Prioritizing Pakistan’s Stability
Steven Walt questions the proposition that the threat from al-Qaeda justifies “a costly, long-term engagement in Afghanistan and Pakistan.” The point I strongly agree with here is that it’s not a good idea to overrate the importance of “safe havens” in terms of al-Qaeda’s ability to cause harm to American interests or American civilians. The evidence suggests that such havens are neither necessary nor sufficient to carry out substantial terrorist attacks.
It’s also difficult to know exactly how to phrase this, but one really does need to keep in mind that as morally appalling as the perpetrators of things like the Madrid or London attacks are, the actual harm done by such attacks is pretty modest in the scheme of things. More lives could be saved by investing dollars in improved highway safety than by military operations in Central Asia. And more important than that, the most important countermeasure we can adopt against vulnerability to a Madrid-scale attack is to increase our society’s psychological resilience in the face of terrorism. The biggest risk posed by the prospect of a bomb going off in Grand Central Station is not that it would kill people (though it would), it’s that it might alter the behavior of millions of people throughout the country’s largest and most economically important metropolitan area in counterproductive ways. The whole region’s transportation network might become semi-permanently more sluggish in response to new fears and security measures in a manner that would, day by day, year by year, sap the country of some of its economic vibrancy. And any attack anywhere might be a further punch in the gut to consumer and business confidence and plunge us deeper into recession. But you don’t, ultimately, fight this kind of stuff by “taking the fight to the terrorists,” you fight it by getting the public and elite opinion leaders alike to recognize the national security importance of not freaking out.
In strict security terms, meanwhile, the biggest threat from the Afghanistan/Pakistan area is not that a “safe haven” will exist somewhere in the hills, it’s that the Pakistani state might collapse in a way that risks the security of the Pakistani nuclear arsenal. Even here, I don’t think it’s helpful to try to keep people up at night with stories about a nuclear weapon finding its way into the hands of a terrorist who smuggles it into the United States. The more plausible nightmare scenario is that India feels compelled to take some kind of “preemptive” military action that leads to the deaths of millions of people in that part of the world.
But either way, preserving and enhancing the efficacy of the Pakistani state should be the key priority. Contrary to Walt, I think this probably does both justify and require “a costly, long-term engagement in Afghanistan and Pakistan.” But it has implications for our priorities. In particular, unilateral American military strikes inside Pakistani territory seem to me to be a serious destabilizing factor in Pakistan. I wouldn’t want to systematically rule out ever launching such an attack, but doing it routinely, as we now appear to be, is creating serious risks even while everyone admits that it doesn’t provide a long-term solution to the issue it’s designed to solve. This is something that I think we need to start thinking much more carefully about.
32 Responses to “Prioritizing Pakistan’s Stability”
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April 9th, 2009 at 12:10 pm
Apparently, fuckface Stephen Walt has forgotten that Al Qaeda had sanctuaries in Taliban run Afghanistan from which the attacks against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were planned and launched. Not surprising that goat fucker Walt is full of shit on this topic, as on all others he screeds about.
April 9th, 2009 at 12:21 pm
Hobbes was right about at least one thing; people’s fear of violent death is very powerful. I don’t think you can educate that out of us, even if such a thing would be desirable. If people think there is a good chance that large structures or gatherings of people will routinely blow up in successful terrorist attacks, they will change their behavior in ways more dramatic than they do knowing the risk of a car crash or the possibility of death from second-hand smoke. Mass society would cease to function in such an environment, or else government would mobilize society to the exclusive purpose of fighting the enemy.
Psychological resilience, going about your usual lives, shopping, and everything GWB told us to do is well and good as long as we have reason to believe that government is preserving a low risk-level.
April 9th, 2009 at 12:21 pm
What a relief to have Bush and Cheney out of office. I think not only blogger, but national security professionals are now free to think about terrorism in realistic terms.
April 9th, 2009 at 12:24 pm
Take a look at the typical British reactions to disasters in general, and terror events in particular, and you will get a nice lesson in what “not freaking out” looks like. However, I think some non-trivial part of that is simply cultural, and probably very hard to duplicate elsewhere.
April 9th, 2009 at 12:27 pm
At some point (preferably before we have another terrorist attack), I hope Obama can find a way to raise the points in your second paragraph. (If it’s difficult for you to find the proper phrasing, the difficulties for a US Prez are infinitely greater, but it still needs to be done.) As you know, Obama’s talked about the politics of fear and politicians exploiting fear for political gain, but we are still far more psychologically vulnerable to terrorism than we should be. No one should ever die at the hands of a terrorist, but no terrorist, no matter how successful, could possibly damage America as badly as we could damage ourselves by overreacting. (Our post-9/11 overreactions, as bad as they were, are probably in the low range of possible overreactions – just look at all the crazy talk on the right these days.)
We were living overseas when the 7/7 London attacks occurred. It was interesting to me that the BBC international news stopped running the story wall-to-wall before CNN International did – a couple of days before, if memory serves. I don’t want to make any blanket assertions about British stiff-upper-lippiness or the hysteria of the American media from this one example, but it does provide a data point.
April 9th, 2009 at 12:32 pm
The purely utilitarian approach doesn’t get you very far, because (a) we value/fear different kinds of death differently, and (b) there are important but non-quantifiable elements. It’s not insane, for instance, to support spending $10bn destroying so-called terrorist safe havens in Pakistan rather than $5bn to “harden” potential targets in the US, because the former is only dislocating to Pakistanis (and to Americans who signed up for the job, at least broadly), while the latter is dislocating to Americans in their daily lives.
April 9th, 2009 at 12:34 pm
Two points:
1. SLC, your words are totally unwelcome and any sentiments you may have will be totally discounted by any of us who want to respect the thoughts of others.
2. Matt, I’m glad to hear you question “unilateral American military strikes inside Pakistan.” I would go further: unmanned missile strikes against anyone is about as cowardly and uncivilized as a society can get. At least those who torture in person have to acknowledge what they’re doing to other real human beings.
April 9th, 2009 at 12:42 pm
But you don’t, ultimately, fight this kind of stuff by “taking the fight to the terrorists,” you fight it by getting the public and elite opinion leaders alike to recognize the national security importance of not freaking out.
As Aaron rightly points out, you can’t educate or manage people’s reaction to terror events like 9/11. The only way people might not “freak out” is if these attacks become commonplace and hence, a relatively more predictable facet of everyday life. That might explain the British insouciance (as Matt C points out) where years of IRA activity likely made the general population a lot more immune to bombs. Thankfully we don’t have the same problem since barring the odd McVeigh, our terrorist are not homegrown. So unfortunately, we will need to spend those mega dollars fighting Bin Laden and his SOBs wherever they might be.
April 9th, 2009 at 1:02 pm
Re Wayne Burkhart
Ah gee, Mr. Burkhart is offended. I will lose approximately a nanosecond of sleep tonight.
April 9th, 2009 at 1:11 pm
I think you are definitely right about this. However, I just don’t see the administration framing the issues in this way.
Of course, there are still a lot of hard questions to answer even if we follow the direction your suggesting here. What responsibility do we currently have to keep Afghanistan from sliding into Taliban domination? What can we do to live up to this responsibility?
April 9th, 2009 at 1:12 pm
I suspect that this post, particularly the comparison between 9/11 and highway safety, will elicit an even larger than usual outpouring of fake outrage from the usual sources. Even I think the comparison is a bit unrealistic. We have a certain measure of control over own fate when we’re behind the wheel. It’s the loss of control that makes something like 9/11 so terrifying.
But I think it’s important to drive home the point that we call it terrorism for a reason. The point is to terrorize people and change their behavior. Neocons felt the right response was to emphasize changing our behavior to be more ruthless, but in the process they ended up terrorizing the people we were ostensibly trying to liberate and democratize, and they also found it politically useful to keep our own people terrified for as long as possible.
There’s a lot to be said for simply refusing to be terrorized. Terrorist organizations are criminal gangs. They need to be treated as such. Treating them as an existential threat that requires WORLD WAR FOUR is a disastrous miscalculation, fed largely by misplaced envy. “Grandpa got to liberate Europe, but all I do is push papers.”
Count your damn blessings and suck it up, people.
April 9th, 2009 at 1:43 pm
Afghanistan can’t be swept under the rug. The Taliban wins and that is going to spill over into Pakistan. Islamicists will be emoldened across the Mideast, North Africa and southeast Asia fanning out from Afghanistan. Domestic US politics will be such that intervention is impossible under a Democratic administration setting the stage for a Sarah Palin. As for psychological resilence half of the US will go bonkers if another major terrorist attack happens on US soil. Fox will see to that. If the US were to withdraw and the Taliban were to take over this would have repercussions in domestic US politics for years. From the viewpoint of the Republicans the worst case scenario is that Obama brings an Iraqi sort of stability to Afghanistan. Sure the Pakistanis publicly decry the missile strikes but there is the possibility that some secretly welcome the strikes. Cost aside almost everything points to trying to make the mission in Afghanistan work. Certainly there are circumstances where the US would withdraw but if the US does the US is going to have pay a high price.
