Safe Havens and COIN

Not all safehavens are created equally. In regards to Islamic terrorism, Afghanistan is the worst safehaven on the planet when the Taliban is in power. Al-Qaeda does what it wants and has free access to training camps, materials and manpower. Al-Qaeda can export its terrorists and idelogy free from any interference from the state. Al-Qaeda also is geographically close to Pakistan, another area that provides Al-Qaeda with men and money.

From a counterterrorism standpoint, to look past Afghanistan and focus on what Yglesias suggests ("Europe, Japan, and the Gulf now joined by China, Brazil, smaller industrialized Asian countries etc.") is a fool's errand. Sunni/Wahabbi Islamic terrorism starts and ends with Al-Qaeda. And like it or not, while we haven't nabbed Bin Laden, we've kept Al-Qaeda from re-establishing itself through the U.S. military in Afghanistan. By pulling out the troops, or simply "re-focusing" our foreign policy elsewhere, you run the risk of allowing the Taliban and Al-Qaeda to return to the 9/10 system.

Keeping focus on Afghanistan doesn't mean your whole foreign policy efforts fall victim to "backwaterfication." In fact, most of the world, whether they admit it or not, understands why the U.S. must deal with Afghanistan. You don't hear a lot of countries publically calling for the U.S. to leave.

Al-Qaeda has had over eight years to find a suitable replacement safehaven. So far, they've not found a place as ideal as Afghanistan. Names like Somalia and Yemen have popped up, but not much has come of it, even in a lawless place like Somalia. To me, that means Walt's worry of playing safehaven whack-a-mole is pretty unfounded.

Al-Qaeda has to place to go right now; they are trapped in the FATA until they can return to Afghanistan or Pakistan goes belly-up and they can migrate east.

"The first error was the failure to capture Bin Laden and his associates at the battle of Tora Bora, which allowed al Qaeda's leaders to escape into Pakistan and thus ensured that the United States would become enmeshed in Afghanistan"

I disagree that this was an error. A failure? Yes. But an error implies that the U.S. had a reasonable chance to get him and failed. Open-source reporting is quite murky about Tora Bora and most "analysis" depends on Monday Morning Quarterbacking. We could do the same thing with Clinton and Bin Laden, but we won't go there.

Similar to B, I'd suggest there are important subcategories to distinguish. When we attack a safe haven, we're potentially doing one, or both, of two things:

(1) Eliminating facilities & personnel (e.g., wiping out the training camps).
(2) Providing evidence to the local power structure supporting the terrorists that it's dangerous to harbor them, and that a cost-benefit analysis would suggest that they be evicted even before the bombers show up.

The Bush administration made a case for (2) -- not very persuasively, in my opinion, but the weakness in its argument derived more from not thinking through the details than in a fundamental flaw in the idea itself. If (2) worked perfectly, then eliminating some camps would lead to the elimination of more of them without our having to do anything. The problem, of course, is that for (2) to mean anything, there has to BE a local power structure, it has to be more powerful than the terrorists, and it has to view U.S. attack as a likely/valid threat. There are quite a number of areas where those conditions aren't met, and quite a number where trying to strengthen that last condition leads to worse problems than it solves.