Paul Pillar has a very interesting op-ed in the Washington Post today, questioning whether a terrorist haven in Afghanistan would be such a terrible thing for U.S. security. I asked a friend what he thought and he e-mailed this note:

I thought it was a smart and well-argued piece – probably the sharpest thing written from the skeptic camp so far. He’s absolutely right that the “safe haven” argument is not as much a slam dunk as it is often presented as. That being said, I still think a pretty compelling case can be made that safe havens matter more to AQ and AQSL than his op-ed argues, which takes a good point and pushes it a bit too far. There is a reason that UBL and the AQSL are operating in the FATA rather than, say, apartments in Germany or hotel rooms in Spain. Likewise, there is a reason that the biggest transnational terrorist plots since 9/11 – e.g., the thwarted 2006 airliner attack – emerged from NW Pakistan. I’d also argue that the best way to think about the parts of the developed world that AQ has used is that they are, in a way, micro-safe havens – collapsed corners of cities with disenfranchised or alienated Muslim populations, often with links back to the core “safe haven,” in which AQ can find shelter (e.g. Pakistanis in London – Pakistan; North Africans in Paris/Madrid –Algeria/Madrid; Somalis in Minneapolis – Somalia).
The piece also neglects the importance of Afghanistan in the broader geopolitics of South Asia, which is another core driver of the AQ/Islamist extremism problem. Although we can’t say so publicly, one of our core strategic interests must be to get Pakistan out of the business of being in bed with Islamist proxies and instead become an unambiguous ally against them. To the extent we fail, a host of very, very bad things have a higher probability of happening all over the place – such as a nuclear war on the subcontinent touched off by one of these groups (e.g., Mumbai or the Indian parliament attack in December 2001), or nuclear weapons falling into their hands, or state collapse in Pakistan. A very significant part of the Pakistani calculus in this regard is Afghanistan, and the feeling that – as long as there is any prospect of US withdrawal there – they need to have Islamist proxies ready to step into the breach. An unambiguous commitment to stabilizing Afghanistan, and success there, is one of the few drivers we have at our disposal to affect Pakistan’s orientation.