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Why Terrorists Do Not Need Territory

Micah Zenko and Amelia Mae Wolf of the Council on Foreign Relations have a smart piece in Foreign Policy. They dispel the conventional notion that safe havens are required for terrorists to thrive, an assumption that is actually in some dispute among scholars of terrorism and civil wars. The issue is relevant to recent discussions over U.S. policy toward Yemen. Yet, as Zenko and Wolf find, of the 63 most recent jihadi terrorist plots or attacks targeted the U.S. homeland, half of the perpetrators were based in the United States, while around 20% were based in the UK. So then why are we spending between $4 trillion and $6 trillion on denying terrorists safe havens in Iraq and Afghanistan?

The concept of controlling territorial space informs Western conventions of counterinsurgency and counterterrorism. Areas inhabited by groups deemed dangerous or unlawful need to be cleared, the logic goes. Not unlike the clearing of protesters who “occupy” central squares, or land occupations by campesinos in Latin America to protest unequal land distribution – there is a tendency by the state to seek control over peoples that resist order. Washington’s post-9/11 approach to countering transnational terrorist networks follows a similar logic. Yet, not all of these ungoverned spaces are monolithic spaces of Hobbesian disorder that threaten our existence as potential terrorist safe havens. They are natural, if non-integrated, parts of the international system. Too many non-state pockets of the globe constitute “imaginary spaces” whose threat level is often embellished and, in some cases, nonexistent.

 

A Fragile Concept

The concept of territorial space provides one of the central tenets to counterterrorism theory. The United States emphasizes capturing and killing terrorists, while denying them safe havens – a central plank to U.S. counterterrorism strategy since 9/11. The attention paid to ungoverned spaces has only grown in importance. As the counterterrorism expert Daniel Benjamin once remarked in reference to Pakistan and Somalia: “These weakly-governed or entirely ungoverned areas are a major safe haven for al-Qaida and its allies an