Here is the doc file for Blackie’s Maze, a solitaire card game inspired by dungeon crawls and RPG-style board games.

You are the Red Joker. Find and kill your evil twin, the Black Joker.

Players layout number cards to represent Rooms, Doors, and Levels, battle Jacks, Kings, and Queens with hit points,search for the Black Joker through up to ten levels in an ever changing maze dealt with a simple deck of standard playing cards. A Quick reference book lays out the mechanisms for movement, combat, Hand-management, and for finding and fighting the Black Joker.

“All my life I’ve known my brother was the evil twin. I’ve always felt that one of us shouldn’t have been born. Today, one of us dies in Blackie’s Maze.”

Blackie’s Maze

And here are the rules pasted below.  All you need are the rules and an ordinary deck of cards with the option of two binder clips to use as stands for you jokers.  Stick the rules on your phone and a deck of cards in your bag and your prepared to be trapped or marooned.

 

 

“All my life I’ve known my brother was the evil twin.  It’s time I did something about him.  But he’s not going to let me walk in and knife him.  I’m going to have to hunt him.  After all, he’s a trickster, like me.  I’ve always felt that one of us shouldn’t have been born.  Today, one of us dies in Blackie’s Maze.”

GAME PLAY

TURN SEQUENCE

Unlock Door

Fill Hand

Set Room w/ doors

Draw Enemy card from the Face Deck

-  Draw from the number deck for Enemies HP

-  Draw 5 cards from number deck for Enemy Combat Cards

Combat

Deal Inventory

Discard Cards

You are the Red Joker. Your objective is to find and kill your evil twin, the Black Joker.

WHAT YOU NEED TO PLAY

A standard deck of cards with Jokers.

Optional – Two paper miniature tab-style stands like those from OneMonk.com. Binder clips also work really well.

SET-UP

Separate all Face Cards from the number cards. Discard the red Face Cards. The Jacks, Queens, and Kings of Hearts and Diamonds are not used in this game.

Separate the Jokers as well. Red is your character.  Black is your arch nemesis/evil twin brother. It’s fun to mount these on paper mini tab style stands if you have them.  Otherwise you can lay the Joker card on top of the room card to show his location.

Find the five of Hearts and place it in your INVENTORY at the lower left side of the playing area. This is your HP (Hit or Health Points).  Your hand size is equal to your HP.

Shuffle the number deck. Place the deck to the right of the playing area.  Leave room to place decks above and below. Draw the top card from the number deck and place it in the face deck.

Shuffle the Face deck. Place it in the upper right hand corner of the playing area.

Draw the top card from the number deck and place it face up in the lower right side of the play area.  This is the level card.  It tells you what level you are on in the maze.  It is also a modifier for the HP of the enemies.  You enter the maze on a random level.  That’s just Blackie’s way.

Fill your hand from the number deck.  You have the 5 of hearts in your inventory so at full health you may hold 5 cards.  As you lose HP, you hold fewer cards.

On the first turn on a new level draw a number card and place it face up in the center of the play area. Make sure it is aligned vertically. This is your room. If the rank of the room matches the level card the Black Joker is present.

Set doors. Draw four number cards and lay them horizontal to the room card–one door card for each side of the room card that is not adjacent to another already-explored room.  On the first turn you have not explored any rooms so you will set four door cards.

Place the Red Joker on the room card.

The discard piles will be on the left hand side of the playing area with the discarded Face Cards in the upper left corner, the discarded number cards below them on the left hand side, and your inventory cards in the lower left corner.

PLAY

ROOMS

Rooms are placed vertically on the playing surface.

If their suit matches the suit of a combat card, the combat card is doubled.

If their suit matches the suit of an Enemy card, ie. The King of Spades in a 4 of Spades Room, then the enemy’s HPs are doubled.

Each room has four doors, one for each side.  Place door cards horizontally on each side of the room that has an unexplored room.   All doors are locked with a rank and suit.  To unlock a door match a suit, or play a card of higher value.  If you cannot unlock any doors in the room, you have to retrace your steps.  Return to a room you’ve already explored, set new door cards and try to unlock one.

Whenever you move to a new room, discard all the door cards from room you just left.

