The National Free Press - World Edition: Free Speech, Free Press and Human Rights

I want to rise or fall with my predictions, rather than with the amount of painful "white noise" I make on various TV channels. So here is my "prediction" as to how history will look at the "War on Terror".

The "War on Terror" started with the famous (infamous) declaration by president Bush that it is a "Crusade". Later he regretted using those words but actually he was right - in a way he wished he were not. In fact, history will call it a Crusade because the "War on Terror" has all the defining characteristics of a Crusade.

This is my first prediction.

Let us go back to the Crusades of the Middle Ages. Two of its main defining characteristics were:

1) It lasted for almost four hundred years.

2) It ended (actually pettered out) without a clear winner or loser. This is in sharp contrast with the two World Wars where the vanquished were brought to their knees within 5 years.

Both of these defining characteristics will be satisfied by the "War on Terror" by the time it ends. The reason is simple: If you interpolate 15 or 20 years of our fast-moving times, they will come out to be about 300 or 400 years of Middle Ages. And already experts are preparing for the hard fact that ultimately there may be no
clear winner or loser.

Hence my prediction that history will call the "War on Terror" a "Crusade of the Supersonic Age which Fast Forwarded 400 years to 20 years".

For my second prediction, I go to the Vietnam War. Experts are comparing the Afgan war with the Vietnam War. They are not yet quite right, but like Bush, they may not be so much off the mark - again in a way they wished they were.

So my second prediction is that if the foreign forces in Afganistan withdraw within 3 or 4 years, the last stage of Vietnam War would be repeated verbatim: The Afgan Army will collapse by just melting away leaving the field open for the Taliban and Al Qaida - a remake of the final days of the Vietnam War. And this fact will have nothing to do with the ultra-modern training they received.

The moral of these predictions: World leaders should be very careful about what they say.

They might just be right, but in ways they wished they were wrong.

Image Courtesy of DayLife - Two woman sit in a shared taxi in Rawalpindi, on the outskirts of capital Islamabad on November 17, 2009. The United States has put Pakistan on the frontline of its war against islamist terror networks, increasingly disturbed by deteriorating security in the country where suicide attacks and bombings have killed around 2,500 people in 28 months. - Getty Images

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