“The whole goal of the strategy is to disrupt that Pakistani safe haven in the first place. If the strategy is working, then al-Qaeda will try to move in response to increased harassment. I don’t know where they’ll move, and it’s not necessarily the case that they’ll move back to Afghanistan, but we should want them to feel the need for getting out of where they are. . . .”
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Why would it be good to get them to move? Isn’t the real strategy to isolate them in the Paki tribal lands of Waziristan rather than have them running amok in the confused urban landscape of Karachi or even the more complicated scenery of the large Indian cities?

…the U.S. will need to get Pakistan to invade the tribal areas before meeting a sufficient condition for such harassment.

This sure seems like a “be careful what you wish for” kind of suggestion. First, WHY would the Pakistanis do this? I don’t get the impression they harbor a deep concern that the Islamic extremists will oust them and impose a different kind of government in Islamabad. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen poling that indicates that the Islamic extremists represent the very low double digits of the Pakistani population. So it’s really a desire to see them kill, injure and displace a whole bunch of their citizens for American political purposes, and I think you’re going to have to pay them more than a few billion to get them to do that.

An attack on the tribal areas might disrupt al Quaeda, but it will almost certainly increase sympathy for what we tend to call the Taliban, and it will without doubt radicalize many Pakistani citizens. When I look at Pakistan today, it sure looks to me like the army and the ISI has the situation pretty much under control – perhaps not in the way that the American leadership would prefer, but there’s no reason why American priorities and Pakistani priorities should necessarily coincide.

A case could even be made that if the Americans left Afghanistan and the Karzai government fell, to be replaced by one sympathetic to and supported by Islamabad, the net outcome would be a more stable Pakistan.

The whole “safe haven” argument is disingenuous. People who wish to do harm to American interests will always be SOMEWHERE. You disrupt and defeat them with effective intelligence, aggressive law enforcement and small special operations when required. It is not possible to take and hold enough ground to deny terrorists a “safe haven”….

mikey

Hi Spencer,

Right at the bottom of this piece in the London Times today is the line:

Western intelligence officers say Pakistan has been moving Taliban leaders to the volatile city of Karachi, where it would be impossible to strike.

Talk about burying the lede!

Regards, Steve

Pakistan created the Taliban (with Saudi & U.S. help). Hard to unring that bell.

Commenter ObamasQuagmire leaves this note at the end of today’s Book Salon:

General McChrystal on 60 Minutes (live now), “We could do good things in Afghanistan for 100 years and still lose.”

Most powerful unintentional call for an end to the war in Afghanistan that I have heard in a while. A nugget of truth in a propaganda piece.

Heh. From the mouths of babes …

I have nothing but contempt for the U.S. military. With a budget as large as the rest of the world’s combined, you’d think they might do something right once in awhile. Hubris is a heckuva formula for failure.

Only 92 more years. Booyah!

If he really feels that way, why does he want more troops? Does it take a certain number of deaths for victory to break out?

Reading this Times UK article you realize how close this war is to be waged openly throughout Pakistan. The best thing that could happen for the U.S. is to coax the Taliban and Al Qaeda back into Afghanistan and contain them. If the war is fought in Pakistan the casualties are going to be mind-blowing.

Thanks. I just used the McChrystal quote in an email to my congresscritter.

It is painfully absurd that the cost to the U.S. of murdering Afghan civilians prevents adequately funding our libraries, schools, health care, not to mention roads and bridges and internet service.

The U.S. participation in the Pak war will be confined to drone murders. U.S. puppet Pak govt will do the dirty work, so the deaths (of those worthless brown people) will not be on the U.S. scorecard.

If it weren’t for Afghanistan, the U.S. might be bombing Iran (actually it’s probably the vulnerability of U.S. troops in Iraq that prevents that). In any event two hot wars and one proxy hot war in Pak kinda limits U.S. military from causing big problems elsewhere. So maybe we should be thankful for the wars we currently have. The alternative wars might be worse.

This is not about the war on al Quaeda.