If you become trapped in a room with no way out, you lose.  For example, if you begin level six and after combat you cannot unlock a door and you do not have a diamond card in your inventory to buy new cards, game over.  Remember if you end combat with no cards in your hand, you may refill your hand.  If you end combat with one card in your hand, you may not refill your hand until you move into a new room.

When a Room number matches the level number, the Black Joker appears.

LEVELS

The maze has 10 levels.  During the set up stage you drew a number card to represent what level you start on… you don’t necessarily enter at level one, an ace card. A number card was also shuffled into the face deck. When this number card is drawn, it means you’ve been teleported or found stairs to a new level, matching the rank of the card.

Discard all the room cards and reset as if starting the game over.  However, the level cards are never discarded.  Make sure to add a new number card to the face deck, gather up the discarded face cards, and shuffle.

If the rank of the level card drawn from the face deck matches the rank of the current level, you have found the Black Joker. (The Black Joker also appears when the rank of the a room card matches the current level card.)

If you draw a number card for a level you have already explored, draw a new number card until you find one that you do not currently have in your level hand.  If you draw a card that matches your current level, you’ve found the Black Joker.  You could conceivably have a full set of rank cards and draw the number card from the Face Deck.  In that case you lose.  See Losing Conditions.

INVENTORY

You have four slots in your inventory–one for each suit.  You may never have more than one card of any suit.  You will start the game with a 5 of Hearts, and if you draw a 7 of hearts after combat, then you must discard the 5 and replace it with the 7. This restores any lost HP, and you may now hold up to 7 cards in your hand.  If you draw a 3 of hearts, discard it.  You may not redraw your inventory, but you could use the 3 to restore lost HP.

INVENTORY CARDS

Hearts equal your Health Points or Hit Points and are equal to the amount of cards you may hold in your hand.

Spades equal your shield.  If you lose a combat you may draw the spade card from your  inventory and add it to your combat card to block the damage.  Note: In combat, you must have a higher pip number than your enemy’s card, so adding a 3 of Spades to your 2 of Diamonds against your enemy’s 10 of hearts doesn’t block the blow.  If you play a spade from your inventory you are only defending yourself.  It does NOT count as an attack and does NOT subtract from your enemy’s HP.

Diamonds in your inventory are used to buy a number of cards from the draw deck up to the rank of the diamond card.  No change is given.  You buy the full amount and discard the diamond card.  But you may draw the full number of cards above the allowable number for your hand and then immediately discard cards to bring it down to your current limit.

Clubs are added to a single combat attack to deal more damage or to bring the number up to win a round of combat.  A club card from your inventory may be played after the enemy plays their combat card.

ACES in the INVENTORY

Aces in the inventory are moved into the player’s hand and the player may then take any card of the same suit from his hand and place it in the inventory.  The player may leave an ace in the inventory to stall until he draws a high rank card of that suit.  However, the player may not use the Ace from his inventory.  If an Ace is played directly from the inventory it counts as a 1 card.  The Ace of Hearts revives one HP and is discarded.

COMBAT

After you enter a new room, draw a Face Card and set it next to your level hand.  Then draw a number card and set that next to the enemy Face Card.  The enemy’s HP are the number card + the Level card.  Then this number is doubled if the suit of the enemy Face Card matches the current room.

On level 6, you’re in the 4 of spades room and draw a Jack of Spades enemy Face Card.  Then you draw an 8 card for the HP.  8+6×2=28.

Draw five cards from the number deck and place them face down in a stack for your enemies combat cards. Choose a card from your hand and play it, laying it face up on the playing surface, then turn over the top card from the enemy’s combat stack. High card wins.

If you win, your enemy loses HP equal to your card with modifiers.

If you lose, you lose a HP.  Cover up one heart on the Heart card in your inventory.  You may now hold one less card.  (There’s usually a descriptive card in a pack, I use this face down to cover up my lost HP).

When the enemy is defeated, draw a card from the number deck and add it to your inventory if possible.

If either you or your enemy runs out of cards during combat, reload to your current limit.  Always reload your enemy to 5.

Think of combat as a mini-game of war except your winning attack also deals damage.

