The space race

• Last Updated: October 29. 2009 12:51PM UAE / October 29. 2009 8:51AM GMT

Somali militants show off their firepower at a training camp on the outskirts of Mogadishu in December 2008. AP Photo

The commitment to denying terrorists ‘safe haven’ anywhere on Earth, Matthew Yglesias writes, will spell disaster in Afghanistan and beyond.

The phrase “graveyard of empires” hangs heavily over the debate on American policy in Afghanistan. Why, sceptics ask, should the United States and its Nato allies endlessly prolong what’s already been a very extended effort to subdue a famously unconquerable land? After all, Afghanistan’s mountains, xenophobia and warlike population resisted not only the Soviets and the British, but Alexander the Great himself. What chance does a declining American empire already reeling from an economic crisis and a major setback in Iraq really have?

But the “graveyard” metaphor, though powerful, also tends to mislead. In a 2001 Foreign Affairs article that took the phrase as its title, the former CIA Pakistan station chief Milton Bearden solemnly informed readers that “Alexander the Great set his supply trains through the Khyber, then skirted northward with his army to the Konar Valley... ran into fierce resistance and, struck by an Afghan archer’s arrow, barely made it to the Indus River with his life.” And, indeed, premodern warfare was a personally risky affair for great kings and generals. But while the campaign to Afghanistan (then called Bactria) was a difficult one, it hardly marked the death of Alexander’s empire. He left the country victorious, and after his empire divided upon his death, Hellenistic political influence remained for a few decades under the Seleucid Dynasty before they quit the area to focus on more prosperous areas to the west.

The British Empire also failed to meet its demise in this alleged graveyard. Instead, logistical and military difficulties convinced the British that attempting to make Afghanistan into a crown colony wasn’t worth the trouble; settling for a basically friendly buffer zone to separate India from Russia would suffice. The empire upon which the sun never set lasted for decades longer, until the combination of two massive wars with Germany and the resistance campaign of Gandhi made it untenable.

The example of the Soviet Union, far closer to our own time, appears to be closer to the mark, but it too has been misread. The Soviet campaign of conquest failed famously, to be sure. It is less well-known that the Russians actually managed to leave behind a Communist regime that was capable of resisting mujahideen conquest without direct military support from the Red Army. It couldn’t control the countryside, but it did hold the cities and the levers of government – and actually outlasted the USSR itself, collapsing only after Soviet financial and diplomatic support vanished. In fact, as Ahmed Rashid argued in these pages in January, a study of the Soviet experience should probably make us more confident, not less, that the United States is capable of achieving success in Afghanistan.

The real lesson of the Soviet invasion is not that victory is impossible; it’s simply that victory is expensive. What damaged the Soviet Union at the end of the day was not that the rebels managed to drive the Red Army from the countryside – it was that the Afghan resistance, funded by the United States, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, goaded the Soviets into wasting an enormous amount of money fighting for a marginal and unimportant piece of territory.

The normal imperial experience in Afghanistan, in other words, is not to find that it’s a graveyard but to find that it’s a waste of time. The country is extremely poor and has neither natural resources nor developed industry. Its mountainous terrain and nonexistent infrastructure make it an appealing place to wage an insurgency but a poor trade route. Traditionally empires have stumbled into Afghanistan because it was adjacent to places they already occupied (Persia, Central Asia, India) and then staggered out after realising that there was nothing of value to be gained by staying.

Which brings us to the curious fact that the deepening US engagement in Afghanistan is part and parcel of a revolution in strategic thinking which holds that space itself – not lush farmland, but simply space – is a vital commodity over which the Pentagon must hold sway. This is the crux of the “safe havens” issue: the fear that somewhere on Earth there might exist a remote locale in which al Qa’eda can gather without fear of the local police. At first glance, it seems like a compelling argument: America has been hunting al Qa’eda for eight years; a hunted group might seek refuge in a safe haven; therefore we must shut down the safe havens. On reflection, however, this apparently simple objective implies an astonishingly ambitious grand strategy, with boundless costs and little prospect for success. It’s a strange inversion of America’s Cold War priorities, which focused first and foremost on securing the rich industrial territories of Western Europe and Japan, and secondarily on securing access to the oil reserves of the Middle East, while evincing little concern for obscure conflicts in impoverished states.

The exception to the rule was Vietnam, a strategic debacle that was the American version of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, a costly and pointless intervention into a country on whose fate nothing hinged. But in other instances, from Namibia to Nicaragua and beyond, such conflicts were treated as proxy struggles, in which Washington might send limited amounts of money or guns or advice but would decline to get directly involved. The progressive transformation of the mission in Afghanistan – away from a punitive expedition against a Taliban government that had angered the United States by refusing to shut down terrorist training camps and into a nation-building campaign – represents a move away from that principle.

According to the new thinking, chaos and political extremism as such are a threat to the United States because they create the possibility of safe havens for terrorists. This in many ways aligns national security policy with worthy goals – spreading good governance and prosperity to the darkest corners of the earth. It’s even proven to be a rhetorically effective strategy for broadening the coalition for action to mitigate climate change; a new organisation called Operation Free mobilises veterans and others on behalf of the proposition that, among other things, “water shortages, agricultural suffering, mass migrations, and natural disasters will destabilise governments around the world, leaving many nations powerless to stop the spread of extremism”.

But there are real questions about how reasonable this fear of safe havens is. For one thing, the strategy is frighteningly unbounded. Today America is worried about chaos in Afghanistan, but there are also indications that al Qa’eda has found safe haven in Somalia and Yemen. Broken states, alas, are not all that rare. To suggest that the United States could succeed in its mission to vastly improve governance in Afghanistan, given enough time and money and manpower, hardly provides evidence that the task could be repeated in Sudan and Nigeria and Chad. If it’s true that the world’s security depends on eradicating every pocket of instability on Earth, then we really are doomed.

Traditionally, countries haven’t worried that safe havens in far-off countries threaten them precisely because a far-off country is, by definition, far away. If a terrorist is able to take refuge in a remote area, that’s a problem – justice demands that perpetrators of serious crimes be caught or killed – but not a first-order threat to national security. To actually carry out an attack in a western city you have to be in a western city, subject to all the governance capacity of an advanced industrial society. The worry that terrorists may be “plotting” attacks on the West from somewhere in the Afghanistan/Pakistan border region is a slightly bizarre one. For any such plot to work, the plotters would need to have access to the location of the eventual attack, and whatever plotting needs to be done could just as easily take place there. What a true safe haven allows is the possibility that terrorists might congregate in large numbers and open fixed training facilities such as existed in pre-war Afghanistan. But it would be almost impossible for camps on this scale to remain undetected.

On some level, policymakers surely understand this. For all that their pronouncements about safe havens in Afghanistan imply the need to somehow establish the ability to exert control over 100 per cent of the world’s land area, clearly nobody in the Pentagon is actually contemplating doing this. The risk, however, is that the logic of “denying safe haven” has become an obsession whose urgency draws attention from other equally significant problems and distorts the shape of policy in the pursuit of impossible aims.

Last week the World Food Program issued a call for $285 million in assistance to avert famine in Ethiopia – a tiny fraction of what’s being contemplated for nation-building in Afghanistan. The existence of hunger in the Horn of Africa, of course, does not require that the world abandon Afghanistan. But it does suggest that once we put aside our paranoia about safe havens, and the fantasies of global control that follows, we may realise that it’s a great a big wide world out there – of which Afghanistan is just a small and relatively insignificant part.

Matthew Yglesias, a fellow at the Center for American Progress in Washington, is the author of Heads in the Sand: How the Republicans Screw Up Foreign Policy and Foreign Policy Screws Up the Democrats.