Bruce Riedel, the Afghanistan-Pakistan policy coordinator on Obama’s National Security Council, stresses that Al Qaeda's growing cooperation with the Afghan Taliban, the Pakistani Taliban, Lashkar-e-Taiba, and other like-minded groups is the most dangerous development in the effort to reduce global terrorism. “The notion that you can somehow selectively resolve the Al Qaeda problem while ignoring the larger jihadist sea in which [Al Qaeda] swims has failed in the past and will fail in the future,” Riedel argues.