Both the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal have articles reporting that the CIA now believes that Islamist extremists based in Yemen pose a bigger threat than those from Pakistan. This will no doubt spur indignant demands to explain why we are committing more resources in Afghanistan. Similar calls were heard for years during the height of the war effort in Iraq. Back then the cry was to invest more in “Afpak” (Afghanistan-Pakistan). Now that we have sent more resources there, critics claim that the threat has moved and our war effort is ill advised.

This is starting to feel like a shell game. Some people seem to simply oppose any war we are currently fighting, using the existence of threats elsewhere as an excuse to cut back on our existing troop commitments. That would be a disastrous mistake because it would hand al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and other extremist groups a major victory in Afghanistan that would spur their terrorist efforts elsewhere.

In any case it should be perfectly possible to fight in Afghanistan while maintaining a light footprint in countries like Yemen and Somalia. The Special Operations Command and the CIA are reportedly planning more drone strikes and other low-visibility actions in Yemen. That seems like the right response.

It is hard to imagine that, even if we weren’t committed in Afghanistan, we would be sending tens of thousands of troops to Yemen. Certainly those who argue that Afghanistan is unimportant don’t advocate an American invasion of some other country where al-Qaeda has taken root. The reality is that we have to use different strategies in different places. We’re in Afghanistan because of 9/11 and we need to win that war. We’ve made a lesser commitment in lots of other countries because they have not (yet) been used as a base from which to attack our homeland. That seems not only a reasonable division of labor but the only politically feasible one: few in Washington of either party would support an invasion of another country unless we are actually attacked.