The "Safe Haven" Nonsense

By Steve Hynd

By now, everyone's familiar with the hawkish cry that the U.S. must stay in Afghanistan forevah! to deny Al Qaeda a safe haven.

Derrick Crowe nails the first itteration of this argument dead in a post so good I'll quote a big chunk.

Al-Qaida is not a conventional military force. It�s a scale-free network. When attacking a such a network, seizing a particular piece of geography is a laughable way to proceed unless you know that the region you target contains a non-random concentration of network hubs. Further, AQ�s network displays small world behavior, meaning that unless you silence a sufficient number of hubs at once, the pieces of the network remain functional as mini-networks.

But Petraeus and Mullen have both flat out told us that there are no al-Qaida �hubs� in Afghanistan.

In other words, Afghanistan holds no hubs, and thus mucking around there has no chance of inducing network failure.

So, why on earth would we continue to spend $1 million per year, per soldier, to seize and hang onto a piece of territory empty of the hubs we�re seeking?

Counterinsurgency represents the conventional military�s bid to stay relevant in current conflicts against unconventional enemies. Conventional forces are a weapon designed to fight other conventional forces. Thus, to stay relevant, commanders of conventional forces (and those with interests in making sure said forces remain relevant, like defense contractors and politicians of a certain stripe) must impose conventional attributes onto the public perception of the unconventional enemy. This is often done by euphemism: �bases� become �safe havens,� for example. When you hear people talking about �safe havens,� you should recognize the projection of the conventional force structure model onto the terrorist group by a person used to thinking about a conventional opponent. What they mean by �safe haven� is essentially a �military base.� But terrorists don�t need military bases.

...even if McChrystal miraculously manages to deny safe haven in all of Afghanistan, well, congratulations. You�ve managed to deny al-Qaida the use of 652,230 square miles out of a total 57,511,026.002 square miles of the Earth�s surface, the roughly 1 percent of the planet�s landmass which, according to U.S. commanders, contains none of the terrorist network hubs they�re after. Good job.

Al-Qaida�s safe haven is a globalized, Internet-connected world. You�re probably not going to defeat it by taking and defending territory. McChrystal�s request comes straight out of a conventional-thinking military accustomed to political deference and unlimited resourcing, striving (successfully, mind you) to stay relevant versus today�s threats, and shaped by a presidential goal that makes no sense given the public statements of U.S. generals and admirals.

COIN is a waste of resources if the goal of the U.S. is to defeat the al-Qaida network.

This is pure 4GW theory and well known to the Surge Protectors, so they then step back to their next line of defense: that the U.S. needs to be in Afghanistan so it can have a presence next door to Pakistan - essentially arguing (though never saying so outright) that America invaded the wrong country because the right one has nukes.

Over to David Rothkopf at Foreign Policy:

Afghanistan is only relevant relative to Pakistan.

Does that make Afghanistan important? Only if we can use it as a base from which we can contain the threats posed from within Pakistan. But the reality is given the terrain in the mountains on the border, we have spent eight years proving that we can't really do that. And our friends in Kabul are running such a bogus government that it is unlikely they will prove to be a useful aid in such matters anytime in the foreseeable future. Thus, if Afghanistan is only relevant as far as it can help deal with threats in Pakistan and it can't really help very much with those, it is actually not that important.

What's the conclusion? View all our actions in Afghanistan relative to our real interests in the region, which are for the most part in Pakistan. To the extent we can position ourselves in Afghanistan in ways supporting cross-border activities into Pakistan and that gives a rapid deployment capability should the worst happen there, fine. Give them aid. Encourage them to stabilize. But recognize that we shouldn't have an extended military presence in a place that is not actually that important to us -- especially if most experts think our likelihood of success with regard to military objectives in the country is in the slim to none range.

Which leaves those paid to think by the folk who make tanks with a last desperate argument: withdrawing from Afghanistan will hand Al Qaeda a propaganda victory.

But seriously, hands up those who think the U.S. should continue to pay a million bucks per man per year so that Al Qaeda doesn't taunt us again. It's silly on a Pythonesque scale. The prospect of American politicians doing Al Qaeda's real work for it, enmeshing the nation in Afghanistan and draining the national blood and treasure banks as BinLaden always hoped, is a far more dangerous and imminent threat.