Reframing al Qaeda?

NY Times:

President Obama’s national security team is moving to reframe its war strategy by emphasizing the campaign against Al Qaeda in Pakistan while arguing that the Taliban in Afghanistan does not pose a direct threat to the United States, officials said Wednesday.

As Mr. Obama met with advisers for three hours to discuss Pakistan, the White House said he had not decided whether to approve a proposed troop buildup in Afghanistan. But the shift in thinking, outlined by senior administration officials on Wednesday, suggests that the president has been presented with an approach that would not require all of the additional troops that his commanding general in the region has requested.

It remains unclear whether everyone in Mr. Obama’s war cabinet fully accepts this view. While Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. has argued for months against increasing troops in Afghanistan because Pakistan was the greater priority, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates have both warned that the Taliban remain linked to Al Qaeda and would give its fighters havens again if the Taliban regained control of all or large parts of Afghanistan, making it a mistake to think of them as separate problems.

Moreover, Mr. Obama’s commander there, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, has argued that success demands a substantial expansion of the American presence, up to 40,000 more troops. Any decision that provides less will expose the president to criticism, especially from Republicans, that his policy is a prescription for failure.

The White House appears to be trying to prepare the ground to counter that by focusing attention on recent successes against Qaeda cells in Pakistan. The approach described by administration officials on Wednesday amounted to an alternative to the analysis presented by General McChrystal. If, as the White House has asserted in recent weeks, it has improved the ability of the United States to reduce the threat from Al Qaeda, then the war in Afghanistan is less important to American security.

In reviewing General McChrystal’s request, the White House is rethinking what was, just six months ago, a strategy that viewed Pakistan and Afghanistan as a single integrated problem, according to several administration officials and outsiders who have spoken with them. Now the discussions in the White House Situation Room are focusing on related but separate strategies for fighting Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

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Reframing is what politicians do, not generals. Defeating the Taliban is not a political for the US military. There are certain principals of counterinsurgency warfare that few in this administration even grasp. Obama and Biden were both dead wrong about counterinsurgency warfare in Iraq and they are dead wrong now if they ignore the advice of Gen. McChrystal. If they think reframing can change the situation in Afghanistan they are exposing their ignorance.

If they want to argue about fewer al Qaeda being found in Afghanistan, they should at least start by asking why there are fewer. What should be clear is that since the fall of al Qaeda in Iraq, many of those terrorist have come back to Afghanistan and Pakistan and they are providing tactical advice to the Taliban. They have also been replacing Taliban commanders and trainers.

The post linked in the above paragraph gives a better idea of the relationship than any reframing effort by the administration. It should also dispel the wishful thinking going into the "reframing" effort.