The administration has been moving away from the phrase of “war on terror,” first with a lower level memo and now via a statement by Secretary of State Clinton. Ackerman notes that this reflects thinking that focuses on al-Qaeda, “Not Hezbollah, not Hamas, not the Sadrist current and so forth; but al-Qaeda.”
So, that deals with the “terror” part of the phrase. The question is are they moving away from the “war.” As Yglesias raises, the question is whether we want to maintain a safe harbor denial policy. The logic of this approach follows fairly logically from 9/11, deny groups like al-Qaeda any safe places to organize such as Afghanistan or northwest Pakistan. Here’s Yglesias:
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.
This overstates things a bit, in most cases we’re talking diplomatic arrangements with states and not direct control of their territory. However, given the number of failed states and uncontrolled regions out there, even this standard is difficult to meet. One intermediary step is predator drone strikes, which seem to be systematically more effective than cruise missiles for this sort of thing. Having them lingering probably means some level of acquiesce by the state in question. Obviously such strikes will not be particularly popular. Alternately there’s intelligence cooperation, but that can mean empowering groups like the Pakistan’s ISI which is thought to have connections with the Taliban.
Figuring out how to handle Afghanistan is one question, but the larger issue is what balance of military, intelligence, and judicial tools works best. This is a hard problem, and both military and intelligence tools can often make it harder by recruiting more adversaries. I think addressing the grievances is the ultimate answer, but that does still leave us with the problem of those already radicalized.
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