This article by David Axe, Malou Innocent, and Jason Reich at Foreign Policy is pretty much* spot on. The Taliban, either Afghan or Pakistani, are not a security threat to America on their own—they have neither the capacity nor the will to strike at American interests. But al-Qaeda has proven itself capable of accomplishing horrific acts.
It makes sense, then, that our mission in AfPak focuses on eliminating al-Qaeda. We should capture or kill Bin Laden and Zawahiri, make sure that other core al-Qaeda figures are similarly incapacitated, and get out. Spending tens of billions a year on trying to build a modern, functioning state in Afghanistan is a fruitless task, one which America can’t afford regardless of whether it could be successful in accomplishing the task (something I highly doubt). Fighting a homegrown Pashtun insurgency isn’t worth the effort—aside from the terrorist threat, America has no interests in Afghanistan. There is no renewed Great Game (and if there is, it’s more north and northwest than Afghanistan). And the withdrawal of thousands of American troops will ratchet down the temperature in the region.
*Pretty much, because their Somalia analogy totally omits the fact that the Transitional Federal Government controls only a few blocks of Mogadishu and basically none of the south or west of the country. Furthermore, al-Shabbab are an element of the ICU that was not reconciled to the TFG in January, when President Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed took power. There is a possibility (probability?) that some hardcore Taliban fighters would reject any power-sharing agreement, and would continue their struggle, just as al-Shabbab has.
