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6
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by Barak
From the 2008 National Defense Strategy:
The inability of many states to police themselves effectively or to work with their neighbors to ensure regional security represents a challenge to the international system…If left unchecked, such instability can spread and threaten regions of interest to the United States…
As if on cue, Voice of America reports,
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton says the problems in Yemen are a threat to regional and global security.
I am not sure that I agree with Domino Theory 2.0. As Michael Cohen at Democracy Arsenal puts it:
…the United States does not have a Yemen problem. We have a homeland security problem…One might actually think that making harder for folks like Abdulmutallab to get in the country in the first place would be a more productive use of taxpayer dollars [than]…seeking out another unstable Islamic country to try and stabilize.
How are things going in those other unstable Islamic countries? Apparently not to well. Back to Cohen:
We don’t have buy-in from the Pakistanis to go after Afghan Taliban safe havens; we don’t have support or even capacity in the Afghan government to support our efforts; the Afghan Army is nowhere close to being up to speed; our own military appears to have different tactical objectives than the civilian side; military intelligence is not serving the mission appropriately and top military intel officials are going outside the chain of command to make their concerns known; our enemy appears far more formidable than we seem willing to acknowledge; our additional troops are a long way from being on the ground in Afghanistan; our military is being asked to wage pointless battles in sparsely populated areas where we have no hope of holding territory in the near-term and it’s not even clear that we’re actually doing population centric counter-insurgency – and if we are doing it; we’re not doing a great job of it.
Osama bin Laden must be having a good laugh, as it seems he is in charge of US national security policy:
We are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy…All that we have to do is to send two mujahedeen to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al Qaeda, in order to make generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic and political losses without their achieving anything of note.
Al Qaeda spent $200,000 planning 9/11 and we have spent well over $1 trillion fighting Al Qaeda. If the best Al Qaeda can come up with at this point is a guy who tried to start a fire on a plane, it suggests that Al Qaeda’s doesn’t have much capacity to pull off terrorist attacks inside the US. Abdulmatallab was no Mohammed Atta. Yes, we can howl for Janet Nepolitano’s head, decry the pathetic state of our national security, and demand mandatory screening for all Muslim men. However, this all seems to miss the point that Al Qaeda’s threat to the US appears pretty small. If people were blowing themselves up in New York and Washington, DC as they are in Peshawar, I could see the point. Yet this is not happening. I agree with Kevin Drum that the reason we don’t see more bombs going off in the US is because we actually do a pretty good job of not letting terrorists in the country. Instead, if we fight al Qaeda by chasing them all over the planet, they will bankrupt us and we will have achieved little in return, just like bin Laden said.
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