The Craziest Thing I've Read In A Very Long Time Posted by Michael Cohen

Over at the Atlantic Council blog there is a wrap-up of Stephen Biddle's recent trip to Afghanistan - and it features this utterly head scratching quote from Biddle:

Now, the threat if the worst-case scenario unfolds is pretty serious. I mean, you may or may not have worried about nuclear weapons in Soviet hands during the Cold War. But bin Laden would probably use the things if he got them. And if an American administration that could reasonably have waged this war with some prospect of success instead decided to withdraw -- if that scenario played out, Pakistan collapsed, and bin Laden got a nuclear weapon and used it on the United States, it would be regarded by generations of historians as the single biggest foreign policy blunder in the history of the nation.

Now, a variety of bad things have to happen in sequence for that worst case to play itself out. That is why I think this is a close call, rather than an obvious one. But, especially with respect to the guy in the Oval Office who has to bear the responsibility for this, I suspect that worst case looms fairly large. But all indications are that the president is pretty ambivalent about this, in part because I suspect he sees the costs and benefits as being closer on the margin than one would, in some ways, like.

I read things like this and I really start to believe that the entire foreign policy community has completely lost its mind. Stephen Biddle is a smart guy - and I simply can't fathom the notion that he actually believes this (except of course for the fact that he said basically the same thing last year). 

Ignoring the fact that the notion of Pakistan collapsing is deeply far-fetched; does Biddle really think that a cratered al Qaeda, on the run in NW Pakistan, with about 200 key operatives has a snowball's chance in hell of getting a nuclear weapon. And even if they did, that they would be able to transport it to the United States with no one finding out - and then exploding it. This isn't the one percent doctrine. It's the 0.000001 doctrine.

Now granted Biddle sees this as a close call (which is itself gobsmacking) and actually criticizes the Obama Administration for not being more concerned about it. As for how our leaving Afghanistan makes this one in billion scenario a bit more possible . . . well your guess is as good as mine. But the very notion that we need to keep 100,000 troops in Afghanistan to guard against this remote possibility (and I use the word "possibility" guardedly) is . . . well words fail to describe how insane this actually is.

Statements like these are perhaps further evidence that we have lost any and all perspective on the actual threats facing this country - and that there are practically no discernible limits applied by members of our foreign policy elite on when and how we utilize our armed forces to "protect" American security.  (The nuclear bogeyman, notwithstanding, it's insane enough already that we are maintaining a 100,000 troop presence in Afghanistan just to combat al Qaeda.)

The very fact that $100 billion a year wars can be justified on this sort of microscopically thin reed while far more significant challenges - like catastrophic climate change basically go ignored by our elected leaders- is as clear a sign as imaginable that the US isn't just entering a period of imperial decline. We're in complete free fall.

Comments

[Dredd]

True dat. Many strange things can be heard concerning Afghanistan.

Margaret Carlson said on MSNBC's Morning Joe today that Gen. Patraeus "owns the White House" when it comes to Afghanistan.

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[Jeff M.]

Are you not overdoing it just a bit with the title of this blog. Surely the underlying point is that this sort of ridiculous analysis is the norm rather than the exception. Perhaps a better title would have been: Same S***, Different Day.

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[Ziv]

Pakistan is reeling, and you think its collapse is far fetched? Why are you so confident of Zardari's success? They can't control the tribal areas, and they stumble from defeat to embarrassment in the conflict to the north. Al Queda has fewer people now that we have killed a good many of them, but they have a decent amount of money. And as Iran and Pakistan grow closer to building nuclear weapons, we have to admit that our fears of terrorists getting a nuclear device are not a worst case scenario, they are simply a realistic appraisal of what is probably going to happen in the next few years.
We, the West, are going to lose a city to a nuclear device. Probably within 5 years. It won't be China that sends us this destructive missive, it will be Islamic radicals.
And yet, we accept the fact that American Muslim's have yet to step out front and decry the idiocy of the radical islamic movement, because we know the truth of the matter. If an Imam tells the truth about Islam, they will probably be killed by other muslims.
If Muslim's demand respect, they should do what is necessary to earn respect. But they demand respect all day and deliver nothing of worth.

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