The Afghanistan war is about to focus on al-Qaeda again:

While emphasizing the importance of continuing U.S. operations against Pakistan-based Taliban fighters who attack U.S. forces in Afghanistan, the incoming administration intends to remind Americans how the fight against Islamist extremists began — on Sept. 11, 2001, before the Afghanistan and Iraq wars — and to underscore that al-Qaeda remains the nation’s highest priority. "This is our enemy," one adviser said of bin Laden, "and he should be our principal target." 

That’s a quote given to Karen DeYoung of the Washington Post in the course of a great piece that’s rather congruent with a post I wrote recently outlining a potential new Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy. Obama wants to see the Karzai-Taliban talks peel off as many reconcilable Taliban as possible, fraying the infrastructure that keeps bin Laden a free man, while seeing if Iran can play the constructive role in Afghanistan it’s tried to play for years, and increasing U.S. forces. According to the piece, there’s a subtle reassessment in the military of the usefulness of the increasingly unpopular and impotent Hamid Karzai himself, as well as a frustration over the lassitude of many NATO partner-countries. Meanwhile, Petraeus is open to asking "how much is enough," nation-building-wise, in Afghanistan. 

All this requires the caveat that the Taliban-negotiation element relies on an as-yet-untested factual premise, namely that there are Taliban elements that would negotiate seriously. And while you can’t really go further with this approach unless you test that premise — the Afghan-Pakistan joint mini-jirga is geared to do that — it’s worth asking: what’s Plan B? What if the talks don’t yield anything? What are the administration’s options then? 

But given that I’ve written frequently about how I think this is all to the good, I think I can say one thing about internal administration dynamics. Something I’ve worried about for a fair amount of time is how delicate the relationship between the unknown-quantity Obama administration — given that Obama ran for president as an anti-Iraq-war progressive — and the military will be. All of this has focused on Iraq. What I didn’t sufficiently consider, and what the Post piece makes rather clear, is how much support Obama has within the military for his Afghanistan policy. Emphasizing and building on that burgeoning consensus is a great way to avoid the early civil-military missteps of the Clinton administration.