Safe Havens

Like Josh Marshall I find it a little distressing that one of the central props of the argument for our mission in Afghanistan doesn’t really make sense:

However that may be, the ‘safe haven’ argument just doesn’t seem to add up. The safe havens or rather the training camps in the safe havens, where so many would-be terrorists apparently did an endless stream of calisthenics on those iconic monkey bars, were neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for the 9/11 attacks. They were funded through too loosely guarded global financial networks, planned and organized in cities in Europe and executed right here in the USA. You certainly wouldn’t want the Taliban again more or less openly hosting al Qaida or bin Laden and his main associates, which would allow them to operate more openly and presumably more easily communicate with their conspirators. But even if the Taliban again ruled the country, it’s difficult to imagine that with our forces in the region and our army of drones, we’d have much problem raining down a ton of ordinance the first time they really put up their head.

I don’t think you want to overstate the case against the case against safe havens. Clearly, all else being equal it’d be helpful to al-Qaeda to have an allied group control a substantial contiguous piece of territory in Afghanistan. But still if you want to perpetrate a terrorist attack in a western city a visa to enter a western country or (even better!) a European passport would be a lot more helpful than having an allied group control a substantial contiguous piece of territory in Afghanistan.

It seems to me that we’ve jumped too quickly into a kind of tactical discussion about modalities in Afghanistan. If I want to express skepticism about General McChrystal’s request for forces, I’m supposed to question his military judgment about what is and isn’t necessary. Or I’m supposed to question whether COIN really can or will work in Afghanistan. There are good questions to be asked in those areas, but potentially also some okay answers. But what I really haven’t seen is anyone attempt to seriously lay out some kind of cost-benefit analysis of how important this whole Afghanistan situation really is relative to what I’m being told it would take to “win.” It seems to me not that we should “lose” instead, but rather that we should define “winning” as us achieving something useful and realistic rather than something grandiose and out of proportion to its actual importance.