Does anybody else remember that arcade game with the alligators? They'd take turns sticking their snouts out a row of tunnels, and you'd whack them with a big mallet. If you did well, they'd memorably shout "NOW I'M ANGRY!" Inevitably, my friends and I would cheat at this game, lining up three in a row to use our hands to smack the gators until the machine spewed forth valuable arcade tickets we would use to get tons of schlocky prizes. I was an especial fan of those parachute men.
Much like these alligators, al Qaeda has the nasty habit of popping up in different places around the world -- safe havens -- and unfortunately the U.S. doesn't have the resources to use a 'cheating' strategy of whacking them wherever they appear. There is also some evidence that our efforts to bring coercive force to bear in these different areas may be counterproductive when they suit the propaganda purposes of al Qaeda, and their goal of locking the U.S. in a series of never-ending wars. Via Mike Crowley, who also draws on arcade metaphors, this article discusses the problem:
Arab intelligence officers say they have tracked foreign fighters allied with al Qaeda traveling from one Mideast battlefield to another -- in particular from Iraq to Yemen, and, over the summer, from Pakistan to Yemen....The global network "moves to the weakest point," says Mustafa Alani, director of security and terrorism studies at the Dubai-based Gulf Research Center, a think tank. "In Yemen, they have found opportunity."
This seeking-the-weakest-point dynamic is something we also see in financial regulation, as financial institutions seek out the weakest regulatory venues and laxest supervision to do their business. In the U.S., we're trying to consolidate regulators to create fewer of these safe havens. That is also why many regulatory changes have to be made globally so there are fewer countries where capital markets can act without proper supervision. But it's far from a solved problem; functioning regulatory systems are hard to create, just as it's hard to prevent the spread of both extremist ideologies and the extremists who seek to put it into action.
What can be said, though, is that the proliferation of safe haven should make us at least reconsider our approach to tackling al Qaeda. There is no doubt military operations in Afghanistan put a huge dent in al Qaeda's capabilities, but there are also diminishing marginal benefits to escalating our military presence there compared to other arenas -- including intelligence, law enforcement and public diplomacy -- that might have a greater long-term pay-off in terms of keeping Americans safe. This is by no means a settled argument, and while the Obama administration's Afghanistan strategy is the product of some smart thinking, but broader questions of how we fight terror remain unanswered.
-- Tim Fernholz