Bradford DeLong:
> But isn't such a sustained campaign of terrorism exactly what the
> overthrow of the Taliban (and probable future campaigns in Somalia
> and Sudan) is supposed to prevent? Isn't the point of it all to put
> governments of nation-states on notice that it is too dangerous for
> them to allow wholesale terrorist groups to use your country as a
> base?
My guess is that no one presently or recently in Afghanistan had much of anything to do with the attacks on the World Trade Center or the Pentagon in a direct, material sense, and that the Administration is well aware of this. At least, this is what the evidence which has been allowed to descend to my very humble level appears to indicate. In any case, the kind of people who run nation-states seem to be mostly unimpressed by threats to their subject populations. The government of the United States, for instance, has certainly tempted fortune by attacking twenty or thirty countries in the last fifty years, to say nothing of allying itself with some very unpleasant regimes; but the risks do not seem to have caused the leadership any great disquiet. (Indeed, some of them may have enjoyed feeling themselves brave and heroic.) Far greater risks have been willingly run by the leaders of other states in recent memory, for example Serbia and Iraq -- and there are many others.
Considering that millions of people now passionately hate the United States, probably the only sure way to prevent terrorism against us would be to find all these people _as_individuals_, and kill them first. Attacking states which "harbor" them is not going to be of much use because many of these states are our allies -- or ourselves. An unpleasant situation, but one which was chosen over and over.
-- Gordon