FP: Francis Fukuyama wrote in the New York Times last year that "Iraq has now replaced Afghanistan as a magnet, a training ground and an operational base for jihadist terrorists." Do you agree?
RP: I'm not sure whether that's true or not, but it's an improvement if it is. Let me explain: Afghanistan was certainly a magnet, and jihadists traveled there from wherever they originated. They were welcomed there, they were trained there, and they worked under very favorable circumstances, with lines of communication and the ability to plan and organize. Now, the jihadists who have flocked to Iraq are themselves in constant danger, large numbers of them are killed, and they're certainly not in a position to plan operations against American territory. So if you ask me whether we are safer with jihadists converging on Baghdad or jihadists converging on camps in Afghanistan and planning events like 9/11, there's no doubt that we're a lot safer because they're converging on Baghdad.
Now, it's important to remember that he's responding to a hypothetical, and one he isn't sure he agrees with. Nonetheless, the content of his answer is very telling and reflects some of the biggest misconceptions about Iraq, Afghanistan, and the war on terror. Since Perle's reasoning is faulty on almost every level, I'll just focus on the three facts that most undermine it.
1) The Iraq war made -- and is making -- more terrorists. Perle seems to be implying that there is a set number of terrorists. So, since we've been able to divert some of them from Afghanistan, a welcoming environment, to Iraq, where much of the population dislikes foreign fighters, we're winning. Things don't work this way. The Iraq war, as the U.S. government's own intelligence reports have shown, has radicalized much of the Muslim world, and has drawn in many young men who would otherwise have had little interest in jihadism. So it's not a choice, as Perle is arguing, between having terrorists in Iraq or having terrorists in Afghanistan. We have both, and thanks to the war jihadism is spreading far faster than it would have otherwise.
2) Afghanistan does provide a more welcoming operational environment for Al Qaeda, but we're losing there as well. Things have gotten so bad in Afghanistan and Waziristan, Pakistan's lawless northwest frontier, that even the mainstream media have picked up on it. In recent months, both Newsweek and Time have run stories about the failure of the U.S. and NATO to make permanent progress against Al Qaeda and the Taliban there. Al Qaeda's command hierarchy was largely smashed after the Taliban was ousted, but, now that the organization is starting to rebuild with little interference from the West, it's likely that the next large-scale attack will be hatched in Afghanistan or Waziristan. Of course, one of the reasons we've been unable to lock things down on this front (apart from the region's massive, treacherous geography, our inability to understand the culture there, and the difficulty in rooting out an enemy that can bleed into local populations) is -- you guessed it -- that we're devoting far more resources to Iraq. And, as everybody now knows, Iraq had nothing to do with Al Qaeda.
3) There aren't that many foreign jihadists in Iraq. For Bush, Perle, and the others who have framed this war as part of an existential struggle against Terror or Islamofascism (one of the most ill-conceived buzzwords in recent memory, and worth its own post), nothing is more important than pushing the idea that the carnage in Iraq is the result of meddlesome foreign influences and wave after wave of Al Qaeda members sweeping in to set up shop and launch a series of massive, devastating attacks against the U.S. If, instead, it's mostly just Iraqis killing Iraqis and Iraqis killing U.S. troops and vice-versa, then a) this really can't be logically tied to the war on terror, since none of the parties involved attacked us prior to March 2003, and b) there's a strong argument to be made that the war was unwinnable, that the forces unleashed by the post-Saddam power vacuum were too powerful to be contained by a U.S. effort of a politically or economically feasible scale. So it's unfortunate for Bush and Perle's rhetoric that such a small fraction of Iraq's violence comes from outside Iraq. The Brookings Institution estimates (PDF, see page 22) that as of last November there were a grand total of between 800 and 2,000 foreign fighters in Iraq -- an almost negligible fraction of the insurgency. The majority of the fighting in Iraq is either between Iraqis or between Iraqis and U.S. troops. Foreign fighters simply don't have the support of most native Iraqis, would be hard-pressed to establish any kind of permanent presence in the country, and have not stormed Iraq's borders on a scale that would support Perle's reasoning. It's a very convenient fiction, however.
So why is Perle making these claims? Did he not do his homework, or is he being disingenuous and trying like so many other pro-war types to salvage whatever he can from a huge, smoking pile of rubble? I'm really not sure. But his comments are yet another reminder that the people at the helm in the post-9/11 world either don't understand the way terrorism works, or don't care enough to learn.
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