Opinion

When America opts to be absent

“When America is absent, especially from unstable environments, there are consequences. Extremism takes root, our interests suffer and our security at home is threatened.”

Funny: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton offered those words in her Capitol Hill testimony last Friday to defend President Obama’s national-security stance — but they actually read more like an indictment.

America is certainly absent in Syria. In their joint “60 Minutes” interview Sunday, Obama and Clinton recited the numerous reasons why they’ve kept us out.

But that’s left the inept “international community” dealing with the Syrian war, even as Islamist extremists “take root” there and are now poised to seize President Bashar al-Assad’s most dangerous war toys, threatening America and our closest allies.

Washington also watches helplessly from the sidelines as the most populous Arab country slides. With at least 30 dead in clashes between police and anti-government protesters over the weekend, Egypt’s Islamist president, Mohammed Morsi, declared a state of emergency yesterday.

Any remaining hope that the Arab Spring will beget a benevolent Muslim-tinted democracy in Egypt — or elsewhere, for that matter — is dead for the foreseeable future.

Then there’s North Africa, where France battles heroically to chase Islamists away from northern Mali. State Department legal eagles insist that, because France’s partner in that war, the Malian government, seized power in a coup (conducted by US-trained generals), our support must be limited. So we’re mostly denying Paris’s requests for refueling and troop-carrying planes and other US assets.

Oh, no, we’re not completely absent: America is now reportedly planning to establish a drone base in Mali’s neighbor, Niger — introducing Obama’s most effective anti-terror tool to the theater.

But a war of drones is conducted by remote control: The “absent” superpower relies heavily on flying robots, and on locals to carry the brunt on the ground.

Relying on others has real drawbacks.

When members of an al Qaeda offshoot took hostages at a major Algerian gas plant on Jan. 16, the Algiers government conducted a bloody raid on the facility — leaving 37 foreign workers dead, including three Americans.

There were benefits: The crisis ended quickly, and any complaints about disregard for human life must be directed to Algeria, not to the West.

And after all, we’ve trusted Algeria for decades to take care of terror threats in that neighborhood.

It made sense: Decades before the Arab Spring, in 1991, Algeria experimented with a free election. But when Islamists won hands down, the army seized power. A long, vicious civil war between the secular rulers and the Islamist rebels followed.

Western intelligence agencies then assumed that Algeria’s rulers could be relied on to effectively conduct a vicious war against their mortal enemies — Islamist terrorists, who happened to be our enemies, too.

In reality, as European diplomats tell me, when the civil war winded down Algerian intelligence officers tacitly made deals with the Islamists, allowing them to operate freely — as long as they did so out of country.

That’s how al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb became a formidable regional force but, until now, was absent from Algeria, its birthplace. Algerian intelligence even helped to establish small Islamist fighting groups (Ansar Dine, for example) in neighboring Mali.

Last week, the Daily Beast’s Eli Lake reported on evidence that Algerian intelligence actually trained Mokhtar Belmokhtar, an infamous leader of an AQIM offshoot.

Well, that backfired: He was the brains behind the raid on the gas field, endangering Algeria’s entire energy sector — its only source of hard currency.

Elements in our “ally” Pakistan’s intelligence agencies cut similar hazardous deals with Islamists in South Asia, at bloody cost to India and Afghanistan. Our “pals” in Yemen did much the same in the Arabian peninsula.

Farm out the War on Terror to countries where pro-terror Islamists have deep roots, and you’ll get burned.

This doesn’t mean America has to send in armies and nation-build, as we’ve tried in Afghanistan and Iraq. There’s a middle ground between that and being absent.

But too often, we’re too close to being absent — unable, as in the case of Benghazi, to save our own people when the terrorists come calling.

So what was Clinton’s thinking with her “when America is absent” defense of the policies she’s been implementing for four years? Perhaps it was a tacit warning that America’s absence will only intensify in the next four years.

Twitter: @bennyavni