Spencer Ackerman thinks the Obama administration's Afghanistan review ducks the question of blow back:
'Obamaâ??s summary doesnâ??t address how to mitigate the provocative effects of the war. Its assessment of the war in Afghanistan is cautious and vague â?? although, to be sure, this is just the unclassified version of a longer, secret report, so perhaps thereâ??s more detail in the secret version. But the â??frail and reversibleâ? progress in Afghanistan â?? giving the Taliban a bloody nose in Kandahar, training Afghan soldiers and cops â?? is said to set the stage for starting to draw down NATO combat forces from 2011 to 2014. And that doesnâ??t mean an end to the war. The summary explicitly points to â??NATOâ??s enduring commitment beyond 2014.â? What effect that will have on future Faisal Shahzads goes unaddressed.'
It's a good question. On the one hand, continuing to bomb Afghanistan (and Pakistan) runs the risk of generating more ill-will and more recruits for the Taliban and/or al-Qaeda. In this sense, NATO strategy could easily be stuck in a terrible feedback loop (if it isn't already): we bomb insurgent targets (even those strictly affiliated with al-Qaeda), passions are aroused, new fighters join the fray, those fighters are bombed, and around and around we go.
On the other hand, how much can the U.S. really opt out of this feedback loop? Imagine a dramatically scaled back effort that sees the U.S. and NATO not only draw down most of its combat troops from Afghanistan but also limit its drone strikes to very "high value" and hard to reach targets. Presumably this would still enrage future Faisal Shahzads, would it not? Even at a sharply reduced rate, news of drone strikes in Pakistan's tribal area would still leak out to the wider Muslim world.
Mind you, I think the U.S. would be better served scaling back its effort in Afghanistan and reserving drone assassinations for truly high-value al-Qaeda targets. But I think we have to acknowledge honestly that there's a trade-off. One strategy courts higher short-term risks in the hopes of reversing the longer-term radical tide. The other strategy - the one in which the U.S. is currently pursuing - tries to minimize short-term risks arguably at the cost of enhancing the longer term threat. It's not an easy set of trade offs to make.
[Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan]