Blind Skies over Afghanistan and Pakistan?

The big headline this past week was President Obama’s announcement at West Point that the United States is drawing down its military presence in Afghanistan to 5,000 ground troops by the end of 2015. Left unsaid by the President, however, was that we’re scaling back substantially on fighting al Qaeda from the skies as well.

As Guy Taylor reports at the Washington Times:

President Obama’s call to cut the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan to 5,000 troops in 18 months will end an era of American drone superiority over the region and jeopardize hard-fought gains against al Qaeda just as the terrorist movement’s original core is rising again, former senior defense officials and national security sources say….

…With regard to drone operations, the heavy U.S. troop presence in northern Afghanistan over the past decade created the logistical capability for sustained cross-border targeting in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas, where more than 250 U.S. drone strikes were reported from 2005 through 2013.

Taylor goes on to relay the concerns of David Sedney, President Obama’s former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Afghanistan and Central Asia, that al Qaeda in the Af-Pak region is regrouping at the same time that we are pulling up stakes on unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) strikes:

What’s particularly disconcerting, Mr. Sedney said, is the manner in which al Qaeda appears to be recovering from gains made by the 2005-to-2013 drone campaign and the 2011 raid that killed bin Laden.

“These strikes were just having a dampening effect. They were not permanently degrading or defeating al Qaeda,” Mr. Sedney said. “Al Qaeda is an ideology, not a core of individuals. The number of attacks is ramping up again. The flow of recruits never stopped; the flow of money has not stopped. A lot of the flow has gone to Syria, but much of that is because al Qaeda leadership in Pakistan wanted it there.”

Is now really the time to degrade this capability, in that part of the world?  Judging from Eli Lake’s reporting at The Daily Beast, the answer would be no:

While it’s true that Osama bin Laden and other top lieutenants were killed in Obama’s first term, it’s also true that the pace of those drone attacks against the extremists in Pakistan have since declined. According to the New America Foundation’s database for drone attacks there have been no drone strikes in Pakistan since December 25, 2013. Reza Jan, an analyst at the American Enterprise Institute’s Critical Threats project, concluded in a paper published Wednesday that the pause in drone strikes in Pakistan has given the Pakistani Taliban a chance to regroup and replenish its leadership ranks. Jan said Maulana Fazlullah, the new chief of Pakistan’s Taliban, has established a haven in Nuristan today. Other reports from the region have said he travels between Afghanistan and Pakistan’s border region with ease.

“I think our intelligence community is very concerned that al Qaeda in northeastern Afghanistan and western Pakistan will grow stronger without pressure being applied to them,” [House Armed Services Committee Vice Chairman, Rep. Mac] Thornberry said.