Fighting them over there so we don’t have to fight them here

In a postquestioning the general threat level of al Qaeda after the botched bombing of a pair of New York synagogues, Will says he’s “generally sympathetic to people who think our current national security consensus exaggerates or over-estimates Al-Qaeda’s capabilities.” One of his commenters writes

I’ve read that there are ten million illegals in the United States. I’ve read that Afghanistan exports ten thousand tons of opium. Yet the bad guys have been unable to sneak one bomb or gunman into this country in the last eight years. How is this possible? Are our defenders that good? Are our enemies incompetent? What am I missing?

I think what they’re both missing is that the vast majority of Islamist terrorists have been drawn to the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan. The focus of al Qaeda has shifted from committing a major atrocity in America to fighting the infidels occupying the Middle East. As a result, the U.S. Army and Marine Corps have turned those battlefields into terrorist mass graves. We’re talking several tens of thousands of dead terrorists, at a minimum. (These numbers are two years old but give you some sense.) We are literally fighting them over there so we don’t have to fight them over there.

Now, I don’t know how tenable that state of affairs is. It’s not as if there’s a finite number of Muslims waiting to be radicalized, meaning we can’t keep this up indefinitely. (I mean, I guess there is, but we’d probably run out of troops before we ran out of poor, ignorant, easily radicalized Middle Easterners.) But this is one of the most-ignored aspects of the “war on terror” framework. Instead of holing up and hoping that law enforcement officers find out about plots being planned in the mountains of some godforsaken country, we’re taking the fight to them and drawing them out into battle against our fighting men in the field. We’re not giving them room to breathe, time to plan, or a place to hide. And I’m pretty sure that has at least something to do with the fact that we haven’t seen another serious terrorist attack on American soil.