Terrorism? Let us help (we insist)!

As Pakistan continues to crumble, it's ability to handle sworn enemies of the United States is decreasing. Will we insist on helping out like we've done in the past?

Today's attacks in Pakistan have thrown yet another point on the line that is pointing to Pakistan's downfall. As terrorism has been ramping up along with political corruption, paramilitary groups are staging even more and more flagrant attacks (if they can shoot up and capture a police barracks in broad daylight, how much more flagrant can they get?), while the government is less able to stop them. While the US may be able to otherwise overlook internal gubernatorial collapse of a third-world nation, this time the bad guys are people who we have sworn to destroy. This time, it's personal.

The US has had a long history of intervention in foreign countries where direct national security is possibly at stake. Can't stop the Zapatistas who are flooding Texas with gang violence? Don't worry, Mexico, we can take care of that problem for you... we insist. Don't care to take out Al Quaeda, Taliban? Don't worry, let us take care of them for you... we insist. Over the past century, there have been dozens of countries that the US has sent boots into from the more obvious (like the invasion of Afghanistan), to the dubious (like the invasion of Lybia), to the blatantly unnecessary (like the invasion of Iraq). No American president (including the current one) has been able to fully resist the seductive call to send American troops places where they're not really needed in order to fix a problem that someone else should have.

The real question, then, is how does the president handle this call? The last one clearly made no qualms about turning his desires into action. The current one, however, has chosen a more Clinton route of under-the-radar, more secretive things that ultimately yield far fewer results, but do so at far less liability. Rather than spending real money and putting real lives on the line, the strategy basically involves things like arming rebel groups that are fighting whoever we're also fighting, or launching a few missiles in and hoping for the best. At the most, US involvement involves dragging dozens of other countries into UN pacts (or NATO, in the case of Clinton in the Balkans) to help us fix other people's problems.

Of course, unlike Operation Desert Fox, Obama has a lot more technology to do the secret dirty work. Specifically, we have lots of unmanned aerial drones, the use of which has escalated since Obama's taken over. Of course, it's still an egregious breach of international law, but we haven't felt we need permission for these kinds of attacks in the past, and we certainly don't feel like we need it now.

Of course, with all of these "limited liability" strategies, they tend to be horrifically short sighted. Was it really a good idea to accidentally lose a bunch of stinger missiles for Islamic Afghan fighters to use against the soviets? Was it really a good idea to give Saddam Hussein a bunch of weapons to use against Iran? History is flooded with examples of limited liability tactics that both don't achieve the desired effect, but also are ultimately counterproductive.

And here we are shooting drones into Pakistan. If Israel has been able to teach us anything over the years, it's that aerial bombardment does NOT destroy terrorist networks (if anything, it has the opposite of the desired effect). Likewise, the flagrant disregard for Pakistan's sovereignty is further weakening the state, making them LESS able to handle the problem by itself which will require MORE American involvement down the road. If committing acts that we knew would cause a future environment that would allow us to invade Pakistan was the point of all of this, we're definitely on the right track.

Because once the Pakistan state looses it's last shred of legitimacy (no matter how much money we give to corrupt government officials in civilian aid), then the problem over there is going to get much worse, and we're going to feel obligated to handle the mess that the Pakistani's might have been able to fix, without our help. In all likelihood, we're going to put boots on the ground because the problem will feel like it needs to be fixed, and we'll insist that we're the ones to fix it.