How Important Are “Safe Havens”?
The head of the Pakistani Taliban, Beitullah Massoud, has threatened to strike Washington, DC with a terrorist attack. But while everyone takes Massoud’s threat to the stability of the Greater Hindu Kush area seriously, nobody seems to take his threat to do this very seriously. As Spencer Ackerman says “It’s difficult to see how Beitullah Massoud, the leader of the Pakistani Taliban, has the capability to launch attacks against the U.S.”
So that’s the good news. The bad news is that this points to what I think is a serious conceptual flaw in the administration’s thinking—this heavy emphasis on the idea that we need to deny al-Qaeda a “safe haven” in Afghanistan or Pakistan. As Andrew Exum observes, it’s not at all clear that a “safe haven” is necessary to carry out a terrorist attack:
Thus, [European governments] are wary of their Afghanistan operations leading to greater unrest in their own immigrant communities, being as likely to look to the suburbs of Paris and London for terror plots in utero as they are to the Federally Administered Tribal Areas in Pakistan. The foiled 2006 transatlantic aircraft plot, for example, was allegedly plotted almost entirely within the confines of my old neighborhood in East London. And while some terrorists–such as Mohammed Sadiq Khan, who is believed to have masterminded the 7/7 bombings–traveled to Pakistan and trained in militant camps, the common denominator that has emerged from domestic terror threats in places like the United Kingdom is that their staging ground was actually on the internet rather than in a physical “safe haven.”
And as per Spencer’s point, not only is a safe haven not necessary, it’s not sufficient either. A safe haven in the mountains in Central Asia doesn’t let you carry out a terrorist attack in the United States. You need an attacker physically located in the United States, in possession of explosives that are also physically located in the United States, in order to attack the United States. The danger is of a terrorist being here or else in someplace like Western Europe or Canada from which it’s easy to get into the United States. Recall that key action in the 9/11 plot took place not just in Afghanistan, but in Hamburg and the best governance initiative in human history is not going to make Afghanistan as orderly and prosperous as Germany. The attackers went to flight school in America; you can’t learn to pilot a jumbo jet in the mountains. Clearly “al-Qaeda has a safe haven” is worse than “al-Qaeda does not have a safe haven” but orienting our national security policy around the goal of denying safe havens is not going to achieve what we’re looking for. And as Exum explains, it could easily lead to dangerous overreach:
The emphasis on destroying “safe havens” also establishes a tricky rationale for our presence in Afghanistan. Even if we succeed in spreading effective governance to southern Afghanistan and western Pakistan, are we then prepared to go to wherever the transnational terror groups relocate? Are we prepared to clear out the Palestinian refugee camps of Lebanon? Or provide governance to the Horn of Africa? The new Obama plan is a dangerous precedent. If the reason we are staying in Afghanistan is to deny al-Qaeda the use of safe havens, where are we going next?
I think that’s right. You need to be wary of a strategic concept which implies that the security of American citizens requires the United States to achieve effective physical control over 100 percent of the world’s land area. We should be especially wary of it given that effective physical control of U.S. territory didn’t actually stop the 9/11 attackers from traveling throughout the country, learning to fly, hijacking airplanes, etc. Absent al-Qaeda acquisition of a nuclear weapon (and they’re not going to find one in Kandahar), the main way al-Qaeda can threaten the United States is by baiting us into implementing costly and unworkable policy responses and some of the “safe haven” rhetoric seems to be pointing us in that direction.
37 Responses to “How Important Are “Safe Havens”?”
Register
RSSLogin
Topic Cloud
ArchivesBlog RollAbout Matt YglesiasContact Me
Donate
March 31st, 2009 at 3:37 pm
As a Pakistani American who isn’t much a fan of Al Qaeda, the Taliban, or the various militaries like the US running around the world stirring shit up, I have to ask: Is there any safe haven from having robotic drones come in and bomb villages and potentially spark civil wars? Doesn’t seem so.
March 31st, 2009 at 3:39 pm
Let me go out on a limb here and say: they knew all of this eight years ago, and didn’t give a shit.
Curious, isn’t it, how the particular “safe havens” we’ve chosen to target happen to be countries in which we had ulterior motives involving oil? Somalia and Sudan are by any measure failed states, completely out of control and as terrorist-friendly as they come. Also, stay tuned for Al Qaeda Bangladesh as that state succumbs to total chaos from starvation and natural disasters. But you don’t see the US doing anything there, now, do you?