April 9th, 2009 at 1:51 pm
Great post Matt.
April 9th, 2009 at 2:19 pm
SLC, why do you hate Stephen Walt?
And why do you insist on calling yourself a goat?
April 9th, 2009 at 2:46 pm
Re SS
I dislike Prof. Walt because he is an antisemitic lying sack of shit and a yellow bellied coward to boot. When challenged to defend his piece of shit book co-authored with Prof. Mearsheimer in debate, he declines like the yellow belly he is.
April 9th, 2009 at 2:49 pm
Perhaps you should actually try reading Walt’s blog post before ranting on it, shithead. Walt never disputed that Afghanistan was a terrorism sanctuary in the way that the FATA is a terrorism sanctuary now; he merely disputes whether actively going after them in military fashion in Afghanistan and Pakistan is a necessary strategy towards stopping terrorism, and everything I’ve read suggests that that is not really the case (although it can be helpful). For example, there were plenty of opportunities to intercept and stop the 9/11 attacks, including multiple CIA warnings, with the main reason that this wasn’t done being a failure of communication between agencies and a severe lack of imagination – and that was with Afghanistan being more or less an open Al-Qaeda sanctuary, with only the occasional missile strike on their encampments.
You obviously want to stop the attacks, but this is a good point. Terrorism’s basic motive as a tactic is to either intimidate the enemy population into cowing from a tactic, or to bait an enemy into doing something. In the case of Al-Qaeda and 9/11, they believed that the US would lash out like a “wounded bear”, and were hoping to drag the US into a war in Afghanistan where they could try the Soviet-style strategy.
Some comments from people in countries where domestic terrorism has been an issue (particularly the UK and North Ireland, or even Spain and the Basques) for a long time would be especially welcome.
Does Pakistan even have the technology for a smuggle-able nuclear weapon (most of them, especially in countries other than the US and Russia, are much too large to simply be carried around in anything other than a truck)? They’re more advanced and difficult to make, which is why I’m not really afraid of a smuggled-in nuke.
It’s definitely a threat, but I wouldn’t be too worried about it unless Islamabad itself falls to either the Taliban or their Islamist sympathizers in Islamabad.
But there’s not really a lot we can do, aside from giving the Pakistani government money and equipment. Ultimately, Pakistan itself (along with their arguably rogue intelligence agency, the ISI, which is frankly responsible for a lot of the Islamist and Taliban bullshit over the past two decades due to years of funding these groups as well as taking sympathizers into the ISI, often to the highest levels) has to make the decision to clear out these guys. Zardari at least seems to want to do this, but I’m not so sure about other parts of their population. Too much of the Pakistani population seems to think this is an “American War”, that if the US just packed up and left everything would return to the way it was.
There’s nothing “cowardly” about it, unless you think using ranged-weapons period rather than fighting up close “like men” is somehow cowardly. The Taliban may think as such, but we don’t really give a shit what they think about it – and they do things like bombings and terrorism.
They do. The fact that they badmouth the attacks at the same time that they’ve secretly allowed the US to use Pakistani air bases to launch the drones from is proof enough of that. I just figured that that was Zardari pandering to his population while pressuring the US to give them drones to carry out their own attacks, among other concessions.
April 9th, 2009 at 3:10 pm
SLC,
Please provide examples of Walt, either a) lying, or b) being anti-semitic. There’s nothing in his and Mearshimer’s book that’s even remotely anti-semitic.
And you’re a fucking douchebag, who does double duty as a bot.
April 9th, 2009 at 3:29 pm
The more plausible nightmare scenario is that in order to keep its power Pakistan army feels compelled to take some kind of “preemptive” military action that leads to the deaths of millions of people in that part of the world.
There, corrected it for you.
What’s with Matt’s Pakiphelia?
April 9th, 2009 at 4:04 pm
Matt’s response to a terror attack is that we should suck it up and deal. That sounds very reasonable when written on a blog post, but fails when it encounters the real world. If your relative or someone close to you happens to be a victim of such an incident, do you really believe that you response would be as dispassionate as if the person died in a car crash. Somehow, I seriously doubt that.
Yes, both Israel and the UK as societies are somewhat more hardened to shrug off terrorist attacks because they have gone through so many. Fortunately, we as Americans have not had to evolve to that state and the pain that it would entail. But, don’t doubt that their societies are not greatly effected by terrorism. Israel is the perfect example of a state that sees itself under siege. Soldiers in arms on most corners, a national permanent draft, the West Bank Wall, etc. In the UK, police cameras are almost everywhere and their civil liberty laws aren’t nearly as liberal as you might imagine of Europeans. I can easily see America becoming that way if faced with similar circumstance, and no American leader would act much differently.
