting task, made more difficult by the diffidence of Pakistan’s own security forces.

Some of that has changed recently, as Pakistan wakes up to the dangers of its own homegrown Taliban. Just last week, Pakistan arrested two senior Taliban leaders in the troubled Swat Valley. In the meantime, the U.S. has stepped up pressure on the Pakistan government, and deployed more drones to hit targets in these regions, thinning al-Qaeda’s top ranks.

‘Death of al-Qaeda’

Some experts say relations between al-Qaeda and the Afghan Taliban are also fraying, which could make bin Laden a liability for his old allies.

So who knows? Maybe there will be a chance to decapitate al-Qaeda, which according to Jean-Pierre Filiu, a French professor and author of “The Nine Lives of al-Qaeda,” would be the end of the organization as we now know it.

“It would be the death of al-Qaeda given that it was founded on personal allegiance to bin Laden,” he said.

As it is, al-Qaeda may already have been weakened. Old- fashioned police work has succeeded in breaking up networks that stretch from the streets of London to the Pakistani borderlands. Last week, a court in London convicted three British Muslims in the so-called airliner plot of 2006, which would have blown up seven passenger planes over the Atlantic.

Nor can al-Qaeda use Iraq as a recruiting tool anymore, now that U.S. troops are withdrawing. The war in Afghanistan has no appeal to bin Laden’s Arab followers. “Iraq was a cause,” said Filiu in an interview. “The conflicts in Afghanistan and Pakistan have very little echo globally.”

$1,000 Expenses

There is also testimony, gleaned from interrogation videos and published in the British newspaper the Guardian, that new recruits are disillusioned by an organization that is hampered by confusion and a lack of funds: Once in Pakistan’s border region, the recruits were stunned to find out they were supposed to pony up $1,000 to pay for their own equipment.

This isn’t to underestimate al-Qaeda’s determination to strike at its enemies, whether in the West, India or in Pakistan itself. But there are more subtle ways to stop them than to flood the region with boots on the ground.

The U.S. can’t walk away from Afghanistan and leave it to drift as happened after the Soviet withdrawal in 1989. Nor should Afghanistan be ignored, as it was from 2003 to 2008, when the U.S. focused on Iraq.

We need to keep a presence there, and we need to keep terrorists out. But we should stay focused on catching them.

(Celestine Bohlen is a Bloomberg News columnist. The opinions expressed are her own.)

To contact the writer of this column: Celestine Bohlen in Paris at cbohlen1@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: September 14, 2009 18:01 EDT