It amazes me how even the most “critical” voices in the media continually take the government at its word on its motives, however spurious. Why, despite mountains of evidence that the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq had at least as much to do with pocket-stuffing as nation-building, is anyone who mentions this laughed off as a conspiracy theorist?
March 31st, 2009 at 3:41 pm
Well it seems to me that having Latvaria as a safe heaven gave Victor Von Doom a significant advantage in his struggle for world domination.
March 31st, 2009 at 3:42 pm
What’s more, it seems like economic sanctions is PRECISELY the way to deal with an Afghanistan-esque “safe-haven” country. In the case of Afghanistan, if we hadn’t been the biggest donors to the Taliban government, they wouldn’t have been nearly as popular/tolerable in the civilian population they were bribing/oppressing.
In Pakistan, we’ll make a lot more friends by being an enticing prospective trading partner than by being those guys who are always bombing them. Furthermore, we could stop propping up oppressive governments (who also directly fund Al Qaeda).
In short, if we stop funding people who fund Al Qaeda, we’ll have a lot more success cutting off Al Qaeda’s funding.
Then again, that’s never been the point, has it? And Obama can’t seem to get rid of the people for whom it’s not the point.
March 31st, 2009 at 3:42 pm
Curious, isn’t it, how the particular “safe havens” we’ve chosen to target happen to be countries in which we had ulterior motives involving oil?
I don’t see any oil in Pakistan. I do, however, see oil in Sudan.
March 31st, 2009 at 3:50 pm
Well, there’s a logical solution to this. Just kill all the Muslims! 9 out of 10 Republicans agree.
March 31st, 2009 at 3:53 pm
Recall that key action in the 9/11 plot took place not just in Afghanistan, but in Hamburg and the best governance initiative in human history is not going to make Afghanistan as orderly and prosperous as Germany.
Which is why I always said we should have invaded Portugal in response.
What? What? It’s no crazier than invading Iraq in response to an attack partly plotted in Afghanistan.
March 31st, 2009 at 3:55 pm
ссылки…
The head of the Pakistani Taliban, Beitullah Massoud, has threatened to strike Washington, DC with[...]…
March 31st, 2009 at 3:57 pm
The war in Afghanistan is a war of legitimation. First, the Republicans needed to immmediately “Do Something” in response to 9/11 and legitimize themselves and their particular brand of post-war imperialism.
For Obama, he’s legitimizing his foreign policy “seriousness” by sending the imperial armies out to Afghanistan and giving the imperialists something to keep them busy while he focuses on domestic reform.
March 31st, 2009 at 4:00 pm
“You need to be wary of a strategic concept which implies that the security of American citizens requires the United States to achieve effective physical control over 100 percent of the world’s land area.”
And you need to be wary of Presidents, political parties, and voters who endorse such a stupid concept.
And pundits: mustn’t forget them. Unfortunately, those are the Presidents, parties, and voters we got.
March 31st, 2009 at 4:02 pm
I’m all for letting the Taliban(s) build up a safe haven in some corner of Pakistan, to the point where their leaders feel comfortable going about freely there. Then, of course, we destroy it. Let a thousand flowers bloom!
March 31st, 2009 at 4:02 pm
The next 9/11 will probably be planned in Western countries, sure.
But shift the focus from conventional to nuclear weapons and those safe havens start to look more important. The safe haven we happen to be talking about is inside a nation with nuclear weapons.
March 31st, 2009 at 4:08 pm
Of course, in the same article, Exum also says:
This is not to say that physical safe havens do not matter. They do–a lot.
March 31st, 2009 at 4:10 pm
Which is exactly why we shouldn’t have large conventional forces in Afghanistan.
If we’re concerned about concentrations of opponents, then we retain the capacity to hit them (inaccurately or brutally) from the air.
We also should probably have something like the Phoenix Program ongoing so that none of their leaders gets cosy.
But it is incomprehensible that we ought to have 50,000 troops.
March 31st, 2009 at 4:16 pm
The rationale for nailing safe havens in Pakistan is the same as for the US invasion of Cambodia: denying the enemy a “rear area” for rest and replenishment.
If the US wasn’t fighting in Afghanistan, there’d be no rationale.
So, what if we called it a day and bailed on the Afghanistan, again? What are the potential consequences?
1) OBL gets to come out from the cold.
2) The Afghan civil war picks up steam again. Being as the Talibs seem to be the most motivated group, and so…
3) The Hazaras, Tajiks, Uzbeks, and women in general get to eat shit, again.
