'Safe Haven Myth' Bites the Dust

One of the most intelligent and thoughtful comments on Afghanistan so
far comes from Paul Pillar, the former chief analyst for the US
intelligence community and a renowned expert on terrorism, who writes in today's Washington Post
that the real issue in Afgahnistan is: What is a "terror haven"?
Pillar's argument ought to be required reading for anyone thinking
about what "success" in Afghanistan means, since the chief fall-back
argument for anyone who supports a long-term counterinsurgency strategy
there is that the United States cannot allow the country to become a
safe haven for Al Qaeda.

Pillar asks:

"The debate has largely overlooked a more basic
question: How important to terrorist groups is any physical haven? More
to the point: How much does a haven affect the danger of terrorist
attacks against U.S. interests, especially the U.S. homeland?"

And he answers his own question:

"The answer to the second question is: not nearly as
much as unstated assumptions underlying the current debate seem to
suppose."

Instead, he says, would-be terrorists can use globalization and
Internet technologies to plan, organize, and train from anywhere. He
points out that preparations for 9/11 "took place not in training camps
in Afghanistan but, rather, in apartments in Germany, hotel rooms in
Spain and flight schools in the United States." And, most important, he
says:

"Al-Qaeda's role in that threat is now less one of
commander than of ideological lodestar, and for that role a haven is
almost meaningless."

Pillar's argument makes a bulls-eye on the central issue for
Afghanistan policy going forward. If the US goal there is to create a
strong, democratic state with a modern army, a centralized government,
and a growing economic infrastructure, then, yes, it's a generational
project that will necessarily require a heavy-handed US military
presence. But if the US goal is simply to prevent 9/11-style attacks on
the United States by Al Qaeda and its allies, then it's hard to argue
for a counterinsurgency strategy a la General McChrystal. Earlier this
year, President Obama seems to have initially defined US goals in the
more limited sense, that is, as an anti-Al Qaeda program. Since then,
however, under pressure from the US military and hawkish aadvisers,
Obama's "limited" counterterrorism apporach to Afghanistan has morphed
dramatically into a much larger, and more open-ended, counterinsurgency
and nation-building approach.

In any case, says Pillar, comparing the unfounded assumptions about
Afghanistan-as-terror-haven to the Vietnam-era domino theory:

"The Obama administration and other participants in the
debate about expanding the counterinsurgency effort in Afghanistan can
still avoid comparable error. But this would require not merely
invoking Sept. 11 and taking for granted that a haven in Afghanistan
would mean the difference between repeating and not repeating that
horror. It would instead mean presenting a convincing case about how
such a haven would significantly increase the terrorist danger to the
United States. That case has not yet been made."

Meanwhile, growing doubts about US Afghan policy are coming not only
from congressional Democrats, such as Nancy Pelosi and Carl Levin, but
from Republican-leaning realists, too. A letter to Obama from
a group that might be called "the Project for Another Type of New
American Century" -- an ad hoc group that includes representatives from
the New America Foundation, the Cato Institute, and other moderate and
libertarian-minded thinkers -- says:

"We are concerned that the war in Afghanistan is
growing increasingly detached from considerations of length, cost, and
consequences. Its rationale is becoming murkier and both domestic and
international support for it is waning. Respectfully, we urge you to
focus U.S. strategy more clearly on Al

Qaeda instead of expanding the mission into an ambitious experiment in state building."

The letter, circulated in part by Steve Clemons' blog, the Washington Note, echoes the point made by Paul Pillar about alleged safe havens:

"The rationale of expanding the mission in order to
prevent 'safe havens' for Al Qaeda from emerging is appealing but
flawed. Afghanistan, even excluding the non-Pashto areas, is a large,
geographically imposing country where it is probably impossible to
ensure that no safe havens could exist. Searching for certainty that
there are not and will not be safe havens in Afghanistan is quixotic
and likely to be extremely costly. Even if some massive effort in that
country were somehow able to prevent a safe haven there, dozens of
other countries could easily serve the same purpose. Even well-governed
modern democracies like Germany have inadvertently provided staging
grounds for terrorists. A better strategy would focus on negotiations
with moderate Taliban elements, regional diplomacy, and disrupting any
large-scale Al Qaeda operations that may emerge."

You can find all the signers of the letter at Clemon's blog posting.

Of course, by signing the letter, Clemons underlines his disagreement
with his New America Foundation colleague, Peter Bergen, a principal
exponent of the idea that Al Qaeda and the Taliban are in cahoots to
reestablish the pre-October 2001 terrorist safe haven in Afghanistan.
Bergen is a believer in the "protect the population" theory of
counterinsurgency in the Afghan context, though he's skeptical of the
idea that the US political system will allow the dispatch of additional
troops.

But last month, in response to a piece by Stephen Walt -- one of the
signers of the "realist" letter -- who'd criticized the "safe haven
myth," Bergen wrote a response for the Foreign Policy AfPak Channel that said, in part:

"If the Taliban did come back to power in Afghanistan,
of course they would give safe haven to al Qaeda. ... The idea that
Afghanistan is not an ideal place from which to launch anti-American
attacks is simply absurd.

"The idea of attacking iconic targets in Washington and New York
was first hatched in Afghanistan in 1996; the coordination of the
attacks took place in Afghanistan over the next several years; the
pilots were given their specific orders about target selection and
their duties by the leaders of al Qaeda when they travelled to
Afghanistan in 1999, and all 15 of the 'muscle' hijackers passed
through al Qaeda's Afghan training camps."

So Bergen backs Obama's escalation strategy for Afghanistan. He's not
alone. It's still the consensus view among national security
specialists in Washington, at the Pentaton, among thinktanks (including
those who've been co-opted into being part of McChrystal's "advisers'
group"). But it's fast losing political support.