ACES IN COMBAT

ACE of SPADES – Full shield against one card or attack.

ACE of DIAMONDS – Allows discarding and redrawing cards up to full hand.

ACE of HEARTS – Restores 1 (one) HP. Play this card at any time.

ACE of CLUBS – Allows application of additional cards in a single attack up to the full hand. Then redraw to fill hand.

Now for the bad news… the cards have the same powers when they appear in the enemies combat cycle.

ACE of DIAMONDS – Automatically discard the enemy’s hand and redraw five cards.

ACE of CLUBS – Play the enemy’s full hand in a single attack and refill hand after, if this is the final card in their combat cycle, draw five and play them all.  Then redraw five more.

ACE of HEARTS – Revives the enemy to full HP and blocks a single combat round.  Discard your card with the Ace and proceed.

ACE of SPADES – Full shield against one card or attack.

FLEEING COMBAT

You may wish to flee combat to avoid death or damage from an unbeatable foe.

To flee you must play a spade card either from your hand or from your inventory against an enemy’s combat card.  If you lose, take a hit and move to the room of your choice.  You may only move to revealed rooms. If you win, move without losing a HP.

Discard the enemy’s combat cards and the door cards from the room you fled.  Set new door cards for the current room if any empty sides remain.

Place the face card and HP card for the enemy you evaded into the room you fled.  Upon re-entering the room, the enemy has regained full health.

You may now discard cards from your hand equal to the rank of the room you are now in as long as no enemy is present.  Otherwise, fill your hand to your current limit and combat the enemy.

THE BLACK JOKER

The Black Joker, Blackie, appears whenever the rank of the number card shuffled into the Face Deck matches the rank of the current level card, OR the rank of the current room number matches the current level card.  In the second case, combat an enemy before confronting the Black Joker.  If you draw a new level card, the Black Joker may or may not be teleported with you.  See rules under Chasing Blackie below.

He has 52 HP.

His hand is equal to your current potential hand regardless of any HP you have lost.

He is trickster, preferring to run and hide than to stand and fight.  Any time his combat card is lower than yours he evades to an adjacent room of the same suit as the current room.  If no adjacent room of the same suit exist, he escapes through a door of the same suit as the current room.  If either condition exists, he takes the damage equal to your winning card with any modifiers.  The Black Joker may not evade into a room from which he has already fled.

After the Black Joker takes damage, reset all the locks on the doors of the current room.  Blackie will attempt to flee the next time he loses combat.  But once you have found Blackie he may not escape to another level of the maze.

When the Black Joker evades to a new room, he locks the door behind him.  Set a door card between the two rooms. You must unlock the door before continuing to battle Blackie. Discard Blackie’s full hand and redraw to full capacity.

Blackie’s HP are never restored. If he draws the Ace of Hearts, it restores a single HP.

CHASING BLACKIE

If you chase Blackie into a new room, you must first combat any enemy face cards first.  It is then also possible that you could be teleported to a new level.  Look through Blackie’s current hand.  If he has a Spade of greater value than the new level card, he is not teleported with you.  Otherwise, Blackie moves to the new level as well.  But you must deal with the new enemies before dealing with Blackie.

LOSING CONDITIONS

There are three ways to lose.

1. HP = 0
2. Get trapped in the Maze without a way to continue searching.
3. Search the entire Maze without killing the Black Joker.  If your Level hand is completely flush, meaning you have one card of each rank, and you draw the number card from the Face Deck, you exit the maze and lose.

WINNING CONDITIONS

1. Kill the Black Joker.

OPTIONAL RULE FOR ROYAL COMBATANTS

If you notice that it hardly matters if you kill a King, Queen, or Jack without differentiation, and that bothers you.  You can add automatic modifiers for each.

1. Kings +1 for all even results.
2. Queens +1 for all odd results.
3. Jacks +1 for all 10 cards.

I’m writing a lot these days.  I’m also doing some game design on the side.  Fun stuff.  It works the brain in a different way, and I’m finding it enjoyable.  As I spent a lot of time on the train last semester, I began writing a solitaire card game.  I’m not generally a card game player.  I like Dungeon Games…  I was a kid in the 70′s. Nuf said.  So I thought I’d try to design a dungeon crawl card game.  No dice.  Just you and a deck of ordinary cards.

