The Summit Is Only Halfway Home

I received a few emails (actual reader email!) that took me to task over the supposed negative tone in the previous post. I clearly didn't want to imply that I was in any way losing heart; in fact I specifically said that I was convinced that we will eventually win this war against Islamic extremism. However, we are not there yet--not by a long shot.

Mountaineering expeditions require intense preparations, which have a strategic goal that is gained by achieving defined objectives. The summit is not the strategic goal of a mountaineering trip; getting to the summit and getting back to car alive is. This is elementary and it may seem like I am pointing out the obvious, however after reading a copy of the annually published "Accidents in North American Mountaineering" you'll see that the majority of accidents occur not on the way up, but on descent.

On busy mountains, such as Mount Shasta, I've witnessed climbers collapsing in exhaustion on the summit. I don't mean to minimize their achievement, but it is extremely dangerous to let your guard down when your trip is only halfway complete. If you don't keep mentally aware on the way down, the likelihood of a careless step on a loose rock or a traverse over an icy patch increases exponentially. This loss of focus has the potential to really ruin your day. When our team reaches the summit, the first words out of my mouth are usually, "Ok, nice work everyone, let's keep focus...Oh look, a blue car!" Blue cars aside, it is imperative to chatter to each other constantly about keeping focused on the way down.

That is precisely my point in regards to the war. We have so much left to do and must be able to endure the second half of this fight. Yesterday Wretchard pointed out the reality of WMDs being built and used by non-state actors:

Recent -- and very real -- successes at spreading democracy in the Middle East, even coupled with impressive technological advances will not change the fact that widely available commercial technology has put enormous destructive potential in the hands of private groups. Nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, once the sole province of states, may become available to powerful nonstate organization or even individuals and we will always have to guard against them.

I agree. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were offensive wars intended to take the initiative away from the Islamic extremists. This was the proper first step, however some further forward thinking is required to deal with the "descent" stage of our strategic goal of ending Islamic extremism. If we relax and lose our focus, we may end up being another statistic in civilization's historical version of "Accidents in North American Mounteering."