ABSTRACT
The previous two chapters have traced the West’s shift from a classic threatoriented security strategy, towards one based upon a security praxeology informed by risk. The Western interventions in Kosovo and Afghanistan do not compute in a traditional realist threat assessment. There was no threat directed at the West from either Kosovo or Afghanistan. That said, there were activities taking place in both countries that could be seen as objective dangers and which formed a basis for the construction of a risk. The politically motivated ethnic cleansing in Kosovo could have destabilized the region and impinged on Western security. Afghanistan, a pariah state, was serving as a safe haven for terrorists and as a base from which they could launch attacks against the West, such as those directed at the US embassies in Africa in 1997 or the World Trade Center in 2001. While both these risk management measures can thus be seen as reactive, they were motivated more by future possibilities than immediate realities. Still, it was easier to construct the risk and the logic of intervention with some facets of the risk scenario already in play. The nature of a risk praxeology, however, is one that eventually leads to scenarios that are based almost entirely upon probabilities, rather than actual events. Risk leads policy makers to think ever more in terms of “could” and “might”. The spur for present action is a future possibility; the future possibility takes on a virtual reality and as such it, rather than a real time event, becomes the motivating factor of policy. The best example of this to date is the Western intervention in Iraq that began in 2003.