4) Opium production may go back down, if the Talib Umma sticks with their previous fatwa.
5) A long range UAV dismembers OBL during a public appearance in Kabul.
The way I see it, that’s a bummer, bummer, serious bummer, win, win.
Back in my day, my high school photography class took a two week field trip across the country. The only safety consideration was to be off the highways at night.
We might be able to get back to something like that bucolic “ideal”, once the Talibs have had 30 years or so to lose their focus while governing. To get there, we’re gonna have to turn our back on a lot of evil shit. Do we have what it takes?
March 31st, 2009 at 4:21 pm
POSH – everybody knows you don’t try out new things until after Labor Day
March 31st, 2009 at 4:26 pm
Which is why the open borders theorists, whether of the libertarian right, or of the liberal left, are wrong. We want to have a decent flow of immigrants, but we should have a controlled flow, not an uncontrolled flow.
March 31st, 2009 at 4:26 pm
Good post, Matt.
March 31st, 2009 at 4:28 pm
Like what – refuse to buy their opium until they get rid of the Taliban?
March 31st, 2009 at 4:31 pm
…the common denominator that has emerged from domestic terror threats in places like the United Kingdom is that their staging ground was actually on the internet rather than in a physical “safe haven.”
Then lets send some predators into those damn internets and turn Islamofasciowebosphere into a damn electronic parking lot!
March 31st, 2009 at 4:32 pm
The only way the emphasis on safe havens makes sense in relation to al-Qaeda is if they’re seeing successful counter-insurgency in Afghanistan as a prerequisite for al-Qaeda-focused counterterrorism. Denial of safe havens is a critical component of counter-insurgency.
Now, there are some interpretations of the Afghanistan policy the administration has put out that would fit this idea. I think someone even put it “Counter-terrorism through counter-insurgency”. So this might actually be the case. Whether it will work is, alas, a rather different question.
March 31st, 2009 at 4:36 pm
Njorl, I was thinking more “don’t give them $6 billion in aid”. I guess “don’t be their primary source of weapons, power, and legitimacy” would be in there too.
March 31st, 2009 at 4:37 pm
Odd. This doesn’t look crazy enough to be a fake “myglesias” post, but it isn’t in orange. Is there a devious plot to make reasonable posts as a fake “myglesias” until such a time that a crazy one could have the ultimate impact?
Or did Matt just forget to click something.
March 31st, 2009 at 4:51 pm
We didn’t give them those things. We gave arms, funds and training to the Peshewar based mujahideen. The Taliban were ISI clients, not CIA clients.
March 31st, 2009 at 5:04 pm
Zaid: I have your answer. America is the safe haven where we won’t send in drones, bomb villages, and start civil wars. Timothy McVeigh came out of the safe Haven of Michigan, right? High unemployment, high poverty rates, high homelessness: aren’t those a cause of terrorism too? I know most of your religious ideologue terrorists come from middle class, but there’s something very basic that they’re usually pissed about. Ironically, it’s usually the very thing we’re doing to stop terrorism that starts it. But there are all kinds of terrorists. Narco terrorism, racism, class war… As the world goes to hell in a handbasket, we’re going to find out that terrorism isn’t something you can stop with more terror.
March 31st, 2009 at 5:43 pm
Hamburg? We need to invade Germany. Wait, we have tens of thousands of troops already there. We need to do something with those troops in Germany!
Also, we need to invade Florida.
March 31st, 2009 at 6:05 pm
further to this conversation of ulterior motves…
let’s not miss the forest for the trees, matt. the afghanistan occupation is about protecting american interests, and looking after the pipelines that feed eurasia.
clearly this is not about 9/11 at all. if it were, why would hilary state just yesterday that we’ve re-branded the “Global War on Terror”? we don’t even use the term “enemy combatants” anymore… see, we’ve really cleaned up our act. everyone can be happy with the public relations campaign under team obama!
so, seeing how afghanistan — or piplinestan, which IS america’s interests — borders pakistan, and the tribal regions of pakistan are known to be “taliban friendly”, then the so-called “war” spilling over into that region makes a lot of sense… particularly when it’s understood in the context of pakistan ousting our puppet, musharraf, last summer.
at this time, america considers pakistan a rogue nation with nukes. this is why Af-Pak is being pushed on us in this all out propaganda war… and so it’s not a good enough reason to de-focus on why we’re there in the first place: to control the entire region. and of course to sell more arms to pakistan so they can fight this “good war” for us.
