Watching President Obama speak this week about the U.S. drawdown from Afghanistan, I thought of the old nursery rhyme:

Oh, The grand old Duke of York, He had ten thousand men;

He marched them up to the top of the hill, And he marched them down again.

In 2009, President Obama ordered an Afghan surge, sending more than 30,000 additional troops into Afghanistan. This week, Obama announced that the additional troops will withdraw by May 2012. The U.S. combat mission in Afghanistan will end by 2014.

Canada’s war is ending, too.

Unlike the Iraq surge of 2006-2008, the Afghanistan surge is not ending in success. The government does not control Afghanistan’s territory. The Taliban have been neither defeated nor included in a political process. The Afghan security forces have been expanded, but they remain depressingly ineffective and enlistment remains far below the one peacekeeper to 30 civilian rule-of-thumb for counter-insurgency.

Odds are that when the U.S. surge ends, Afghanistan will revert to the conditions that prevailed before the surge: a weak government in Kabul beset by a growing Taliban insurgency in the Pashtun parts of the country.

So you have to wonder: What was the point?

President Obama has explained his Afghan surge as driven by the need to “deny a safe haven to al-Qaeda.” But as the whole world has spectacularly witnessed, al-Qaeda has already found a new safe haven in Pakistan -a safe haven with better airline connections and more reliable phone service than their former rocky home in one of the world’s most remote countries.

In fact, the Afghan surge had the perverse effect of intensifying U.S. dependence on Pakistan. Back in 2001, George W. Bush declared that any government harboring al-Qaeda terrorists would be deemed terrorist itself. In 2011, we discover that somebody important in Pakistan was harbouring Osama bin Laden himself -and nothing has happened. Nothing can happen, because without Pakistan, the U.S. cannot fight in Afghanistan.

There’s a management saying: the main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.

Building schools in Afghanistan is not the main thing.

Improving the lives of ordinary Afghans is not the main thing.

Bestowing stable government upon Afghanistan is not the main thing.

Eradicating al-Qaeda is the main thing.

Back in 2008, candidate Obama repeatedly described Afghanistan as the central front in the war on terror. He repeatedly accused the Bush administration of “taking its eye off the ball” by not investing more in Afghanistan.

After three years of doing it Obama’s way, perhaps more people can see the sense in the Bush approach.

Obama’s over-emphasis on Afghanistan has committed the U.S. and the world to a gigantic state-building mission on inhospitable terrain. That mission is ending in predictable disappointment.

Yet even as the mission in Afghanistan is fizzling out, the campaign against al-Qaeda is succeeding. Even before the killing of bin Laden, al-Qaeda and other radical Islamist groups had lost their ability to carry out major terrorist attacks on the Western world.

Instead of 19 hijackers carrying out a coordinated attack on the most potent symbols of American power, we have occasional lone gunmen attempting Columbine-style shooting sprees. Those can be lethal and harrowing, like Major Nidal Hassan’s murder of 13 people at Fort Hood in 2009. But nobody will interpret these ugly crimes as system-shaking assaults on American power, as bin Laden once hoped Muslims worldwide would interpret the 9/11 hijackings.

Each international terrorist attack since 9/11 has been less sophisticated than the one before: the Bali bombing less sophisticated than 9/11 itself, the Madrid train station bombing less sophisticated than Bali, the London subway attack less sophisticated than Madrid, the Ontario plot of 2006 less sophisticated than London.

But there is one exception to the dwindling of Islamist terrorism, and that is the terrorist attacks upon India. As recently as 2008, Islamist terrorists carried out coordinated attacks on targets in Mumbai, India’s biggest city, killing 164 people and wounding more than 300.

These terrorists drew backing from the Pakistan security forces, probably from some of the same people who shielded bin Laden -and for that matter, who continue to support the Taliban in its war with NATO and the United States. It is precisely because Obama agreed to treat Afghanistan as the central front that the U.S. has found itself so helpless to force change upon Pakistan.

Obama and other Democrats agreed to overestimate Afghanistan in large part for domestic political reasons: Having opposed the Iraq war, they needed a war of their own to support to prove their tough-on-terrorism credentials. More and more, it looks like they chose wrong.

As that war winds down to its unsuccessful conclusion, we can only say: it’s a good thing that Afghanistan is not as important as candidate Obama said. If it were, we’d be in real trouble.