Obama’s Afghanistan Refocus

The Afghanistan war is about to focus on al-Qaeda again:

While emphasizing the importance of continuing U.S. operations against Pakistan-based Taliban fighters who attack U.S. forces in Afghanistan, the incoming administration intends to remind Americans how the fight against Islamist extremists began — on Sept. 11, 2001, before the Afghanistan and Iraq wars — and to underscore that al-Qaeda remains the nation’s highest priority. “This is our enemy,” one adviser said of bin Laden, “and he should be our principal target.”

That’s a quote given to Karen DeYoung of The Washington Post in the course of a great piece that’s rather congruent with a post I wrote recently outlining a potential new Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy.

Obama wants to see the Karzai-Taliban talks peel off as many reconcilable Taliban as possible, fraying the infrastructure that keeps bin Laden a free man, while seeing if Iran can play the constructive role in Afghanistan it’s tried to play for years, and increasing U.S. forces. According to the piece, there’s a subtle reassessment in the military of the usefulness of the increasingly unpopular and impotent Hamid Karzai himself, as well as a frustration over the lassitude of many NATO partner-countries. Meanwhile, Petraeus is open to asking “how much is enough,” nation-building-wise, in Afghanistan.

All this requires the caveat that the Taliban-negotiation element relies on an as-yet-untested factual premise, namely that there are Taliban elements that would negotiate seriously. And while you can’t really go further with this approach unless you test that premise — the Afghan-Pakistan joint mini-jirga is geared to do that — it’s worth asking: what’s Plan B? What if the talks don’t yield anything? What are the administration’s options then?