I got it to a point where it’s playable.  So I am entering it into a game design contest for solitaire games hosted by BoardGameGeek.com.

Here are a few pictures I took of the card game.  They’re needed for the contest.

 

 

I set out to make a dungeon crawl using only a deck of cards.  Blackie’s Maze is the result.  Numbers cards represent Rooms, Doors, Levels, the player’s inventory, HPs as well as the mechanism for combat against the black Face Cards.  I also made miniatures using the Jokers from my deck to make character location.  There’s nothing but a normal deck of cards used… and optional tab-style miniature stands if you want to stand up your joker cards, which makes the game visually more interesting.

 

You play the Red Joker who has set up to kill his evil twin, the Black Joker.

The rules are currently about 8 pages long, but not densely written.  It’s rule heavy for a card game but light for a miniature dungeon crawl.  Character is simply HP and inventory.  There are no other challenges other than combating minions, unlocking doors, and killing the Black Joker, which are all done my managing the cards.

The down side is there is a lot of reshuffling of the number cards.  I’ve considered adding a second deck but haven’t tried it yet. I’m not sure what that would do to the balance or imbalance of the game which may be part of its charm.  When you see all the aces laid out as dungeon rooms, you know you won’t be able to use them in combat until you reach the next level.  So the limited resources adds tension.

I’ll post more about this as it progresses.  At some point, I’ll post the rules here as long as it doesn’t make me ineligible for the contest.  I’m not really interested in winning anything.  I’m just after the feedback and interaction with other like-minded gamers.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It rained again today in Wan Lu Yuan.

Water pooled in low areas of the walking paths.

No lovers sat, arms wrapped about each other,

On the benches overlooking the bay bridge.

Not a single couple clung to each other

Under the Dragon Tree.

No one kissed on the grassy lanes,

Hands cupping cheeks, shoulders.

 

I walk alone, fingers curled into palms

Plunged deep into jacket pockets

Instead of intertwined or held in comparison

Palm to palm, fingertip to fingertip,

While sly smiles speak words

Like ‘matching’ and ‘comfortable.’

 

Where are your lovers, Wan Lu Yuan?

Are they sitting somewhere warm

Still smiling over hot drinks,

Steam misting up into their long and forward gazes?

Or have they requested separation from each other,

Solitude,

Time to ponder or to forget Wan Lu Yuan,

Both waiting for the other to reach out first for reconciliation?

Or have they simply postponed,

Hoping for a better time,

Saying, no we shall not take a walk

Through Wan Lu Yuan in such weather?

 

The rain cools to a mist though thick,

Soaking, and cold.

My shoulders hunch,

Pushing my upturned collar

Over my ears.

I cannot shake this chill.

Wow 2012! This year seems to hold a lot of promise. The beginning of a new era for humanity, which also indicates the end of an era for humanity, according to the Mayans, the year of the dragon for China, a year of prosperity and good fortune, and for me personally a year of accomplishing life goals. We moved into our apartment in Sanya… Pictures at some point, I will publish my first novel online, and I will launch a full on writing career one way or another…

I have discovered a love/hate relationship with Chinese new year. I hate it because there is so much going on, the kid is off from school, the city in which I live becomes clogged with mainlanders, and I often cannot find the time to write. This year that distressed me because my new year resolution was to write everyday and I blew it for three days! I tried getting up super early to write, but no matter how early I got up, Hunter got up too. I tried staying up late to write, but no matter how much coffee I drank I ended up face down in the notebook! But now, here comes another new year like a second chase at making the resolution work!

The weather has been very strange in Munich.  At one point it’s summer and sunny, to warm even for a jacket.  The next minute it’ll rain and be cool.  So we opted for McDonald’s for breakfast so the kids to play in the indoor play area.  They didn’t seem to mind.

Then Hunter and I braved walk to the nearby village of Trudering.  It’s name comes from the fact that the town was built around a monastery of nuns who lived after the example of Saint Gertrude.  Perhaps they called her Trudy for short?   The village is very quaint.  It reminded me of Frankenmuth in Michigan in style–but without the forced quaintness for commercial reasons.

