Part of Me: You saw that WSJ piece about al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and al-Shebaab moving into the fore of al-Q’s operations targeting the U.S., right?

Another Part: Oh yeah. It struck me as commensurate with how John Brennan has framed the mutating threat from al-Qaeda’s failed-or-failing-state franchises. By the way, what does it say about us that my first reaction was, “Yemen? I should really go there next”?

Part of Me: Come now. This is admittedly a solipsistic frame for a post, but let’s not get out of control. People aren’t concerned about psychoanalyzing you. They want to know the strategic implications.

Another Part: You’re the one who broke the fourth wall. And I was going somewhere with this. We just got back from Afghanistan, where we spent a lot of time assessing the war’s fortunes. But its relationship to al-Qaeda’s fortunes is, at best, indirect. If the war goes perfectly, we’ll be denying al-Qaeda territory that they’re barely in and arguably don’t need to reclaim. I mean, is that really–

Part of Me: Dude. Surge, deescalate and sustain. Remember?

Another Part: You really find that so compelling now? Really?

Part of Me: It’s not so cut and dried, and the mismatch between strategy and resources is still great, as we conceded back in June. But it’s probably still the best way of winding down the war.

Another Part: We interviewed Petraeus! Did he sound like he’s going to wind down the war along the timeframe we outlined? Are we talking about surge-deescalate-sustain or surge-marginally deescalate-sustain?

Part of Me: Notice we’re getting away from talking about al-Qaeda.

Another Part: But that’s my whole point! We’re supposed to be about a grand strategy to neutralize this psychotic death cult, but we’re sinking vast expanses of resources — not just blood and treasure, but ISR, attention, focus, all these finite assets — into a place where al-Qaeda has “strategic depth” but not anything like a robust presence. Meanwhile, al-Qaeda’s affiliates are growing more ambitious where we ain’t. And we saw it coming since Abdulmutallab’s failed attack and Brennan’s CSIS speech. I’m going to quote Discharge to you: Does This System Work?

Part of Me: Let’s not go nuts overestimating AQAP and al-Shebaab’s capabilities. Like we’ve been writing, these aren’t coordinated simultaneous attacks on multiple targets. They’re incompetent attacks by B-Teamers in an attempt to demonstrate that they can project power globally. We turn them into successes needlessly and at our own peril.

Another Part: Yes. But you can also recognize that test runs often fail. And that doesn’t locate the Afghanistan war and its undeclared Pakistani offshoot within the broader framework of the struggle against al-Qaeda. Stop stalling.

Part of Me: OK. Put it this way. On the one hand — and believe me, I don’t mean to reinterpret Failure as Success, but just stay with me for a minute — there’s something to Brennan’s contention that pressuring the Pakistani safehavens with the drones leads to al-Qaeda’s B-list affiliates picking up the slack. And if they do, with all their diminished capability, that’s not such a bad sign. But in order to make it count, you need to consolidate your effort. Wind down the Afghanistan war, keep the pressure on that safehaven. And above all, resist the effort to commit a massive amount of resources in Yemen and Somalia, lest we restart the cycle of incitement and inflammation that we saw in Iraq.

On the other, that still leaves you with what to do in Yemen and Somalia. And in neither place do we have a robust local partner for our outsourcing. Containment and limited strike is probably our most prudent and robust option from a military perspective, but it absolutely can’t exist in a vacuum. Nagl’s security-force-training proposal (now Gates‘s) looks better by the day. Then there’s the additional question of political and economic commitment. But the Somali government is a creaky imposed vestige of an ill-advised 2006-7 war and the Yemenis, Lord. I’m not going to pretend to be an expert here. It’s a big and unresolved problem.

Another Part: That’s a start, but you see how shaky it is. I’m left with this question. If Yemen and Somalia and I guess Pakistan are what you might call “economy of force” missions, why isn’t Afghanistan?

Part of Me: Afghanistan is going to have to be. We need to deescalate in order to sustain. I don’t know why you think I’m resisting that contention.

Another Part: Wow, you’re even hostile to yourself. Don’t like to ask yourself hard questions, do you?

Part of Me: OK, OK. I’ll put it differently. Iraq and Afghanistan should teach us that we can’t fight two major wars simultaneously. Basic prudence should teach us that we shouldn’t seek to fight two major wars simultaneously. The overall strategy against al-Qaeda is massively disproportionate to the threat al-Qaeda realistically poses. That disjunction should be a huge blinking red light. It’s a failure of the Obama administration not to challenge the root of that disproportion, which is what we once called the politics of fear, and we chided Obama for that in a recent American Prospect piece that you had a big hand in writing.

Another Part: You need to wrap this up.

Part of Me: Sure. What I mean to say is that in order to get to any reasonable balance between threat, strategy and resources, you need to bring Afghanistan into some stable deescalation that favors the U.S.’s interests here. That’s why we wrote that thing yesterday about involving Pakistan in a diplomatic bargain. I’m not saying you have to sequence it like First Afghanistan Then Yemen And Somalia. But if it doesn’t credibly appear like U.S. interests against an unstable Afghanistan and an expanded safe haven for al-Qaeda and its affiliates are being advanced, we’re just going to face calls for even more disproportion and we’re never going to get to a point where we wind this insane geopolitical overcommitment down to a place where we can responsibly promote our legitimate security interests against al-Qaeda and not play into its call to bleed us to bankruptcy. Does that satisfy you?

Another Part: No, but I gather that it’s as far as you’ve reasoned it through since coming back from this last Afghanistan trip. So I’m not going to push my luck. But recognize: limited commitments don’t stay limited, do they? Look at… well, Afghanistan.

Part of Me: Yeah, I have a strong feeling we’ll be returning to this unhappy subject a great deal. But I want to say one last thing here, about this headline: We should be extremely careful of implying that there’s always a Real War on the horizon that we should be fighting, and the massive one we’re in now is a mere distraction. That’s exactly the kind of unthinking hubris that benefits Usama bin Laden. Dangle the ball of yarn and watch the cat allow his reflexes to take over.

Another Part: We agree entirely. This headline writer is extremely stupid.