WASHINGTON — When President Barack Obama decided last year to narrow the scope of the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan, he and his aides settled on a formulation that sounded simple: Eviscerate al-Qaida, but just “degrade” the Taliban, reversing that movement’s momentum.
Now, after the bungled car-bombing attempt in Times Square with suspected links to the Pakistani Taliban, a new, and disturbing, question is being raised in Washington: Have the stepped-up attacks in Pakistan — notably the Predator drone strikes — actually made Americans less safe? Have they had the perverse consequence of driving lesser insurgencies to think of targeting Times Square and American airliners, not just Kabul and Islamabad? In short, are they inspiring more attacks on America than they prevent?
It is a hard question.
At the time of Obama’s strategy review, the logic seemed straightforward. Only al-Qaida had the ambitions and reach to leap the ocean and take the war to America’s skies and streets.
In contrast, most of the Taliban and other militant groups were regarded as fragmented, regional insurgencies whose goals stuck close to the territory their tribal ancestors have fought over for centuries.
Six months and a few attempted bombings later, including the near-miss in New York last weekend, nothing looks quite that simple. As commanders remind each other, in all wars the enemy gets a vote, too. Increasingly, it looks like these enemies have voted to combine talents, if not forces.
Last week, a senior American intelligence official was saying that the many varieties of insurgents now make up a “witches’ brew” of forces, sharing money handlers, communications experts and, most important in recent times, bomb makers.
Yes, each group still has a separate identity and goal, but those fine distinctions seem less relevant than ever.
The notion that the various groups are at least thinking alike worries Bruce Riedel, who a year ago was a co-author of Obama’s first review of strategy in the region.
“There are two separate movements converging here,” said Riedel, a senior fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. “The ideology of global jihad has been bought into by more and more militants, even guys who never thought much about the broader world. And that is disturbing, because it is a force multiplier for al-Qaida.”
Riedel also notes, “The pressure we’ve put on them in the past year has also drawn them together, meaning that the network of alliances is getting stronger, not weaker.” So what seemed like a mission being narrowed by Obama, focusing on al-Qaida and its closest associates (which included the Pakistani Taliban), “now seems like a lot broader mission than it did a year ago.”
Figuring out cause-and-effect when it comes to the motivations of Islamic militants is always tricky. Whenever he was asked whether America’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were goading Islamic militants into new attacks, President George W. Bush used to shoot back that neither war was under way on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001.
When Obama came into office, the conventional wisdom held that the mere arrival of a black president with some Muslim relatives and an eagerness to engage the Islamic world would be bad news for al-Qaida and Taliban recruiters. One rarely hears that argument now.
