Welcome home, al Qaeda
An article in today’s Wall Street Journal discussed the return of al Qaeda to the mountain valleys of eastern Afghanistan. In doing so, the piece questioned the goals, assumptions, and logic underlying the United States strategy in the region. If the incidents described in the Wall Street Journal piece turn into trends, defenders of the current U.S. strategy in Afghanistan will likely find themselves increasingly under siege. And with disparate developments in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and elsewhere conspiring to inhibit the ability of the United States to locally suppress al Qaeda, policymakers may be forced to devise an entirely new approach to counterterrorism.
Over the past year or so, U.S. military commanders in eastern Afghanistan opted to abandon their efforts to pacify a variety of remote mountain valleys such as Korengal, Pech, and others. The high costs of maintaining outposts in these valleys were deemed to exceed the strategic importance of the terrain. In addition, commanders concluded that local populations who resisted so fiercely were effectively neutral in the conflict between the coalition and the Taliban. They figured that conceding the valleys back to local control would not necessarily mean turning the terrain over to the Taliban or al Qaeda since it was assumed that many of these locals would equally resist the presence of the coalition’s adversaries.
According to the Wall Street Journal, that assumption is not coming to pass:
Over the past six to eight months, al Qaeda has begun setting up training camps, hideouts and operations bases in the remote mountains along Afghanistan’s northeastern border with Pakistan, some U.S., Afghan and Taliban officials say. The stepped-up infiltration followed a U.S. pullback from large swatches of the region starting 18 months ago. The areas were deemed strategically irrelevant and left to Afghanistan’s uneven security forces, and in some parts, abandoned entirely.
American commanders have argued that the U.S. military presence in the remote valleys was the main reason why locals joined the Taliban. Once American soldiers left, they predicted, the Taliban would go, too. Instead, the Taliban have stayed put, a senior U.S. military officer said, and “al Qaeda is coming back.”
Such re-infiltration is a direct affront to the Obama administration’s goal “to disrupt, dismantle, and eventually defeat al Qaeda and to prevent their return to either Afghanistan or Pakistan.”
The U.S. command in Afghanistan has been well aware of the problem. Last September, a large U.S. air strike on the Korengal valley blasted a budding al Qaeda training camp, killing dozens of Arab fighters, two senior al Qaeda leaders, and one of Saudi Arabia’s most-wanted al Qaeda militants. Termed “mowing the grass,” such air strikes and direct action raids would seem to be an acceptance of periodic “Bidenesque” counterterrorism suppression instead of a hoped-for permanent pacification through counterinsurgency.
The U.S. surge strategy in Afghanistan hopes to achieve two goals. First, it hopes to buy time to permit a buildup of Afghan security forces so that they can maintain security in the country. Even if this hope is achieved in Afghanistan’s urban areas, the Afghan government’s imminent control and pacification of places like the Korengal and Pech valleys is not in anyone’s imagination. Second, U.S. policymakers hope the surge will create negotiating leverage over the Taliban, leading to a political settlement. Such a settlement would undoubtedly include a ceasefire which would favor Taliban and al Qaeda re-infiltration into ungoverned spaces like the Korengal and Pech valleys.
Meanwhile political upheaval in Yemen and elsewhere in the Arab world is disrupting previous U.S. counterterrorism programs and relationships. U.S. policymakers may have to rethink assumptions they may have held concerning the cooperation they expect to receive from local governments.
The basic U.S. strategy for countering al Qaeda has been to build up indigenous security forces to govern previously ungoverned spaces. This is a very long-term project which in the meantime has resulted in many “no-go” areas. Even when it had its own significant ground combat power at its disposal, U.S. military commanders have found it too costly to impose their will in some wild areas, such as some mountain valleys in eastern Afghanistan. In other places like Yemen and possibly Egypt, the U.S. government may end up losing the counterterrorism relationships it previously had with local officials. The result will be the reopening of sanctuaries for al Qaeda and a setback for the current U.S. strategy. The fallback plan will be periodic Bidenesque “lawn mowing.” But this alternative is likely to be insufficient and will create its own problems. Policymakers will soon be scrambling for a new counterterrorism strategy.