And. no, no one would shrug it off if a Pakistani nuke took out an American city. I think OBL and his gang were unpleasantly surprised by our response in Afghanistan. I think this was a good act, and the only way to handle the situation.
April 9th, 2009 at 6:14 pm
Brett’s analysis of Matt’s post is very good. Matt is wrong to assume that stabilizing Pakistan is important to US national security.
While it would be unfortunate if Pakistan’s government would be seized by the Taliban, there is no evidence whatsoever that the Taliban would use nukes, OR give nukes to anyone else.
And the notion that Al Qaeda would be able to take over Pakistan is discounted by almost everyone with knowledge of the area. Al Qaeda is not the Taliban and vice versa. Even “the Taliban” are a loose coalition of organizations that would probably fight among themselves more than the current Pakistani political parties do if they were to seize power.
As for India doing something pre-emptive, how about we take that up with India instead of spending hundreds of billions of dollars over decades to somehow “stabilize” Pakistan, with no guarantee we could do it at all?
Matt’s notion that somehow you just pour money and people into a region and it magically all comes together is just bizarre. He has zero concept of history and human cultural evolution. He has no knowledge of exactly HOW any of this is actually going to work or even if it CAN work. He has zero knowledge of military affairs, COIN, terrorism and refuses to learn about what is going on in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
So why is he posting this stuff? Apparently because he’s still drinking the Obama Kool-Aid and feels compelled to support Obama’s expansion of a war that was stupid to begin with.
Meanwhile, Courtney’s argument above amounts to: “We’re emotional, we can’t handle terrorism, so we need to expend vast amounts of uneconomic and non-effective efforts to kill other people so we don’t have to deal with it.”
Good luck with that.
April 9th, 2009 at 6:31 pm
Gregor is perceptive to have picked up on Matt’s Pakiphilia, which seems aligned with the Obama administration’s own apparent default setting in that direction. Remember (among other stuff) the early Obama statement about wanting to “broker” an Indo-Pak “deal” – just the sort of outside meddling the Pakis have been trying to engineer and the Indians have been opposing for decades.
Pakistan is already a failed state, but still held together by a fanatical heavily islamized army. A better long run solution may be to just let it fall apart into six or seven more natural ethnically homogenous statelets, which could be manipulated into venting their irrepressible islamic energies mostly against each other, leaving the rest of us in peace. Of course that would entail somebody having first launched a successful surprise attack to seize and make off with all the Paki nukes …
April 9th, 2009 at 6:31 pm
Re SS
Prof. Walt is a yellow bellied coward who is afraid to debate the claims made in his book. And Mr. SS is a fucktard.
April 9th, 2009 at 7:28 pm
SLC – YOUR CLAIMS REQUIRE PROOF
Why is this so hard for you to understand? Are you too thick? Did you fry your head in a particle accelerator? Seriously, some people are a waste of breathable oxygen.
April 9th, 2009 at 8:12 pm
“While it would be unfortunate if Pakistan’s government would be seized by the Taliban, there is no evidence whatsoever that the Taliban would use nukes, OR give nukes to anyone else.”
So, I take it that Richard thought that conducting military action against Al Qaeda and the Taliban government in Afghanistan was wrong in the first place. With comments like these, no wonder why the general American public thinks that Dems are weak on defense and protecting Americans. Actually, that is probably why we could use a real left wing, pacifist, socialist party in this country. So, the more moderate amongst us wouldn’t have to defend statements like these.
The Taliban and Al Qaeda are not Iraq, Iran, or any of the other myriad things GWB seriously screwed up. They aren’t even Hamas. They are much more serious about their stated goals than you appear to be. Good thing your views aren’t taken seriously in this country.
April 9th, 2009 at 8:16 pm
The ONLY reason Obama and the current administration care about the Taliban and Afghanistan is because Pakistan has nuclear weapons. Without those, we would deal with the region the same way we deal with most other parts of the world that might provide terrorist safe havens. Nuclear weapons are a game changer and the Taliban/Al Qaeda really are fanatics who will do what they say and have proven it every time.
This is not the same thing as Iran.
