The meaning of "containment" in Afghanistan

Seth Jones, an analyst at the RAND Corporation and an adviser to U.S. special operations, has an op-ed in today's New York Times calling for an expanded drone war in Pakistan. Jones thinks the U.S. should target Baluchistan province, where the Taliban's senior leadership is reportedly based.

The NYT fails to mention that Jones' boss, Brig. Gen. Edward Reeder, might be involved in carrying out those aforementioned drone attacks in Baluchistan. (Noah Schachtman at Danger Room catches that detail.)

In any event, even if drone strikes might be successful at decapitating the Taliban leadership, this is the kind of reductive thinking that leads to tactical successes and strategic failures. A drone campaign in Baluchistan would be another huge infringement upon Pakistani sovereignty; it would inevitably kill civilians and stoke anti-American anger in Pakistan. It also risks linking Baluchistan's nationalist movement, a purely local grievance, with the U.S. war on terror. That's not an outcome U.S. policymakers want.

In that spirit -- talking about "reductive thinking" -- that I read Spencer Ackerman's latest post, which asks what the U.S. endgame is in Afghanistan. (I say "reductive thinking" in regard to U.S. policy, not to Spencer's post, which raises some good questions and is worth a read.)

It's a shame that Inskeep moved on to a different line of questioning. Because this sounds very much like Petraeus acknowledging that the U.S. cannot and will not kill every last al-Qaeda operative. What it can do, along with its Pakistani partners -- and can't do without them -- is degrade al-Qaeda-central's safe haven and harass it militarily when possible, so that it can't export the extremism that senior officials continue to see emanating from the region. There's a word for that: containment.

My first reaction was, "define containment." It was easy to define and measure during the Cold War: Either Communism was spreading to new states, or it wasn't. I'm unclear how it can be measured in the context of al-Qaeda, though. The small cadre of al-Qaeda leaders on the Afghan-Pakistan border doesn't really carry out operations; instead, it provides training and ideological support to the decentralized operational wings of al-Qaeda.

So what we're talking about here, essentially, is trying to contain information, training, operational expertise. How will the U.S. measure that?

You could define containment simply as the absence of terrorist attacks: If al-Qaeda-linked groups aren't attacking Western targets, then the group is contained, right? But that's a logical fallacy. The absence of al-Qaeda attacks (successful or foiled) doesn't mean the group isn't training attackers; likewise, successful attacks by al-Qaeda-linked groups doesn't mean the group is actively "export[ing] extremism." Al-Shabab has pledged its allegiance to al-Qaeda, but yesterday's suicide bombing in Mogadishu isn't necessarily linked to the al-Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Broadly speaking -- this is the "reductive" part -- there is this relentless focus on a few hundred al-Qaeda fighters in the mountains along the Durand Line. Gen. David Petraeus seems to be arguing that we can keep al-Qaeda's operational expertise bottled up in a small region in northwest Pakistan. And I'm just not sure -- in a world of limited resources -- that trying to "contain" them (or kill them) is the best way to prevent acts of terrorism against the West.

To me, "containment," in a terrorism sense, means doing good intelligence and law enforcement work, breaking up plots (like the Zazi plot), choking off terrorist financing, etc. But trying to keep a few hundred al-Qaeda fighters from sharing their operational expertise? That seems a Sisyphean task. (Remember, Al-Qaeda offshoots and affiliates in Somalia, Yemen, North Africa and elsewhere are developing their own operational expertise as we speak.)

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