Location, location, location

To those who say that Rory Stewart is pessimistic about Afghanistan, he has this to respond:

"[…] the Taliban are very unlikely to take over Afghanistan as a whole. Their previous administration provided basic road security and justice but it was fragile and fell quickly. They are no longer perceived, as they were by some in 1994, as young student angels saving the country from corruption. Millions of Afghans disliked their brutality, incompetence and primitive attitudes. The Hazara, Tajik and Uzbek populations are wealthier, more established and more powerful than they were in 1996 and would strongly resist any attempt by the Taliban to occupy their areas. The Afghan national army is reasonably effective. Pakistan is not in a position to support the Taliban as it did before. It would require far fewer international troops and planes than we have today to make it very difficult for the Taliban to gather a conventional army as they did in 1996 and drive tanks and artillery up the main road to Kabul.

Even if – as seems most unlikely – the Taliban were to take the capital, it is not clear how much of a threat this would pose to US or European national security.

Would they repeat their error of providing a safe haven to al-Qaida? And how safe would this safe haven be? They could give al-Qaida land for a camp but how would they defend it against predators or US special forces? And does al-Qaida still require large terrorist training camps to organise attacks? Could they not plan in Hamburg and train at flight schools in Florida; or meet in Bradford and build morale on an adventure training course in Wales?"

So there is optimism about Afghanistan, but not so much about the rest of the world, including Yorkshire. Or about the US/NATO effort, for that matter:

"It is impossible for Britain and its allies to build an Afghan state. They have no clear picture of this promised ‘state’, and such a thing could come only from an Afghan national movement, not as a gift from foreigners. Is a centralised state, in any case, an appropriate model for a mountainous country, with strong traditions of local self-government and autonomy, significant ethnic differences, but strong shared moral values? And even were stronger central institutions to emerge, would they assist Western national security objectives? Afghanistan is starting from a very low base: 30 years of investment might allow its army, police, civil service and economy to approach the levels of Pakistan. But Osama bin Laden is still in Pakistan, not Afghanistan. He chooses to be there precisely because Pakistan can be more assertive in its state sovereignty than Afghanistan and restricts US operations. From a narrow (and harsh) US national security perspective, a poor failed state could be easier to handle than a more developed one: Yemen is less threatening than Iran, Somalia than Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan than Pakistan."

His last point is a rebuttal to the whole idea of systematically seeing in “ungoverned territories” potential sanctuaries for terrorists. As Stewart points out, terrorist groups seeking refuge in such areas are vulnerable because no one will complain too loudly about infringement on state sovereignty if they end up getting Predatored.

Ungoverned territories also have serious disadvantages for the functioning of any organization. They lack communications, banking systems, infrastructures. Areas where state control is lax or inexistent may make it possible, for a group, to train a few people to the use of small arms and the assembling of IEDs, as Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) does in the stretch of the Sahara desert between Mauritania, Algeria, and Mali. But the major AQIM attacks that took place against Algerian security forces, civilians, and foreigners have largely originated from the cells located near Algiers, not the southern ones. Saharan cells have mounted attacks against isolated military outposts, in 2005 and 2008, kidnapped tourists (one of which they killed last month), and, over the past two years, killed four French tourists and an American aid worker: tragic events, to be sure, but not destabilizing ones. These cells' biggest potential for harm lies in the (few) people and the money (provided they do not decide to keep all the ransom money for themselves) they send to the northern cells. There is only so much one can do in the middle of the desert…