We’ve gotten various responses to the question I posed below. Here’s TPM Reader RW’s response …
I think you oversimplify the issue of safe havens. In counter-terrorist operations, every second and dollar a terrorist organization must use to physically protect the organization is a dollar and a second it does not have to work on initiating a terrorist operation. In Afghanistan under the Taliban, al Qaeda had a government willing to provide an entire country for a safe haven. In other words, the Taliban used its state sovereignty as a shield to protect al Qaeda from the reach of law enforcement. It turns the problem of terrorism from a law enforcement to one of warfare.
From that perspective, terrorist groups who are protected by state sponsors are especially deadly to the nation-state. It is especially critical to the passive helper, the friend that agrees to leave his keys in his car on a specific night, or who hides a wounded fighter in his basement for a night. It is these passive supporters who, knowing terrorists have a far-off and powerful patron, are willing to invest, in their own small way, in the promised terrorist victory. Those passive supporters are the real lifeblood of Islamic terrorism.
This is why Bush’s policy of not pressing Pakistan to get rid of terrorist havens made no sense. The only thing that has allowed the Taliban to survive for so long is the connections it maintains with the outside world via Pakistan’s ISI. Those connections have been its only source of support and its only vehicle for launching attacks for its entire existence. Cut those connections, as Obama is trying to do, and you eliminate al Qaeda as the very real threat it is. In essence, Obama is forcing the Taliban and its al Qaeda allies to fight a two-front war for the first time ever. This is a winning strategy. The stateless terrorist is far less appealing to the passive supporter.
I don’t think this settles the larger question by any means. But I think there are a few key errors in RW’s logic.
First, not all states are created equal. They can be powerful in either military, financial, diplomatic or scientific terms. And one’s that have one or more of those qualities can be very dangerous as state sponsors of terrorism. But Afghanistan under the Taliban’s first reign had none of those. And given the poverty of the country itself, it’s quite difficult to imagine it ever will. You’re not going to have funds funneled through the intricate Afghan financial services sector or really do anything else. The key thing the Taliban offered al Qaida in the first round was non-interference, which isn’t nothing. As a state, the central fact about Taliban-controlled Afghanistan was that it was barely a state at all, which in many ways was what made it so attractive to al Qaida. And to wrap up on this point, the idea that al Qaida operatives are going to get passive assistance from Muslims in Albany or Riyadh or Bali because they have the tacit backing of Afghanistan strikes me as ludicrous.
Second, it’s true that a key element of counter-terrorism strategy is that you want to put pressure on a terrorist adversary on all fronts. And time and money that doesn’t have to go toward self-protection can be routed toward forward operations. Earlier in this decade this got sort of distorted and warped into ‘fighting them over there so we don’t have to fight them here.’ But again, there are two key problems with this argument in this case. First, if you’re going to fight them ‘over there’ it’s key to know where they are. And most of al Qaida wasn’t in Afghanistan. Many had come through. But most were in other Muslim countries or in the West. Rooting the command and control from Afghanistan was key. But much of the disruption operations were a matter of cracking down in other ways on operatives in other countries. Related to this, I’m not saying that the ideal isn’t to deny al Qaida safe havens anywhere. It’s a relative thing. Is it the best use of our resources? Most of these guys have been laying low in Pakistan for the last seven or eight years. And might we be creating more terrorists in a 20 year counter-insurgency than we kill or deny safe havens too?
It comes back to the same question: how critical is it whether terrorist capos can hide out, with the passive approval of the government, in caves in Afghanistan? And should this be the center-piece of our counter-terrorism effort or even our whole foreign policy?