It is about right wing incitement of the military to challenge Obama.

We won’t be prepared for al Quaeda dispersal. This is America. We prepare for nothing and then blame non-white people for our troubles.

Has anybody given any thought to what their strategy might be?

By “them”, I mean the people yanking our chain. Is anybody on our side formulating our strategy with any idea of what those folks are trying to do? I don’t refer to “them” as al Qaeda, because, frankly, I suspect that getting us to take that construct seriously, as if it were an enemy basicly like us, with a command structure, an infrastructure, locations for any of these things, etc., is a big part of their strategy. Why should we play along?

Of course, the reason we play along is that this “al Qaeda” managed to kill 3,000 of us eight years ago. Right after that happened, it became literally an openly stated criteria of basic patriotism, that no Amercian could even formulate the question of why they did it, as if understanding would in some way carry some element of foregiveness. Since foregiveness was out of the question, the idea was that understanding was also streng verboten. So much for knowing your enemy.

What we got in the place of any thought-out strategy was national unanimity on invading and occupying Afghanistan to get rid of the al Qaeda sheltering Taliban. Now, given that the other side knocked off Massoud three days before 9/11, as a minimum, you would think that they fully expected us to do exactly that as response to 9/11, invade Afghanistan, and they killed Massoud because they either feared that he would be effective as a national leader after our invasion succeeded, or that his military leadership would enable us to win solely by proxy, without having to invade with actual US troops. Of course, any people on the globe will tend to think, “it’s all about us”, and maybe the people of the world’s sole remaining hyperpower can be excused for carrying that tendency to an extreme, but it really might be useful if we could leave that thinking behind long enough to see that 9/11 wasn’t done to kill the 3,000 Americans who died that day. It was done to get America to invade and occupy Afghanistan.

Why would the other side want us to invade and occupy Afghanistan? Well, if the phrase “al Qaeda” means anything, it certainly doesn’t refer to any organization. It stands for the idea, which these folks who go by that name think is foundational to any prospect for an Arab and Muslim resurgence, that the way forward for the Arabs and Muslims lies in recovering their old virtues by becoming guerrilla warriors fighting the decadent West. Their defeat of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, which led to the demise of the Soviet Empire, is for them the classic case and proof of concept. Lightning might not strike twice in the same place, but if they could only get the other great Western empire to repeat the folly of the Soviets and try to occupy Afghanistan, the same factors which let the mujahadin defeat an advanced Western military machine would allow them to defeat the most feared and respected such military machine.

It didn’t go smoothly for them at the outset. The US seemed on the verge of executing a successful overthrow of the Taliban and victory of a US-friendly Afghan coalition without the committment of US ground troops, without the occupation that was the whole purpose of 9/11 for the other side. When we did send in some of our own troops as our local coalition was already in control of Kabul and Kandahar, at first the smart money assumed that these were there purely to capture ObL, and would quickly leave the country after doing that. But, miraculously, the US snatched defeat from the jaws of victory, and we sent local forces of dubious enthusiasm for the project of catching ObL on that mission, while Western forces steadily expanded as a permanent occupation force. The rest has been history, has steadily been developing into a retelling of the same history that occupiers of Afghanistan always create.

The notion that al Qaeda has an HQ anywhere is as vaporous, as laughable as the notional “third in command of al Qaeda” that the US has been steadily killing in some sort of nightmare of the eternal return for the past eight years. What we call al Qaeda is an idea, the idea that the Arab and Muslim world will rise again to glory by successfully waging guerrilla war on Western powers. It’s not clear that you can beat an idea with anything but other ideas, but it should be clear that the least we can do is to stop going along with the idea of al Qaeda. Let’s stop occupying Afghanistan. That’s their idea, an idea that does only them any good. We may not have a better idea, but at least we should get a different idea.

And who is to blame for that, I ask you?

It reads as if you have a head full of quagmire.
I think that you’re failing to grasp the idea that one kills members of Al Qaeda for simple reasons, having little to do with attempting to kill an idea.