Safe Haven Myth Should Die With Bin Laden

I don’t want to pose as an expert on Pakistani geography, but surely the fact that Osama bin Laden turns out to have been hiding out in a walled compound near a city thirty miles up the road from Islamabad featuring a professional cricket team, a field hockey stadium, and a medical school ought to prompt us to reconsider the obsession with the idea of “terrorist safe havens.”

On the one hand, no location on earth is actually safe from a United States military capable of deploying special operations troops and a wide array of deadly airborne munitions. On the other hand, people can hide out in all kinds of places. It didn’t take a remote cave or a super-villain lair, it just took discipline. Trying to physical conquer and occupy territory in order to prevent it from being used by terrorists is extremely difficult, oftentimes counterproductive, unnecessary, and offers no guarantee of success.