Why defeat ISIS but not the Taliban?

Similarly, in Feb. 2011, he told Fox news host Bill O’Reilly that “I can say we will defeat al Qaeda and that the Taliban will not be retaking Afghanistan.” Note the careful phrasing: it would have been easier, simpler, and stronger to say “defeat al Qaida and the Taliban,” but he went out of his way to separate the two groups and construct an awkward sentence to avoid saying that the United States is committed to “defeating” the Taliban. The New York Times reported back in 2012 that one of the reasons the president had a difficult relationship with the military was that “Mr. Obama concluded that the Pentagon had not internalized that the goal was not to defeat the Taliban,” (an issue I blogged about at the time).

To give credit where it is due, we should of course recognize that the president is right to differentiate between al Qaeda and the Taliban. They are different groups with different goals — the Taliban have always been more locally-focused than al Qaeda. And it is true that the U.S. should not lump all jihadist groups together and treat them as a monolith, nor assume that one tactic — say, drone strikes — is the right tool to use against all of them. Frankly, some jihadist groups (Boko Haram comes to mind) are barely relevant to U.S. national security.

But if Boko Haram is on one end of the spectrum of relevance to the United States and al Qaeda is on the other, the Taliban plainly are far closer to al Qaeda. Of all jihadist groups in the world, the Taliban have been the most intertwined with al Qaeda, the most directly responsible for the latter’s operations and continuing success in South Asia, and the one most likely to continue its relationship with al Qaeda if given the chance.