I don’t want to make too much out of a small word-choice decision, but this line in yesterday’s Rajiv Chandrasekaran article on the White House’s latest thinking about Afghanistan struck me:
As the president’s top defense and foreign policy officials debate the way forward, they have begun to revisit the March review’s main conclusion, asking whether the administration’s relatively narrow goal of preventing al-Qaeda’s return to Afghanistan would best be achieved through a full-on counterinsurgency mission or through a more limited counterterrorism operation that would target any high-level terrorists seeking to operate there again.
What I hope they’re asking is not which of these approaches would be the best way of achieving the goal, but rather which way of achieving the goal would best serve the national interest.
What do I mean? Well, say that a COIN strategy would have 90 percent efficacy in terms of stopping al-Qaeda from using Afghanistan as a base of operations. And maybe we think a “more limited counterterrorism operation” would only have 75 percent efficacy. So COIN is better. But it also costs more. How much more? Well, we’d want an estimate of that. And then we ought to ask ourselves with the additional cost is worth it. I bring this up because the scenarios that victory in Afghanistan is supposed to prevent—a devastating Afghanistan-based al-Qaeda strike against the US homeland or the total collapse of the Pakistani government—strike me as things that are unlikely to happen no matter what we do.
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