Even if we were able to suppress Islam in both Afghanistan and Iraq for a couple of generations, at the end, Islam will become resurgent. Just take a look at once Secular Turkey flexing their military muscle over Israel right now.
Robert Goldman (Spengler) made a good point about Islam: it will collapse under its own weight as it meets modernity, something that it can no longer avoid doing because of modern communications and technology. Islam is anti-rational (which was the point the Pope tried to make at Regensburg, until the press sallied forth to defend Islam and confuse things). Islam does not believe that the visible world is predictable, since its all-powerful god is irrational, arbitrary and not even bound by his own laws, and could at any time decide to make the rivers run backwards simply because he felt like it.
Obviously, something like this is not going to be able to survive, and something that spawns the irrational, repressive societies that are Muslim countries is also not going to hold up against the demands of modern people, who whether they know it or not have adopted the Judeo-Christian belief in natural law and the dignity of man.
BUT the thing that is keeping it from collapsing on its own is precisely the West, theoretically its enemy. We shored up Islam in Iraq, we’re doing the same thing in Afghanistan, and the US has supported every one of these “Arab spring” revolutions which are essentially about the reimposition of sharia and full Islamic society in places which, while they may have been horrid dictatorships, were moving away from it.
Look at Libya, where Bambi has our soldiers “advising” and to which we are channeling money - and the new government’s announcement yesterday that the country will be run based on Islam and Islamic law. Same with Egypt and everywhere else in the ME. Islam would have collapsed even there if we had not shored it up.