Under the threat of being bombed back to the stone age, the United States secured the surender of Pakistan from Pervez Musharraf (occupying only four critical bases, and avoiding in this way the expense and problems of occupation).

Today, with a rising chorus of influential voices the American public has been persuaded that the 9/11 attacks were planned by Al Qaeda in Pakistan. Having installed a “friendly” government and built up enormous diplomatic pressure, under the threat of “either you bomb them, or we will,” the Americans have bullied the Pakistan Army into a messy war within Pakistan that no one can win.

In an important corrective to the barrage of preparatory propaganda against the threat to the US of Al Qaeda “safe heavens” in Pakistan, therefore, let us remember while we can that (as Yglesias points out in How Important are Safe Havens?):

A safe haven in the mountains in Central Asia doesn’t let you carry out a terrorist attack in the United States. You need an attacker physically located in the United States, in possession of explosives that are also physically located in the United States, in order to attack the United States. The danger is of a terrorist being here or else in someplace like Western Europe or Canada from which it’s easy to get into the United States. Recall that key action in the 9/11 plot took place not just in Afghanistan, but in Hamburg and the best governance initiative in human history is not going to make Afghanistan as orderly and prosperous as Germany. The attackers went to flight school in America; you can’t learn to pilot a jumbo jet in the mountains. Clearly “al-Qaeda has a safe haven” is worse than “al-Qaeda does not have a safe haven” but orienting our national security policy around the goal of denying safe havens is not going to achieve what we’re looking for.

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