Abdallah Umar al-Qurayshi, a top al-Qaeda operative in eastern Afghanistan, made the mistake earlier this week of hanging out in the Korengal valley, where a NATO airstrike ended him. My friend James Gordon Meek of the New York Daily News, an absolute beast of a reporter, overthinks it a bit:

But taking Al-Qurayshi off the battlefield in Afghanistan may not only have been one of the biggest blows to Al Qaeda’s small force there in years, it could end up helping the White House counter criticism of the war within Democratic ranks. There is no doubt U.S. troops and Afghans are better off for Al Qurayshi’s demise; the question now is whether killing the Al Qaeda commander will help President Obama with his liberal base.

But (one of) the liberal critique(s) of the Afghanistan war isn’t that there are no members of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. It’s that their meager presence there, coupled with their threat to U.S. interests, is vastly smaller than the amount of resources that Obama is spending in Afghanistan. By the same token, a notional liberal war skeptic could say, “Great! We’ve killed al-Qurayshi! And I noticed we killed him in an air strike. Why do we need 98,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan for an indefinite period to do stuff like that! I’m always hearing how great these drone strikes are for harassing al-Qaeda in Pakistan — where they largely are, by the way, even if a couple dozen of them are in Afghanistan — and they don’t require a big on-the-ground presence. So doesn’t this mean we should just draw down to a more sustainable force posture? If, as you write, al-Qaeda is rather peripheral to the Taliban these days, and al-Qaeda is the entire point of the Afghanistan war, then doesn’t it represent strategic drift to focus so heavily on the Taliban? I mean, even if we actually do all of the things that a years-long resource intensive counterinsurgency actually promises — and good luck with that — what will that actually mean for the fight against al-Qaeda?”

And if what we’re talking about is Obama’s relationship with his base, a different response from Notional Liberal War Skeptic might just as well be, “Wait. Who?“