Intelligence operations that help detect terrorist insurgents for arrest and prosecution are the single most important practice to protect a population from threats to its security.

Now that's certainly a true statement, but if one looks at the other areas neatly summarized by Nadezha I think it becomes clear that these are not the kinds of things that cops or spies are trained to do. Moreover, there is a marked difference between fighting a global insurgency (which Scheuer argues is what al-Qaeda is) and fighting a national insurgency in an occupied country, which is the subject of the CGSC paper. Denying global insurgents sanctuaries in either failed states or states that actively support them, for instance, isn't something that police or intelligence personnel are going to be able to do when you're dealing a state level unless you enlarge and expand the police and the intelligence to the point where they are basically indistinguishable from a regular military. The latter has already been done, and such forces are generally referred to as international peacekeepers.

Eric then proceeds to put this to the test:

To see this in action, let's take Darling's examples of Al Qaeda still being "out there" which he cites in reference to his hope that Americans don't abandon the use of the military: the recent attacks in Ayodhya, India, London, England and Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt "among other locations worldwide." What Dan doesn't address, though, is what, exactly, could military intervention have been used for in any of those settings? Could military intervention have prevented any of those attacks? Should we have invaded England? Would an invasion of Egypt have prevented or caused more terrorism? In urging us to keep military options on the table, he cites examples where only intelligence operations would have succeeded.

Actually, taking out "Londonistan" probably would do a substantial amount of damage to international terrorism if one considers the number of unsavory characters that tend to congregate there. All kidding aside, employment of the military option in either of the cases he suggests doesn't work because it fails to distinguish between where these attacks are carried out versus where they are organized. In the case of the London bombings, at least one of the ringleaders, Khan, appears to have trained at a Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) camp in Pakistan and there are suspicions that additional bombers may have been there as well. Those training camps are the types of facilities in which military options, while unadviseable at this point, may become feasible somewhere down the line. The issue of Sharm el-Sheikh is a bit more ambiguous because of the Egyptian media blackout, but judging from the fact that the perpetrators appear to be mining their hideouts in the face of a hunt by 5,000 Egyptian security forces, it appears that there are at least some terrorist sanctuaries in the Sinai that would have been the Egyptian government's interest to eliminate prior to the Sharm el-Sheikh bombings. Certainly I fail to see how any kind of law enforcement or intelligence operation could have disrupted the LeT training facilities, anymore than anything other than the current application of paramilitary forces in the Sinai is likely to disrupt the terrorist sanctuaries located there.

This is true for most examples of terrorist attacks and prevention. When cells are embedded in non-hostile nations, the military is an ill-suited tool to remove them. The sanctuary in Afghanistan was the exception, not the rule.

It depends on how much terrorist activity there has to be before you start considering something a sanctuary, the means and willingness (or lack thereof) of the local authorities to remove them, and what you do if you have no real military or law enforcement abilities available. In the case of the Lashkar-e-Taiba camps in Pakistan, the administration seems to believe that there is no way that Pakistan is going to close them down and feels that that's the price they have to pay for Pakistani cooperation in the war on terrorism. They have also, in a manner I don't find terribly encouraging, refrained from informing the general public on this issue and the Democrats don't seem to want to talk about it either. Given the number of LeT graduates who have showed up either in terror plots or fighting at al-Qaeda's behest in the UK, Australia, the US, and Iraq though, I think at some point you do need to figure that one of those attacks is going to succeed on a scale far larger than 7/7 and at the absolute least be willing not to rule out the military option.

Just fill in the blank in this sentence: "The War on Terror would be going so much better right now if we would only invade [insert country]." Is there such a country out there where invasion would not do more harm than good? The answer is no if you truly understand what counterinsurgency means, and what steps we must take to marginalize and isolate the violent extremists from the moderate majority.

Invasion is a means, not an end. In the case of the war on terrorism, it is a tool you use to deprive the enemy of its sanctuaries as well as to establish/expand secure areas, both of which are recommended by the CGSC document. If you want me to give you a list of countries that the war on terror would be better off if al-Qaeda didn't have a safe haven there, I can come up with quite a few for you. The counter-insurgency recommendations in the CGSC document are wonderful, but you cannot expect them to work by only carrying out some of them and not others.

