President Barack Obama has just promised not to cut the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan or pull them out entirely as part of the current review of U.S. strategy there, but he has not promised to increase them. Could he privately be having second thoughts about the whole war?
"The maximum estimate is less than a hundred (al-Qaida members) operating in (Afghanistan), no bases, no ability to launch attacks on us or our allies," said President Obama's national security adviser, Gen. James Jones, in an interview on CNN last week. In that case, why does the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, want another 40,000 troops?
The Washington orthodoxy insists that there is essentially no difference between al-Qaida, the mostly Arab organization that ordered the 9/11 attacks on the United States, and the Taliban, the local Islamist extremists who controlled most of Afghanistan before the U.S. invasion in 2001 and allowed al-Qaida to have camps there. If the U.S. pulled out of Afghanistan, al-Qaida would be back like a shot.
But hang on. For all practical purposes, the Taliban already control at least a third of Afghanistan's territory. Yet Gen. Jones says there are fewer than 100 al-Qaida operatives in the country.
Somalia, Yemen, Iraq, Pakistan, and several other countries each have more al-Qaida members than that on their territory. Al-Qaida doesn't seem to be accomplishing much from those countries, either. So, why is controlling political outcomes in Afghanistan crucial to American security?
That question may finally be getting posed by the Obama administration. After the shameless rigging of the recent Afghan election by President Hamid Karzai, the U.S. no longer has a credible partner in Kabul. So the current review of U.S. strategy, which until recently was mainly a debate about how much to escalate, is taking on a broader focus.
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