Al-Qaida and the Taliban: Knowing Your Enemy

In this picture taken 25 January 2006,a Pakistani tribesman carries an AK47 assault rifle as he...

In this picture taken 25 January 2006,a Pakistani tribesman carries an AK47 assault rifle as he stands inside his collapsed house after a 13 January, US air strike in the remote village of Damadola, at Bajur tribal agency bordering Afghanistan. Senior al-Qaida leaders are forging deeper relationships with Pakistani militants and often operating from their camps inside the Pakistan border, fueling Obama administration arguments for a shift in the Afghan war strategy that more narrowly targets the terrorists.

(Tariq Mahmood/AFP/Getty Images)

Senior al-Qaida leaders are forging deeper relationships with Pakistani militants and often operating from their camps inside the Pakistan border, fueling Obama administration arguments for a shift in the Afghan war strategy that more narrowly targets the terrorists.

For eight years since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the U.S. has focused mostly on Afghanistan's Taliban as an unabashed ally of al-Qaida.

Now, however, forced to choose between sending more troops in an intensified counterinsurgency campaign against Afghanistan's Taliban or largely maintaining troop levels and using more drone strikes to take out al-Qaida along the border, U.S. officials must first determine which enemy is the greater priority.

That dilemma is complicated by the recent rise of a Pakistani faction of the Taliban that operates in close proximity with al-Qaida — even as al-Qaida has lessened activities with its former Afghan Taliban hosts, according to some administration officials.

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U.S. officials face a tough challenge in dissecting the structure and leanings of the militant organizations on both sides of the often indiscernible Afghanistan-Pakistan border, and understanding their murky and evolving ties to al-Qaida.

"You cannot meaningfully distinguish between al-Qaida and the co-linked (militant) networks — either in terms of understanding the landscape or crafting a policy response," said Vahid Brown, a researcher at the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point.

"If you think you can kill al-Qaida leaders, as opposed to doing a broader scale effort against the militant environment, that notion is based on a fundamental misapprehension of the nature of the terrain," said Brown, describing the complexity of the networks along the border and their threat.

With concerns about Pakistani militants growing, an influential faction inside the administration that includes Vice President Joe Biden is pushing for the U.S. to concentrate more on al-Qaida and less on the Afghan Taliban.