April 10th, 2009 at 12:14 am
Very good post. I wrote in Walt’s post’s comments that I also think we have legacy responsibilities in Afghanistan proper due to our invasion and subsequent neglect of its political and physical rebuilding. But Pakistan’s stability is undoubtedly our greatest interest in the region. I (and I would venture 95% of Americnas) am just simply am not expert enough to say whether a modest escalation of troop presence in Afghanistan like the one planned is the best way to preserve stability across the border. So I am choosing to give it some time. One thing I am not willing to give time to, however, is a high frequency of Predator strikes in either country. Yes, high-value targets. But the likely short-term blowback of adopting this as a first-order approach to fighting insurgents in the border areas cannot possibly be justified by their effectiveness in killing. Beyond that, I remember specifically about 20 months ago Obama being very clear about when he would authorize strikes in Pakistan. It involved U.S. posession of reliable, actionable intelligence about high-ranking Al Qaeda figures when Pakistan couldn’t or wouldn’t act. (Hillary made hay.) It definitely did not involve more-than-weekly strikes as part of overall counterinsurgency operations. So yeah, drone strikes not so much.
But basically I’m in complete agreement with every word of this post. Good for me & Matt.
April 10th, 2009 at 2:18 am
Interesting over-generalization based off of your assumption of someone else’s opinion. Try again.
Nobody’s disputing that.
April 10th, 2009 at 8:22 am
“If the Taliban are not defeated, history is a witness that whenever Khyber has been breached, the battle has been fought in Panipat.” – Pakistan’s Ambassador to the UN, Abdullah Hussain Haroon, quoted by Khalid Hassan in the Pakistani Daily Times.
You seriously need to think whether you want the next battle of Panipat.
April 10th, 2009 at 8:24 am
Re SS
Harvard Prof. Alan Dershowitz has challenged Prof. Walt to debate his book on numerous occasions and the latter has refused to do so. Now, of course, Mr. SS will immediately denounce Prof. Dershowitz as a pawn of AIPAC and a tool of the International Zionist Conspiracy, in addition to being an advocate of torture but these would be grist for Prof. Walts’ Mill if he had to balls to accept the challenge, which he does not.
April 10th, 2009 at 9:06 am
Courtney H is completely wrong. The Afghan Taliban have repeatedly said they have ZERO interest in exporting their mode of government. The Pakistani Taliban haven’t indicated much interest in that either.
The Pakistani Taliban are united with the Pakistani government against India, however. So if they had hold of nukes, the question would be would they go to war with India or would India attack Pakistan in fear of the Pakistani Taliban using nukes against India. Neither is relevant to US national security, and the odds are very great that neither India nor Pakistan would use nukes in any sort of first strike.
As for attacking Afghanistan to get rid of Al Qaeda, that was totally stupid. Al Qaeda could have been dealt with whenever they stuck their noses out of Afghanistan. It was Bush’s incompetence (and possibly Cheney’s connivance) that allowed 9/11 to occur. Even if military action against Al Qaeda was required, that could have been carried out without bothering to topple the Taliban. And trying to nation build an area that wouldn’t know what a “nation” looked like if it bit them on the ass is unbelievably stupid.
Finally, the odds are great that the US knows where every single Pakistani nuclear weapon is located, and if Al Qaeda were on the verge of getting them, could probably take the lot out.
Not to mention that even if Al Qaeda managed to get hold of a nuke, they would need someone to arm it, a way to transport it, and the odds of pulling that off without being intercepted along the way is pretty small. And their target would just as likely be Israel as the US.
So panic mode is not in the cards and certainly does not justify billions or hundreds of billions of dollars to try to “stabilize” a region that has never known stability and probably never will.
April 10th, 2009 at 1:08 pm
SLC – that’s where you’re wrong. Dershowitz’s rebuttals to the W & M piece were little more than strawmen – he did not attack the actual arguments, he set out to misrepresent the arguments that W & M made. He did not challenge the facts that they quoted, but rather presented vague charges of “anti-semitism”. What purpose is served by debating someone like that? All debating someone like that does is to legitimize their viewpoints – and Dershowitz’s “rebuttals” had no legitimacy.
And it’s not like the conclusion that WM made is really controversial – there is a very strong pro-Israel lobby in the United States, it very strongly attacks critics of Israel, and occasionally it pushes an agenda which is not in the long term interest of the United States of America, or really Israel for that matter, but rather the Likud party in Israel. Where exactly is this conclusion incorrect?
April 17th, 2009 at 11:07 pm
[...] political fortunes of our enemies and worsen those of our allies.” Meanwhile, liberal blogger Matthew Yglesias identifies the strikes as a “serious destabilizing factor in Pakistan”, and that [...]