CIA: Al Qaeda in Arabian Peninsula Most Urgent Threat
An article in Tuesday’s Washington Post discussing the U.S. response to the AQAP threat:
The sober new assessment of al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen has helped prompt senior Obama administration officials to call for an escalation of U.S. operations there – including a proposal to add armed CIA drones to a clandestine campaign of U.S. military strikes, the officials said.
Proponents of expanding the CIA’s role argue that years of flying armed drones over Pakistan have given the agency expertise in identifying targets and delivering pinpoint strikes. The agency’s attacks also leave fewer tell-tale signs. “You’re not going to find bomb parts with USA markings on them,” the senior U.S. official said.
I’m not sure how much it really matters that missiles and bombs used to target AQAP leaders and other al Qaeda operatives cannot be definitively identified as being deployed by American drones versus Yemeni military aircraft. As we noted in our report on the AQAP threat and our Are We Winning? Mid-Year Update, we should probably keep in mind that regardless of the level of traceability, deniability, or what have you, al Qaeda will use missile strikes, as they have previously, as propaganda tools to turn public opinion in Yemen and other places across the Muslim world against the United States and its allies.
When something blows up in Yemen and no one is sure who did it, it is probably fair to say that the U.S. is going to be suspected and duly demonized whether the bomb parts have USA on them or not. Whether propaganda coups for al Qaeda are acceptable consequences of U.S. counterterrorism efforts in Yemen are a matter of some debate, but we probably shouldn’t pretend that we deniability is something that we can really count on as realistically working in our favor.
From the same article re: the importance of targeting Awlaki:
“The other leaders of AQAP are predominantly Yemenis and Saudis, and their worldview and focus is on the peninsula,” said the U.S. counterterrorism official. Aulaqi “brings a worldview and focus that brings it back here to the U.S. homeland.
It’s interesting that here we’re talking about how locally focused most of AQAP’s leadership is , which I’m not sure is really true given past statements that seem to point in the opposite direction, as part of the logic for targeting Awlaki. It’s as if we’re assuming that these alleged divergent focuses within AQAP – near enemy focus versus far – are set in stone and that if we kill Awlaki the U.S. focus will somehow diminish. Doesn’t it make sense to also consider that targeting Awlaki or other al Qaeda figures through drone strikes ala Pakistani tribal areas could potentially lead those other supposedly locally-focused leaders to become as U.S.-focused as Awlaki?
I’m not saying that I have a better solution to reducing al Qaeda’s presence and influence in Yemen, but I think it might be misguided to take this drone-as-a-scalpel sort of metaphor too far. Droning Awlaki might solve some problems, but we should definitely consider the possibility that it will also make some new ones. Whether we want to acknowledge it or not, our actions are going to have repercussions that may develop out of our control. It is important that we balance our kinetic operations against that reality to ensure that in trying to eliminate a problem, we are not taking major steps toward exacerbating it.
