What's the Problem with Pre-9/11 Afghanistan?
As someone who has been a skeptic of claims that America needs to embark on a costly program of armed state building in Afghanistan, it's worth mentioning that I found the counter-arguments by Steve Coll here and Peter Bergen here to be rather persuasive in favor of a redoubled commitment.
That said, I'm still not quite convinced and this line from Max Boot reminded me why. Boot argues for a surge in Afghanistan, noting that:
It’s a painful process, but what choice do we have unless we want to risk Afghanistan reverting to its pre-9/11 state?
One of the main reasons that "pre 9/11 Afghanistan" is now considered such a problem is because we did not appreciate the magnitude of the al Qaeda threat then. Michael Scheuer, former head of the bin Laden unit at the C.I.A. has said that on ten occasions, the C.I.A. had actionable intelligence on the whereabouts of bin Laden but the Clinton administration refused to act - reasoning that the costs of attempting to kill or capture bin Laden at those moments outweighed the gains.
Today, with drone strikes occurring at an unprecedented pace, that simply would not be the case. If this administration, or any future administration, had a solid lead on a senior al Qaeda figure they would be much less hesitant to pull the trigger.
And return for a moment back to the Afghanistan of the 1990s and imagine that a more aggressive U.S. takes all ten shots it was offered by intelligence officials. Imagine it is able to land a cruise missile on top of bin Laden, al Zawahiri and Khalid Sheik Mohammad. With them dead, it's difficult to imagine 9/11 even occurring.
In other words, one of the major problems stemming from "pre 9/11 Afghanistan" is not simply that it was a host-state for al Qaeda, but that it was a host state and we did next to nothing about it.
Presumably, given eight years of military occupation, the U.S. has a slightly better feel for Afghanistan and a more extensive intelligence network than it did during the 1990s. And presumably we are going to continue to view the establishment of al Qaeda camps as an urgent threat. Presumably (although I do not know for a fact) a Hellfire launched from a Predator Drone is a more accurate weapon than sea and air-fired cruise missiles, which were the weapon of choice in the 1990s. Those two (or three) factors alone ensure that no matter how bad Afghanistan gets, we're still considerably ahead of the game than we were in the 1990s. Or am I missing something?
(AP Photos)
