American Footprints

Marc Lynch makes a very good point:

Suppose 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 (and even suppose that it did this without the expense depriving Americans of the same things).  So what? Al-Qaeda (or what we call 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.  Are we to commit the United States to bringing effective governance and free wireless to the entire world?  On whose budget?  To his credit, McChrystal adviser Steve Biddle raises all of these questions in his excellent American Interest article from last month — but in my view goes wrong by limiting the policy options to either full withdrawal or full commitment to COIN.

Right.  It’s not like al-Qaeda is confined to this little sliver of land in South Asia such that, once that narrow stretch of land is magically pacified and completely reordered, al-Qaeda will cease to exist.  Thus, as Lynch points out, the game of nation build-a-mole will have to continue in a new setting.  And at a couple trillion dollars a pop, we don’t have the money.  Further, al-Qaeda (and its viral ideology) has penetrated Western Europe and other regions not in need of nation building.  So even if at the end of a century and $50 trillion dollars or so, we managed to purge the globe of potential havens, the problem would persist.

This, for my money (taxpayers too), is the right approach: Read more »