Eric also says that I'm wrong in saying that the US could easily backslide back into the 1990s approach to dealing with terrorism if we're beaten in Iraq:

Here I think Darling is misreading the situation in terms of what our responses would be, no matter the outcome in Iraq. There is no way the US government, no matter the administration or result in Iraq, would return to the same perspective on Al Qaeda that we had in the 1990s and early 2000s. You simply can't turn back the clock, nor should we.

Except, as mentioned earlier in discussing my fears of an "Iraq Syndrome" that I could easily see military intervention, at least within any context that might imply difficulty, being labeled verboten by political class fearful that the public would turn against them if the US sustained sizeable numbers of casualties. This would actually be worse than the 1990s approach because whereas in the 1990s all bin Laden had was anecdotal evidence to support his claims about the US now he could claim that his followers sent us home with a bloody nose in Iraq.

The US will aggressively use its intelligence assets to roll up cells, hound Bin Laden (maybe even find him, huh?)

Already done that. Next question?

And as an added hint, understanding Joe Biden's question is critical here ...

... and strike out at any sanctuary we can locate (within reason, and within the confines of maintaining necessary alliances that exist even in the post-9/11 world). To suggest we were really using these resources in the 1990s is to belittle the many successes in this arena since 9/11.

Unlike a lot of other conservative commentators (and I expect I'll get a lot of flak for saying this), I gained a lot more of an appreciation of the Clinton administration's pre-9/11 efforts against bin Laden when realizing just how much of a complicated enemy we're dealing with and how ill-served they were by a good number of people in the intelligence community (I believe that as of about 1995-6 bin Laden was still classified as just another terrorist financier by the CIA). Within those confines, I think that their counter-terrorism, law enforcement, and intelligence people did the best they could under the circumstances they were working under. The problem is that law enforcement and intelligence personnel aren't the full solution to the terrorism issue, at least when it comes to al-Qaeda, and that the Clinton administration failed to adequately understand that (to get a full sense of this, take a look at the intense debate over whether the U.S.S. Cole was bombed by the Islamic Army of Aden [an al-Qaeda affiliate group] or al-Qaeda itself before a decision could be made as to whether or not to go after bin Laden), as I think did the Bush administration after 9/11. Then again, this is coming from somebody who thinks that what Wurmser and Maloof did after 9/11 should have been done years ago, thus making my opinion untenable in most lefty circles ...

The thought that Bin Laden would be able to sit back in open sight and strike us without retaliation would require more than a loss in Iraq. That being said, as mentioned above, it is unlikely that the military option would be the most effective anti-Bin Laden measure in most circumstances. But where it was needed, the American people wouldn't need any convincing. They might be doubting the lethality of Saddam at this point, but not Bin Laden. I wonder sometimes if the Bush administration has not had this formulation inverted. As newly declassified documents from the State Department indicate, we began planning the Iraq invasion less than two months after 9/11, with Bin Laden and his cohorts still alive and kicking.

Bin Laden now occupies the "Evil Middle Easterner" category among the US public that had previously been occupied by Khomeini, Qadaffi, and Saddam at various periods. People don't any particular motivation to go after him, but there are also a lot of people trying for various reasons to split hairs between his designated emissary and a lot of the suicide attacks that are now going on inside Iraq. Most of the groups that make up al-Qaeda's terrorist coalition have been able to survive and even flourish in Western circles for the better part of the last decade due to similar murkiness about the links between them and the terror network. And if the government isn't in the business of highlighting these links (as in the case of the Pakistani jihadis), there certainly isn't going to be a sizeable public outcry for them to change their ways because, as we've seen, this is an extremely complicated issue.

As far as planning to hit Iraq after 9/11 is concerned, this planning and the reasons for it are covered in the 9/11 commission report and the US has been planning at various levels to hit Iraq for the better part of the last decade. I know people who've been doing serious military and logistical planning against Iraq since at least 1992 if not earlier. And just so nobody gets alarmed, there are also war plans for Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states dating back at least as far as Carter era if not even earlier.

In any case, I don't think that the American (or international) public has been educated enough about the nature and scope of the threat to fully appreciate either what we're up against (a point I made a little while back during a discussion between Kevin Drum and A.L.) or the appropriate means with which to deal with it. So either the general public needs to become more informed or the political class needs to get more serious about what we're doing, the latter being what I'm arguing for here.