Does the U.S. presence in Afghanistan make us more or less secure? It’s hard to say. On one hand, it seems to be human instinct to feel better when you are doing something to solve a problem, like securing against a terrorist threat, because then you know that at least you’re trying to do everything you are capable of and not needlessly endangering yourself by not acting. On the other hand, this does not mean that taking action for the sake of action will actually solve the problem -- sometimes, it just makes people feel better. However, given the fact that the nature of “security” is disputed, to say the least, how exactly can we tell if our actions make us more secure? One idea about the nature of security is the extent to which people feel secure, because there is no way to know about every single possible danger that could easily crop up at any moment. Another similar idea is that security involves dealing with any danger at hand, because if we cannot be safe from unknown unknowns, we should at least guard against what we know to be a danger, lessening the amount of danger however slightly. Do either of these idea apply to the presence of U.S. troops in Afghanistan?
First of all, it is true that in Afghanistan, the U.S. is seeking out a real, tangible danger to U.S. citizens, unlike the operations in Iraq, where the dangers to the U.S. were speculative at the very best. The Taliban in Afghanistan were responsible for supporting and giving sanctuary to Al Qaeda, and therefore are a direct threat to the U.S.’s security. However, and this is a rather large “however”, how exactly do we mitigate that threat? The Taliban is not a nation-state that can surrender and “lose” a war, and Al Qaeda is not a single entity that can be defeated by a strong enough push from the U.S. Fighting the threat in Iraq has greater similarities to fighting organized crime than to fighting a war, and we measure the success of fighting crime by fewer deaths due to crime, lower crime statistics, fewer criminal convictions. Organized criminals do not all stand up, organization by organization, and surrender to the police. The same concept applies in Afghanistan. Just because the criminals are foreign, it does not mean they are the work of a foreign state. Therefore, while having troops in Afghanistan can make us “feel” safe, we cannot really expect to have a single clear-cut victory, because for one, unlike in domestic affairs, the U.S. cannot police the whole world simultaneously and indefinitely; and for another, terrorist attacks on the U.S. are not nearly frequent enough to provide reliable statistics.
In addition to this, given this idea that we cannot completely win against a danger that is not a single entity but simply a series of actions stemming from the same general idea, there’s the question of whether, if we cannot possibly foresee all the dangers that could arise, if simply feeling safe and secure means security. I believe that sometimes it does, but only if it does not influence our actions that could raise the total number of seen and unforeseen threat even higher. As discussed in class, it frequently is true that if we act as though we are at war, we tend to induce actual war. If we are sure that we are at war in (the distinction between “in” and “with” does not have as much meaning to the people in Afghanistan who are affected by our presence as it does to us, far away in the United States) Afghanistan, the obvious reaction in Afghanistan would be to react accordingly. Therefore, in theory, having troops in Afghanistan could actually be seen as making us less safe in the long run.
Of course on a smaller scale, this is much more complicated. The fact that our problems in Afghanistan were caused by what we did more than what we, at this moment, are doing makes a lot of difference. On a small scale, we are technically lessening dangers of more 9/11s by weakening and disrupting the organizations who caused it. However, our troop presence in Afghanistan does not make us, as a nation, in the long run, more “secure”, because there is no discernible, naturally-occurring, obvious end in sight, no victory like the toppling of the Nazis in World War II. The only way to solve this overarching threat is to allow the ideas and social conditions that fermented the ideas to die off. In the meantime, we are racheting up resentment towards us by acting (or at least being perceived as acting) as though we are at war in a situation where conflict cannot be framed in terms of war. Also, in the meantime, we may prevent some particular American deaths by weakening our strongest enemies and derailing specific plans, but to say that these few acts actually makes us more secure, as a nation and in the long run, is a gross oversimplification.
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