It’s a sign of how much time has passed since 9/11 that we are having a national discussion about, essentially, whether we can tolerate a loss to Islamic extremists in Afghanistan. But so it is. This passage in the New York Times today highlights some of the practical difficulties of the pull-out, do-it-from-afar strategy (although I wouldn’t go as far as Hoffman does in saying an attack on the U.S. would be “guaranteed” in the wake of a pull-out):
“The notion that you can conduct a purely counterterrorist kind of campaign and do it from a distance simply does not accord with reality,” Mr. Gates told reporters last Thursday. “The reality is that even if you want to focus on counterterrorism, you cannot do that successfully without local law enforcement, without internal security, without intelligence.”
Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at Georgetown University, concurred, saying the argument that terrorism can be prevented essentially by remote control was “immensely seductive” — and completely wrong.
“We tried to contain the terrorism problem in Afghanistan from a distance before 9/11,” he said. “Look how well that worked.”
Airstrikes risk killing civilians — as shown by international concern over the possibility that many civilians were among the scores killed in the NATO bombing of two fuel tankers in northern Afghanistan last week — and making enemies of the very people American commanders are trying to sway. General McChrystal recently tightened rules on airstrikes to try to avert civilian deaths.
Mr. Hoffman said the success of strikes from Predators in killing Qaeda suspects in Pakistan depended on accurate information on terrorists’ whereabouts from Pakistani intelligence. In Afghanistan, without such sources, “we’d be flying blind,” he said.
Disengagement from Afghanistan could destabilize Pakistan and “guarantee” a future attack on the United States from the region, Mr. Hoffman said. For starters, a pullout could deny the United States bases from which it carries out some Predator missions.