One thing I’ve been wanting to address over the last week is what remains the background premise for the Afghanistan mission: denying a safe haven to al Qaeda or other similar groups from which to mount attacks on the United States. I have already seen numerous analyses claiming that al Qaeda will soon be setting up shop again under Taliban protection. Sometimes it is necessary to grab hold of a bad argument by the root.
Let me address this at a few levels.
In retrospect – and perhaps at the time – the entire ‘safe haven’ argument was greatly overstated. Let’s take the actual 9/11 attacks as our example. As many note, most of the plotting was done by people who weren’t even in Afghanistan. They were mostly people from the Gulf living in Europe or the United States. At a basic level the whole premise was wrong from the beginning. But this critique misses a non-trivial part of the equation. There’s only so much time in the day. If you’re running an international terror group, time spent on the run is time not spent plotting attacks. Obviously terrorist and guerrilla groups have managed to do both throughout history. But it certainly makes sense and I think is borne out by history that if you have a base of operations which is basically protected and secure that’s an advantage. This is the premise on the strategy of ‘pressure’ wrapped up in aggressive surveillance, drone strikes, throttling access to the international banking system, special ops raids and more. Time spent running is time not spent plotting.
Here’s an update on the definitely failed evacuation and abandonment of everyone who ever worked for us in Afghanistan. According to the White House, 21,600 people were evacuated over the last 24 hours bringing the total number to 58,700. I know a tone of sarcasm is a bit jarring in what is a very serious and dangerous situation. But in addition to a story of great significance and human drama we’re coming off one of the biggest and most revealing press tantrums I’ve ever seen. Yesterday I said I thought we were only days away from pundit-bewailers shifting to taking credit for turning the greatest military debacle in history into a historically successful airlift. But I was wrong: it’s already happening.