I was surprised he let me take this picture.  He was very protective of that flower.  He even got mad at me when I didn’t put it in water after we returned to our host’s home.

This is a typical home for the area we’re staying in…. I grabbed this shot on the walk back.  I noted the steep slope of the all the rooftops and the presence of a snow rail just above the gutter.

The professor potted the flowers we brought home from Trudering in his mother’s vase, and I set the gnomes about to guard it.  Unfortunately the gnomes were mounted on stands of chocolate bars and were overwhelmed by greedy children.  Though the gnomes were taken out, the flowers and pot survived the assault.

And then came a hail storm!  I’m glad Hunter and I had made it back well before that.  I was told by our hostess that it actually snowed in Munich!

I’ve had two major culture shocks since arriving in Germany.  One, Bavaria looks a lot like the areas in Michigan where the Bavarians settled.  Maybe there’s a correlation.  Two, THE FOOD!  OMG! After two and half years eating rice and veggies, I’m finally eating MEAT!  not to mention the liquified bread commonly known as BEER!

Yesterday, the weather broke and Hunter and I were privileged enough to cut the blackberries, raspberries, and Boysenberries in the Helle garden.  There are some great pictures of Prof. Helle with Hunter.

And then there was a BBQ with a ton of MEAT!

Today, the Professor and I were able to sink our teeth into the manuscript.  For me it is an awesome experience to collaborate with such a brilliant sociologist.  And it’s amazing what happens when we work together.  Okay, the ideas are all his but some of the sentence structures and commas are mine!  Anyway, after an exciting morning of revision we headed back to the Lindengarden for lunch… and what do you think I ate?  Yep, you guessed it, MEAT!

Meat and mustard on a bed of Sauerkraut.  I haven’t eaten sauerkraut since I left Michigan. And I’ve never eaten sauerkraut since good.  We had a blueberry pancake for desert, but I didn’t recognize it as a pan cake other than the fact that it was actually served in a pan.  I’ll have to plan a trip to Frankenmuth to get “authentic” German pancakes!

The first couple of days Hunter and I spent in Germany were marked with very early bedtimes and very early mornings.  Our bodies thought we were still in China.  But we still made it out to the LindenGarten for Lunch.

But day three we were determined to beat the jet lag… we spent the entire day out with our friends.  Rain dampened our choices so we did what any tourist would do… we went to the mall where we discovered a Lego store before sitting down to a sweet brunch.

Then the weather mostly cleared and we headed to a petting zoo…

Then we returned to our host’s home for Dinner, Play, Music, and Television.

I was lucky to have a photographer and a news crew come with me to my first day of classes.

I was already nervous.  And though I love cameras, I’m not too hip to being on the glass side of them.  Anyway, the students are lovely.  I hope I can meet or exceed their expectations for the semester.

Some of the pictures have been posted to the college’s website.

By George Friedman

It has now been nine years since al Qaeda attacked the United States. It has been nine years in which the primary focus of the United States has been on the Islamic world. In addition to a massive investment in homeland security, the United States has engaged in two multi-year, multi-divisional wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, inserted forces in other countries in smaller operations and conducted a global covert campaign against al Qaeda and other radical jihadist groups.

In order to understand the last nine years you must understand the first 24 hours of the war — and recall your own feelings in those 24 hours. First, the attack was a shock, its audaciousness frightening. Second, we did not know what was coming next. The attack had destroyed the right to complacent assumptions. Were there other cells standing by in the United States? Did they have capabilities even more substantial than what they showed on Sept. 11? Could they be detected and stopped? Any American not frightened on Sept. 12 was not in touch with reality. Many who are now claiming that the United States overreacted are forgetting their own sense of panic. We are all calm and collected nine years after.

At the root of all of this was a profound lack of understanding of al Qaeda, particularly its capabilities and intentions. Since we did not know what was possible, our only prudent course was to prepare for the worst. That is what the Bush administration did. Nothing symbolized this more than the fear that al Qaeda had acquired nuclear weapons and that they would use them against the United States. The evidence was minimal, but the consequences would be overwhelming. Bush crafted a strategy based on the worst-case scenario.

