Prioritizing Pakistan’s Stability

Steven Walt questions the proposition that the threat from al-Qaeda justifies “a costly, long-term engagement in Afghanistan and Pakistan.” The point I strongly agree with here is that it’s not a good idea to overrate the importance of “safe havens” in terms of al-Qaeda’s ability to cause harm to American interests or American civilians. The evidence suggests that such havens are neither necessary nor sufficient to carry out substantial terrorist attacks.

It’s also difficult to know exactly how to phrase this, but one really does need to keep in mind that as morally appalling as the perpetrators of things like the Madrid or London attacks are, the actual harm done by such attacks is pretty modest in the scheme of things. More lives could be saved by investing dollars in improved highway safety than by military operations in Central Asia. And more important than that, the most important countermeasure we can adopt against vulnerability to a Madrid-scale attack is to increase our society’s psychological resilience in the face of terrorism. The biggest risk posed by the prospect of a bomb going off in Grand Central Station is not that it would kill people (though it would), it’s that it might alter the behavior of millions of people throughout the country’s largest and most economically important metropolitan area in counterproductive ways. The whole region’s transportation network might become semi-permanently more sluggish in response to new fears and security measures in a manner that would, day by day, year by year, sap the country of some of its economic vibrancy. And any attack anywhere might be a further punch in the gut to consumer and business confidence and plunge us deeper into recession. But you don’t, ultimately, fight this kind of stuff by “taking the fight to the terrorists,” you fight it by getting the public and elite opinion leaders alike to recognize the national security importance of not freaking out.

In strict security terms, meanwhile, the biggest threat from the Afghanistan/Pakistan area is not that a “safe haven” will exist somewhere in the hills, it’s that the Pakistani state might collapse in a way that risks the security of the Pakistani nuclear arsenal. Even here, I don’t think it’s helpful to try to keep people up at night with stories about a nuclear weapon finding its way into the hands of a terrorist who smuggles it into the United States. The more plausible nightmare scenario is that India feels compelled to take some kind of “preemptive” military action that leads to the deaths of millions of people in that part of the world.

But either way, preserving and enhancing the efficacy of the Pakistani state should be the key priority. Contrary to Walt, I think this probably does both justify and require “a costly, long-term engagement in Afghanistan and Pakistan.” But it has implications for our priorities. In particular, unilateral American military strikes inside Pakistani territory seem to me to be a serious destabilizing factor in Pakistan. I wouldn’t want to systematically rule out ever launching such an attack, but doing it routinely, as we now appear to be, is creating serious risks even while everyone admits that it doesn’t provide a long-term solution to the issue it’s designed to solve. This is something that I think we need to start thinking much more carefully about.