Yikes!
I can’t claim any secret knowledge of our plans for the war. But my personal belief is that the whole thing has been allowing a huge amount of young people to grow up without the foot of the extremists quite so heavy on their throat. Now hopefully when we do leave they will not like being under someone elses foot, and there will be enough that grew up with a taste for some freedoms, and they will organize and fight to keep it.
Not much, I suspect.
Saddam hated the Taliban and the Afghanis. He saw them as religious nutcases who were living in the Stone Age. As brutal as Saddam was, he was also a committed secularist who was interested in modernizing Iraq and making himself sole power source. He worked quite hard to disempower the mullahs, balance the religious sects against each other, and making Iraq a modern petrostate.
That was why Saddam was our friend back before he invaded Kuwait. He was seen as a secular force to moderate the Iranians, who had signed on to a theocracy.
If Saddam wanted to help the Afghanis, why didn’t he just get involved in Oct 2001 when started Operation Enduring Freedom? He stayed well away from that involvement.
As with taking down Saddam and his sons, I think it’s going to take someone in his circle to rat on him for us to be able to take him down. It seems to come down to actionable human intelligence, which apparently is difficult to obtain in certain parts of the world. I think whenever you’re looking for specific individuals, that’s what it takes...I have noticed this with Saddam and his sons, with Pablo Escobar, Noriega, and also with tracking down war criminals in Bosnia...you can find out where people have been, but where they’re going to be seems to be the challenge.