Response to Terrorism and Military Occupation Revisited Post
Bernard,
One comment on your discussion of Hoffman’s quote in the NYT article. You write:
“…And Bruce Hoffman, who is quoted as saying,
…the argument that terrorism can be prevented essentially by remote control was “immensely seductive” — and completely wrong.
“We tried to contain the terrorism problem in Afghanistan from a distance before 9/11,” he said. “Look how well that worked.”
First the there is a core problem with Hoffman’s argument. In reality, we didn’t try any of what is being proposed now before 9/11. There were no special operations raids. They was no persistent drone presence. There were no efforts to pay off warlords — other than by the indirect means of putting a price on the head of senior AQ leaders. A single cruise missile strike in 1998 doesn’t prove the case one way or the other.”
Hoffman should have said, that is what we tried from 2001 to 2007/8 more or less. We were in Afghanistan with drones and SOF, making deals (esp. early on) with warlords (this is why CENTCOM was so opposed to going after druglords), and it wasn’t enough to prevent the Taliban from a resurgence.
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But he wasn’t talking about the Taliban. He was talking about containing the “terrorism problem.”
I don’t understand why people insist upon conflating the resurgence of the Taliban with the risk posed by AQ to U.S. interests. Yes, there is at least an indirect relationship between the two, but making them synonymous is just wrong.