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Riffing off of Josh Marshall's confidence in drones, Mike Crowley observes that, even in the event of a complete takeover of Afghanistan by the Taliban, U.S. forces would be able to have a pretty credible deterrent threat against them, given our 2001 demonstration of force. But performing counter-terror missions -- i.e., drone strikes against terrorist leaders -- in the area would be another question entirely, as Stephen Biddle explained at a congressional hearing last week:
I disagree fundamentally with Rory Stewart on the function that havens provide and the ability of the United States to thwart geographic haven with Special Forces strikes or with drone attacks from a distance. What havens do is not to provide real estate for the construction of tent farms where you can conduct training seminars. What havens do is to protect insurgent organizations or terrorists from human intelligence penetration on the ground, which is the primary threat to their survival. The efficacy of our drone attacks turns importantly on our ability to find intelligence on where these organizations and where these individuals are located. That intelligence comes, to an important degree -- not wholly, but to an important degree -- from human intelligence through penetration on the ground, which would be made extraordinarily difficult by the presence of a hostile government that actively prevented people from getting access to the members of the organization. That's why control of the government underneath the drones is so important to the efficacy of drone-based counterterrorism, and another reason why, again, I think the problem here is that the component elements of what people talk about when they talk about counterinsurgency are very difficult to pull out of context and make them work on their own without the rest.Essentially, without control over the airspace and the ability to move with relative freedom on the ground, we're not going to be able to do targeted drone strikes against terrorist leaders in a Taliban-controlled Afghanistan -- U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan depend on cooperation with Pakistani intelligence. Let's say the U.S. does scale down to a light footprint approach, and al-Qaeda returns to Afghanistan. The only deterrent we could use would be a 2001-style assault. Is the U.S. government going to be willing to undertake an operation of that nature, based on what will surely be inconclusive intelligence? Probably not without a lot of dithering.None of this is to elide the debate about whether safe havens are actually the issue here, since potential terrorist safe havens abound in the world, or whether fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan is actually destabilizing Pakistan, our greater national concern. Nor should we set aside the question of whether the Taliban returning to power in Afghanistan is something the United States should be willing to concede.
-- Tim Fernholz