Bush was the victim of a decade of failure in the intelligence community to understand what al Qaeda was and wasn’t. I am not merely talking about the failure to predict the 9/11 attack. Regardless of assertions afterwards, the intelligence community provided only vague warnings that lacked the kind of specificity that makes for actionable intelligence. To a certain degree, this is understandable. Al Qaeda learned from Soviet, Saudi, Pakistani and American intelligence during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and knew how to launch attacks without tipping off the target. The greatest failure of American intelligence was not the lack of a clear warning about 9/11 but the lack, on Sept. 12, of a clear picture of al Qaeda’s global structure, capabilities, weaknesses and intentions. Without such information, implementing U.S. policy was like piloting an airplane with faulty instruments in a snowstorm at night.

The president had to do three things: First, he had to assure the public that he knew what he was doing. Second, he had to do something that appeared decisive. Third, he had to gear up an intelligence and security apparatus to tell him what the threats actually were and what he ought to do. American policy became ready, fire, aim.

In looking back at the past nine years, two conclusions can be drawn: There were no more large-scale attacks on the United States by militant Islamists, and the United States was left with the legacy of responses that took place in the first two years after 9/11. This legacy is no longer useful, if it ever was, to the primary mission of defeating al Qaeda, and it represents an effort that is retrospectively out of proportion to the threat.

If I had been told on Sept.12, 2001, that the attack the day before would be the last major attack for at least nine years, I would not have believed it. In looking at the complexity of the security and execution of the 9/11 attack, I would have assumed that an organization capable of acting once in such a way could act again even more effectively. My assumption was wrong. Al Qaeda did not have the resources to mount other operations, and the U.S. response, in many ways clumsy and misguided and in other ways clever and targeted, disrupted any preparations in which al Qaeda might have been engaged to conduct follow-on attacks.

Knowing that about al Qaeda in 2001 was impossible. Knowing which operations were helpful in the effort to block them was impossible, in the context of what Americans knew in the first years after the war began. Therefore, Washington wound up in the contradictory situation in which American military and covert operations surged while new attacks failed to materialize. This created a massive political problem. Rather than appearing to be the cause for the lack of attacks, U.S. military operations were perceived by many as being unnecessary or actually increasing the threat of attack. Even in hindsight, aligning U.S. actions with the apparent outcome is difficult and controversial. But still we know two things: It has been nine years since Sept. 11, 2001, and the war goes on.

What happened was that an act of terrorism was allowed to redefine U.S. grand strategy. The United States operates with a grand strategy derived from the British strategy in Europe — maintaining the balance of power. For the United Kingdom, maintaining the balance of power in Europe protected any one power from emerging that could unite Europe and build a fleet to invade the United Kingdom or block its access to its empire. British strategy was to help create coalitions to block emerging hegemons such as Spain, France or Germany. Using overt and covert means, the United Kingdom aimed to ensure that no hegemonic power could emerge.

The Americans inherited that grand strategy from the British but elevated it to a global rather than regional level. Having blocked the Soviet Union from hegemony over Europe and Asia, the United States proceeded with a strategy whose goal, like that of the United Kingdom, was to nip potential regional hegemons in the bud. The U.S. war with Iraq in 1990-91 and the war with Serbia/Yugoslavia in 1999 were examples of this strategy. It involved coalition warfare, shifting America’s weight from side to side and using minimal force to disrupt the plans of regional aspirants to gain power. This U.S. strategy also was cloaked in the ideology of global liberalism and human rights.

The key to this strategy was its global nature. The emergence of a hegemonic contender that could challenge the United States globally, as the Soviet Union had done, was the worst-case scenario. Therefore, the containment of emerging powers wherever they might emerge was the centerpiece of American balance-of-power strategy.

The most significant effect of 9/11 was that it knocked the United States off its strategy. Rather than adapting its standing global strategy to better address the counterterrorism issue, the United States became obsessed with a single region, the area between the Mediterranean and the Hindu Kush. Within that region, the United States operated with a balance-of-power strategy. It played off all of the nations in the region against each other. It did the same with ethnic and religious groups throughout the region and particularly within Iraq and Afghanistan, the main theaters of the war. In both cases, the United States sought to take advantage of internal divisions, shifting its support in various directions to create a balance of power. That, in the end, was what the surge strategy was all about.

