PPI National Security Director Jim Arkedis has a new column up at Foreign Policy on why Al Qaeda needs a safe haven along the Af-Pak border to attack the U.S. again:
As deliberations about the Obama administration’s strategic direction in Afghanistan unfold, the White House is weighing whether al Qaeda, in fact, needs an Afghan safe haven — an expanse of land under the protection of the Taliban — to reconstitute its capability to attack the United States. Many noted scholars doubt it. In a recent Washington Post op-ed, Council on Foreign Relations President Richard Haass bluntly stated, “Al Qaeda does not require Afghan real estate to constitute a regional or global threat.”
He’s wrong. Although the group has been significantly weakened since late 2001, the only chance al Qaeda has of rebuilding its capability to conduct a large-scale terrorist operation against the United States is under the Taliban’s umbrella of protection.
Objections like Haass’s are rooted in the following arguments: that terrorists don’t need physical space because they can plot online; that the London and Madrid bombings prove deadly attacks can be planned in restrictive, Western, urban locations under the noses of local security services; and that denying terrorists one safe haven will simply compel them to move to another lawless region.
Read the full article at Foreign Policy.
