The need to destroy safe havens — defined by the U.S. State Department as an “area of relative security exploited by terrorists to indoctrinate, recruit, coalesce, train, and regroup, as well as prepare and support their operations” — was the premise for the war in Afghanistan and for the expansion of drone operations into Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. Most recently, it has underlined the rationale for initiating an open-ended war to degrade and destroy the Islamic State. Although Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson has emphasized since September that the Islamic State poses no credible threat to the U.S. homeland, policymakers continue to conflate the group’s relative safe haven with its ability to conduct international attacks. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel claimed, “These fighters can exploit [the Islamic State’s] safe haven to plan, coordinate, and carry out attacks against the United States and Europe.” Similarly, Nicholas Rasmussen, now director of the National Counterterrorism Center, contended that a safe haven would allow the Islamic State “to bring additional Western potential operatives into Iraq or Syria, into that safe haven, and potentially train, equip, and deploy them back out to Europe and the United States.”
Given that the United States is over 13 years into this campaign and that the size of foreign terrorist organizations that the United States is at war with has grown or stayed the same size, it is well past time to test the truth and wisdom behind the safe-haven assumption. Spoiler alert: The support for its universal acceptance simply is not there.
