By Steve Hynd
Matt Yglesias is a clever guy and a great writer on progressive issues. I certainly never would suggest otherwise. But I've upset him with my post yesterday. In an email which is published with his kind permission, Matt writes:
I read your "Netroots Nation and Afghanistan" post and I have to say that I thought it was kind of unfair to me. For one thing, I don't actually have any access to "policy movers and shakers" on the national security front and I never try to develop any such access precisely because I don't want to be co-opted. For another thing, I think that if you read my actual recent writings on Afghanistan (here and here) you'll see that I've been quite critical of what the administration is doing.
I'll admit that the drama of the transition, the stimulus fight, the economic collapse, the ACES battle in the House, and then the health care fight has gotten me pretty distracted from this whole set of issues. Distracted to a fault, I think, I'm trying to resolve to re-engage because I think we're on the edge of making a major mistake.
When the guy is right, he's right. I admit that I'd included him in a list of progressive bloggers who were supportive of the COIN/interventionist school of thought which has so monopolized the reins of Dem foreign policy thinking because of his earlier writings, which certainly gave the administration considerable benefit of the doubt. But his recent writings are far more critical.
At the Daily Beast, Matt writes that:
The nominal reason for [the escalating occupation] is that an ill-governed and anarchic Afghanistan "could" once again become a "safe haven" for al-Qaeda. The trouble, as Marc Lynch, director of the George Washington University Institute for Middle East Studies points out, is that even if "the U.S. succeeded beyond all its wildest expectations, and turned Afghanistan into Nirvana on Earth, an orderly, high GDP nirvana with universal health care and a robust wireless network" then al-Qaeda "could easily migrate to Somalia, to Yemen, deeper into Pakistan, into the Caucasas, into Africa�into a near infinite potential pool of ungoverned or semi-governed spaces with potentially supportive environments."
What's more, it's not at all clear that the presence of an ungoverned or semi-governed space even has anything to do with our exposure to terrorist attacks. The 9/11 attacks were primarily plotted in Hamburg, Germany which is considerably better-governed than Afghanistan is going to be under any foreseeable situation. Other major terrorist attacks in Britain and Spain were plotted and executed entirely in London and Madrid. At the end of the day, to mount a terrorist attack against the West you need to be in the West. You can't hijack airplanes in the Hindu Kush or find a crowded train station in Mogadishu.
And at his own blog he addresses the COINdinistas' "urge to surge" :
...having (allegedly) developed a workable counterinsurgency hammer everything now looks like a nail. Suddenly, counterterrorism goals require counterinsurgency methods because, allegedly, the only way for a country to make itself safe from terrorism is ensure that there are no unstable governments anywhere in the world�or at least anywhere in the world that it�s plausible to imagine the congress funding a massive counterinsurgency campaign. Not a single person from the counterinsurgency community seems to have said �you know what, counterinsurgency is really hard and we shouldn�t embroil ourselves in it on a thin pretext.�
Today, Matt writes that he's resolved to re-engage on the Af/Pak debate. I'm very glad to hear it and I apologize unreservedly for mischaracterising his current position and for any offense I may have caused. The point of my original post was to, hopefully, stir some progressive bloggers to start thinking about Af/Pak again. Hopefully Matt won't be the only one to return to fully being involved with the debate about foreign interventionism.
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