Al Qaeda An "Afterthought" in Afghan War
An article in yesterday’s Washington Post noted that al Qaeda has an increasingly minor presence and role in Afghanistan, becoming almost an “afterthought” in the conflict there.
Though this isn’t really new information, the article makes what I thought to be an interesting suggestion, noting that al Qaeda’s relatively small role in the Afghanistan conflict might be in at least some part at the Taliban’s insistence. It also notes that the role reduction might be in keeping with a deliberately altered al Qaeda strategy:
Although Taliban commanders want support from al-Qaeda and jihadists around the world, according to [Maj. Michael] Flynn, they are sensitive to the idea that ordinary Afghans might view it as foreign interference.
This time, U.S. military officials and analysts say, al Qaeda has changed its strategy mostly limiting its role in the Taliban-led insurgency to assisting with training, intelligence, and propaganda… In Iraq, he [terrorism expert Bruce Hoffman] noted, al-Qaeda figures from elsewhere alienated the locals by trying to hijack that insurgency. U.S. military officials say al-Qaeda recognizes the same risk in Afghanistan.
This doesn’t necessarily contrast with claims that it has been the U.S. presence in Afghanistan that has forced a reduced al Qaeda’s presence and limited the group’s participation in the Afghan conflict. It does raise the under-explored possibility, however, that the more removed role for al Qaeda operatives might be a strategic choice on the part of AQ and Taliban commanders have made largely independent of U.S. counterterrorist and counterinsurgency operations in Afghanistan.
We tend to think that when we see a major effect, we must be the cause; if AQ no longer has a large presence in Afghanistan, it must be because we drove them out and made Afghanistan an inhospitable operating environment. This is of course in part true, but we also sometimes seem to forget that there are other parties involved and that we are not the only actors basing strategies on the effect that AQ’s presence will have on the nature of the conflict and our ability to win it.
If the Taliban and AQ have decided to keep the conflict it strictly local and reduce al Qaeda’s “footprint” in Afghanistan, that’s probably a smart move on their part. We can take some significant credit for reducing AQ’s presence in Afghanistan of course, but the more we remember that we are one of many strategic actors assessing and dictating how, when, and where AQ involves itself in this conflict, the better equipped we’ll be to design strategies that take into account the enemy’s thought processes and priorities in the longer term.