the neocon war machine divined a arguably prescient view of central asia and the middle east prior to 9/11… how timely it was that were able to take advantage of the event so quickly. how ingenious, too, that the nations which were targeted for retaliation also provide incredibly strategic advantages for attacking other oil and gas bearing nations, such as syria and iran.
i have a theory about the blogging community and its newfound access to the whitehouse in an obama administration that is eager to craft a message to an internet-savvy audience: bloggers don’t want to screw up their 15 minutes. they don’t want to lose their status in the cool kids club by asking the wrong questions… so we’re seeing the lion’s den of internet punditry being effectively de-clawed and de-fanged… government has usurped the last vestige of information sources that we had. of course, this is still in its infancy, but it seems as though my theory is not without merit considering all the softball questions, or LACK of meaningful questions during this propaganda barrage.
how sad.
March 31st, 2009 at 6:31 pm
Part of the problem here is many people’s misconception of military action and air power. To launch a Predator or other airstrike, you need a location, relatively close to the target to launch and make an engagement on a timely matter. You also need operational surprise and operational intelligence or you blow up weddings because you have no clue what is happening on the ground from a satellite in orbit.
BTW, the operable issue is that Pakistan has nuclear weapons. Neither Sudan, Somalia, etc have them nor have the slightest prospect of obtaining NBC weapons. Pakistan is the nightmare scenario. Hopefully, there civil institutions can withstand this assault. Only time will tell.
Afghanistan is more like the rear area…I’m glad Obama sees that the real fight is in Pakistan.
March 31st, 2009 at 7:06 pm
Odd. This doesn’t look crazy enough to be a fake “myglesias” post, but it isn’t in orange.
For some reason the orange feature doesn’t work anymore. That was the real me.
March 31st, 2009 at 10:07 pm
Yglesias wrote:
Are you saying that the 9/11 attackers had safe haven in the US?????
In any case, the key ability we seek is to be able to disrupt the activities of al Qaeda. Almost by definition, if they have safe havens, we haven’t disrupted them.
March 31st, 2009 at 10:20 pm
Odd. This doesn’t look crazy enough to be a fake “myglesias” post, but it isn’t in orange.
Yeah. Sure thing, “Matthew”.
April 1st, 2009 at 12:33 am
Most of the world excluding Pakistan, Afghanistan and a few other benighted countries that are home to radical Muslim terrorists (e.g., Yemen, Somalia) is a safe haven from U.S. drone strikes. It’s a safe bet that we won’t be launching any drone strikes on Switzerland anytime soon. And by the way: Pakistan’s military-intelligence complex has probably done more to “stir shit up” than anyone else.
April 1st, 2009 at 12:53 am
the US and Germany did indeed offer safe haven to the 9/11 hijackers.
Underlying Politics of 9/11 (Part I)
The Underlying Politics of 9/11 (Part II)
April 1st, 2009 at 1:30 am
This is one of Matt’s really rare posts – he gets it absolutely right.
So why does he want more troops in Afghanistan again?
Because all that’s doing is pissing off the Taliban who otherwise don’t give a rat’s ass about the United States. It’s common knowledge that the Taliban have no international terrorism interests. But the longer they are attacked by the US, the more likely it is that they will adopt the “long range strategy” and start sending people to attack the US.
It’s precisely like bin Laden. If the US wasn’t supporting Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Israel, bin Laden couldn’t care less about the US.
Get the troops out of Afghanistan, stop attacking people in Pakistan, and deal with the terrorist groups using counterintelligence.
Counterintelligence works better than counterinsurgency OR counter-terrorism. You infiltrate a group, get all the info you need to hit them either in their holes or when they come out of their holes. And the odds of killing civilians in the process becomes much less.
April 5th, 2009 at 1:16 pm
I knew I wasn’t alone when I said to many of my friends that rebuilding Afghanistan and sending more troops will not stop al Qaeda from planning attacks against us. We need to focus more on counter-intelligence and counter-terrorism operations than just military operations, and rebuilding Afghanistan will only shift the “safe haven” away from that country into another country, and then another country, etc, in an end less game of nation hopscotch.
April 8th, 2009 at 7:53 pm
After reading through this article, I feel that I need more info. Can you suggest some more resources ?
April 15th, 2009 at 5:29 am
This is quite a hot information. I’ll share it on Digg.