Bruce Hoffman of Georgetown had an important report in Sunday’s Washington Post on al-Qaeda’s emerging strategy, which can be glimpsed in such plots as the Christmas Day attempted airplane bombing and the suicide bombing at the CIA base in Afghanistan. He notes that such attacks suggest that al-Qaeda is exceedingly resilient and that reports of its demise are premature:
While the United States remains preoccupied with trying to secure yesterday’s failed state — Afghanistan — al-Qaeda is busy staking out new terrain. The terrorist network sees failing states as providing opportunities to extend its reach, and it conducts local campaigns of subversion to hasten their decline. Over the past year, it has increased its activities in places such as Pakistan, Algeria, the Sahel, Somalia and, in particular, Yemen.
He’s right about al-Qaeda’s ability to fill vacuums in undergoverned countries, but I disagree with the implication that the war in Afghanistan is a distraction from the wider campaign. If we were to lose in Afghanistan, it would become tomorrow’s failed state, as well as yesterday’s, and that would constitute a massive win for al-Qaeda. Among other things, it would further destabilize Pakistan, which is already facing a horrific threat. (A new think-tank report finds that in Pakistan, “terrorist attacks killed 3,021 people and injured 7,334 in 2009. There were 87 suicide bombings amid 2,586 terrorist strikes, a 45 percent increase over the previous year.”)
The answer isn’t to give up in Afghanistan but to do better on those other battlefields where we will have to fight without benefit of large numbers of our own ground troops.