It’s important to remember what the only viable strategy for — well, if victory is the wrong word, the next-best thing to it depends on the application of a classic principle of counterinsurgency. Divide the insurgents from the greater pool of potential insurgents: those who can be persuaded to join the insurgency — or, to go a step further, those who can be either persuaded or coerced into not bandwagoning with the counterinsurgent force. Doing that depends on several different things, but chief among them is addressing the legitimate grievances the cohort of ‘potentials’ has with the counterinsurgent force. To reduce the whole thing to a bumper sticker: justice and legitimacy are force multipliers. Losing either amounts to unilateral disarmament.

Now read this Washington Post story about al-Qaeda’s attempts to portray Barack Obama as Change The Muslim World Can’t Believe In.

The departure of George W. Bush deprived al-Qaeda of a polarizing American leader who reliably drove recruits and donations to the terrorist group.

With Obama, al-Qaeda faces an entirely new challenge, experts say: a U.S. president who campaigned to end the Iraq war and to close the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and who polls show is well liked throughout the Muslim world.

Right there’s the frustrations of both al-Qaeda and — this is not a moral equivalency, but it is a strategic one — the 27 Percent Nation. To a great degree, a proper methodology to deny al-Qaeda the feeder pool it needs to keep its war going is to adopt a strategy of retreat and defeat. Get out of Iraq. Close Guantanamo. Renounce torture. Actively redress the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. None of these actions are sufficient to rolling up al-Qaeda. But by committing to them, you accomplish something significant toward that end: you place redressing the legitimate grievances of the Muslim world on your side, not al-Qaeda’s. That’s what the Long War crowd doesn’t understand.

Narrowing their potential recruiting base is not the same thing as ending it — that’s probably impossible, or at the least, impractical. Nor should you do things that manifestly are outside of the American interest (withdraw all support and commitment from the Middle East, for both Arab and Israeli governments alike, for instance) because Usama bin Laden placed such demands in a speech somewhere. But where you can isolate legitimate grievances that can be impacted by actions that don’t harm the American interest, even if they’re difficult — do you think U.S. commanders in Anbar Province liked partnering with former insurgents? — you put al-Qaeda against an anvil. And then you can bring the hammer down.

Of course, I’ve made it sound too easy. The hard question, and the next great foreign-policy debate, is what if Afghanistan is no different than Iraq: a hopeless war that inflames and destabilizes the Muslim world rather than cuts to the heart of the legitimate U.S. struggle against al-Qaeda. I don’t believe it is: the prospect of cutting off al-Qaeda from its most lethal staging ground in Pakistan — inextricable from Afghanistan — is too central to U.S. interests to justify retrenchment, even though that statement is agnostic about strategy for advancing those interests. It has to be recognized that going after al-Qaeda in Pakistan, whether by us directly or through Pakistani proxies, is itself inflamatory.

Some provocations, though, are justified, and this is the most central provocation of all in this context. To make it work — to make the high costs worth it — it won’t be sufficient merely to have a strategy that succeeds militarily. It’s also necessary to give the Muslim world much of what it wants that’s also in our interest, so it can accept, passively or actively, the pain of seeing the application of force in eastern Afghanistan and western Pakistan. Now, reasonable people can define mutual U.S.-Muslim interests differently, and it’s an important debate. But if you believe that there is no mutual interest, or if that mutual interest boils down to Muslim acquiescence, then you’ve guaranteed the U.S. will be drawn into an unwinnable war with over a billion Muslims. Think hard about this.