The American obsession with this region in the wake of 9/11 is understandable. Nine years later, with no clear end in sight, the question is whether this continued focus is strategically rational for the United States. Given the uncertainties of the first few years, obsession and uncertainty are understandable, but as a long-term U.S. strategy — the long war that the U.S. Department of Defense is preparing for — it leaves the rest of the world uncovered.

Consider that the Russians have used the American absorption in this region as a window of opportunity to work to reconstruct their geopolitical position. When Russia went to war with Georgia in 2008, an American ally, the United States did not have the forces with which to make a prudent intervention. Similarly, the Chinese have had a degree of freedom of action they could not have expected to enjoy prior to 9/11. The single most important result of 9/11 was that it shifted the United States from a global stance to a regional one, allowing other powers to take advantage of this focus to create significant potential challenges to the United States.

One can make the case, as I have, that whatever the origin of the Iraq war, remaining in Iraq to contain Iran is necessary. It is difficult to make a similar case for Afghanistan. Its strategic interest to the United States is minimal. The only justification for the war is that al Qaeda launched its attacks on the United States from Afghanistan. But that justification is no longer valid. Al Qaeda can launch attacks from Yemen or other countries. The fact that Afghanistan was the base from which the attacks were launched does not mean that al Qaeda depends on Afghanistan to launch attacks. And given that the apex leadership of al Qaeda has not launched attacks in a while, the question is whether al Qaeda is capable of launching such attacks any longer. In any case, managing al Qaeda today does not require nation building in Afghanistan.

But let me state a more radical thesis: The threat of terrorism cannot become the singular focus of the United States. Let me push it further: The United States cannot subordinate its grand strategy to simply fighting terrorism even if there will be occasional terrorist attacks on the United States. Three thousand people died in the 9/11 attack. That is a tragedy, but in a nation of over 300 million, 3,000 deaths cannot be permitted to define the totality of national strategy. Certainly, resources must be devoted to combating the threat and, to the extent possible, disrupting it. But it must also be recognized that terrorism cannot always be blocked, that terrorist attacks will occur and that the world’s only global power cannot be captive to this single threat.

The initial response was understandable and necessary. The United States must continue its intelligence gathering and covert operations against militant Islamists throughout the world. The intelligence failures of the 1990s must not be repeated. But waging a multi-divisional war in Afghanistan makes no strategic sense. The balance-of-power strategy must be used. Pakistan will intervene and discover the Russians and Iranians. The great game will continue. As for Iran, regional counters must be supported at limited cost to the United States. The United States should not be patrolling the far reaches of the region. It should be supporting a balance of power among the native powers of the region.

The United States is a global power and, as such, it must have a global view. It has interests and challenges beyond this region and certainly beyond Afghanistan. The issue there is not whether the United States can or can’t win, however that is defined. The issue is whether it is worth the effort considering what is going on in the rest of the world. Gen. David Petraeus cast the war in terms of whether the United States can win it. That’s reasonable; he’s the commander. But American strategy has to ask another question: What does the United States lose elsewhere while it focuses on the future of Kandahar?

The 9/11 attack shocked the United States and made counterterrorism the centerpiece of American foreign policy. That is too narrow a basis on which to base U.S. foreign policy. It is certainly an important strand of that policy, and it must be addressed, but it should be addressed through the regional balance of power. It is the good fortune of the United States that the Islamic world is torn by internal rivalries.

This is not dismissing the threat of terror. It is recognizing that the United States has done well in suppressing it over the past nine years but at a cost in other regions, a cost that can’t be sustained indefinitely and a cost that could well result in challenges more threatening than a rising Islamist militancy. The United States must now settle into a long-term strategy of managing terrorism as best as it can while not neglecting the rest of its interests.

After nine years, the issue is not what to do in Afghanistan but how the global power can return to managing all of its global interests, along with the war on al Qaeda.

“9/11 and the 9-Year War” is republished with permission of STRATFOR.”

Read more: 9/11 and the 9-Year War | STRATFOR