How should the U.S. wage a battle against terrorism?
Daniel Larison picks up on the question of American policy and terrorism, arguing that Robert Pape's preferred "off-shore" strategy won't be very effective at quelling radicalism:
Long-term occupation is one form of this, but we would be foolish to think that we can routinely bomb another country without generating the same violent reaction. Instead of trying to force withdrawal, terrorist attacks would have the cessation of attacks as their goal. It is one thing to argue that we should not have a military presence in Afghanistan because it feeds the instability and violence the government is presumably trying to reduce, but it is quite another to claim that the U.S. can remove its forces from a country, reserve the right to continue attacking it at will, and that this still counts as a real withdrawal. The trouble here is that Pape seems not to have taken his own claims about the causes of terrorism as seriously as he should, which has given Schake an opportunity to dismiss his important and valid claims along with his more questionable recommendations.
I think this correct and there seems to be confirmation of this fact in the Pakistani tribal regions where the U.S. is essentially conducting the kind of covert battle that Pape seems to endorse for Afghanistan. But this raises an important question: if a large-footprint occupation is out and if a counter-terrorist campaign of the kind being waged in Pakistan is deemed just as radicalizing, what's left?
