Al-Qa'ida in Yemen - Up or Down?

Following on the heels of the announcement of the death al-Qa'ida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP)'s second-in-command Said al-Shihri, Peter Bergen wrote on CNN.com that "Shihri's death in the U.S. drone strike is part of [a] larger story of AQAP decline over the past two year."

Bergen goes on to argue that the jihadist group lost all the territorial gains it made during the confusion sewed by Yemen's Arab Spring uprising in 2011, that Shihri was one of more than 30 al-Qa'ida leaders/senior operatives killed by U.S. drone strikes in Yemen in the past three years, and "despite its focus on attacking U.S. targets, AQAP has not tried to attack one since its October 2010 attempt to plant bombs hidden in printer cartridges on cargo planes destined for the United States." He discounts last year's AQAP plot to detonate an underwear bomb on a plane bound for the United States because the operative designated to carry out the attack was working for British and Saudi intelligence.

Because success or failure in counterterrorism is inherently a binary proposition in which infrequent, low probability events still have devastating consequences. Thus, saying a terrorist group is "on the ropes" as Bergen proposes is always an iffy proposition, since it only takes one successful attack to propel them back to the ranks of a significant threat. Bergen is certainly correct that AQAP has declined from its highwater mark two years ago when then-head of the National Counterterrorism Center, Michael Leiter, told the House Homeland Security Committee that AQAP was "probably the most significant risk to the U.S. homeland." But why doesn't the Boston Marathon bombing represent an AQAP operation given that the Tsarnaevs drew their inspiration and technical know-how from Inspire, the group's propaganda materials, which was their intent in publishing the bombmaking recipes/diagrams? And what if AQAP had decided to use another operative besides the mole to conduct the 2012 airplane bombing?

Regarding that intercepted plot, the head of the U.S. Transportation Security Administration, John Pistole, provided new details regarding the bomb at the Aspen Security Forum last week. Perhaps more important than the technical details of the explosive device was Pistole's revelation that Ibrahim Hassan Asiri, the feared-AQAP bomb maker behind the 2009 Underwear Bomber and the printer cartridge bombs, "has unfortunately trained others" in making bombs sophisticated enough to avoid detection.

Pistole describes Asiri as "out greatest threat," and Bergen that as long as he remains at large AQAP is a threat. Until Asiri and his proteges are apprehended or killed, I think it would be foolish to let up in our efforts to combat AQAP.

Update: Although the Yememi government has generally been a reliable ally in the fight against AQAP, news that they released a journalist accused of collaborating with al-Qa'ida isn't a reassuring sign.

AQAP master-bombmaker Ibrahim Hassan al-Asiri, called by some "the most dangerous man in the world."