Ayman al-Zawahiri, Guantanamo, and Fifty Shades of Gray

Reuters reports that al-Qa'ida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri slammed U.S. treatment of hunger striking inmates at Guantanamo Bay and vowed to "free all our prisoners."

Perhaps Zawahiri is feeling a little cocky given the successful jail break in Iraq, and a similar mass escape in Dera Ismail Khan, Pakistan yesterday that freed 250 Pakistani Taliban prisoners.

Or perhaps Zawahiri has been asked to get his comrades out in time for next year's movie version of female-friendly soft-porn/S&M novel Fifty Shades of Grey, which is allegedly the most requested book by the camp's high-value detainees, even more so than the Koran.* (This takes the concept of "make love not war" to a whole new level, I suppose).

Note: This nugget is according to Congressman Jim Moran, so take it with the appropriate-sized grain of salt.

The War of Ideas is hell, but somebody has to fight it!

Al Qa'ida on the Ropes or Reborn?

Two weeks ago, separate from his piece declaring al-Qa'ida in the Arabian Peninsula on the ropes, Peter Bergen wrote that although the Benghazi consulate attack and the Boston Marathon bombing "were victories for 'Binladenism,' the ideological movement that al Qaeda has spawned," al Qaeda itself "is going the way of the VHS tape." Citing the lack of a successful attack in the West since the London underground bombings in July 2005 and the attrition of al-Qa'ida core's leadership due to kinetic CT operations, "Al Qaeda 'Central,' . . . remains on life support."

On Friday Bruce Reidel argued that the jailbreaks in Iraq and the massive influx of jihadists into Syria (and possibly Lebanon) indicates al-Qa'ida's influence is on the rise. Reidel argues that "Syria has become what Afghanistan, Bosnia, and Iraq were to earlier generations of jihadists: the epicenter of global jihad," and Ibrahim Talib of the Center for Strategic Studies in Damascus says there are more than 130,000 foreign jihadists currently fighting in Syria. Even if this number is questionable, if it is even half that, the comparison to Afghanistan in the 1980s and what emerged from that war is sobering. (Reidel also makes an excellent point that the regeneration of al-Qa'ida in Iraq in the wake of the U.S. withdrawal demonstrates the significant danger of the "zero option" the Obama administration has floated for post-2014 Afghanistan).

So who is correct, Bergen or Reidel? Well, both, but Reidel's argument is more pertinent. Whereas Bergen is correct that the al-Qa'ida leadership as it existed on September 2010 has been decimated, it would be dangerous to conclude the War on Terror is over as well. (Stephen Hayes in the Weekly Standard, citing Thomas Jocelyn, suggests the attempt to the conflate the two is a brazenly political move by the Obama administration, but I'll let others decide for themselves the merit of that argument).

Bergen is correct that al-Qa'ida's affiliates haven't struck the west, but the key word may be YET. The network that Bergen calls al-Qa'ida was just a former bunch of ex-jihadists who'd fought in Afghanistan making anti-American declarations in 1998 until they launched the African embassy bombings. This isn't to say it is inevitable that these affiliates will  try to attack the U.S. homeland, only that once upon a time terrorism experts didn't belive al-Qa'ida Core could/would attack us and consequently underrated the organization as a threat with tragic consequences.

If Reidel is correct, even if by some miracle Syria sorts itself out in a way not wholly damaging to U.S. strategic interests, there will be a massive number of combat hardened young men who've sworn loyalty to al-Qa'ida to consider. Again, this isn't to say that direct military intervention is the answer. I think Jocelyn is correct when he notes: "The right course for combating al Qaeda’s aggression, including the appropriate uses of American military force, should be a matter of debate." However, triumphalism about the defeat of al-Qa'ida Core could blunt such a debate and risk a return to a pre-9/11 complacency.

Al-Qa'ida to Target U.S. Allies in Iraq?

In yesterday's Daily Beast, Eli Lake reports on one possible result of al-Qa'ida in Iraq's daring jailbreak from Abu Ghraib that I hadn't considered. Specifically, Lake writes that the Sunni tribal leaders who revolted against al-Qa'ida in 2006 now fear they will now face mass retribution from the jihadists they helped U.S. and Iraqi forces capture during the Anbar Awakening and subsequent Surge in 2007. 

This is a sobering thought, especially the lesson other potential indigenous forces the US wants to use as proxies against al-Qa'ida affiliates may draw from it: if they side against the jihadists, the United States will eventually abandon them just as they did by withdrawing completely from Iraq in 2011 whereas the terrorists will remain. The "decade of war" may have ended for us (likely only in the short-term, however), but it certainly hasn't for al-Qa'ida, and it is our putative allies who will suffer the terrible costs of our irresolution.

Also, Lake quotes an unnamed intelligence analyst who is much more pessimistic about the ability of the U.S. intelligence community to assist the Iraqis in locating the escaped fugitives than DOD spokesman George Little. "We just lost track of everyone we didn't kill who was in al Qaeda during the surge," one U.S. intelligence analyst said. "We don't have the analysts or the human source networks to track these guys." Lake's source added that most of the Iraq analysts have been reassigned to other areas since the US withdrew from Iraq at the end of 2011.

Al-Qa'ida's Ice Cream Social

Forget the heart eating, priest beheading, and book burning.

If you really want to understand the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, you should know that they also sponsor ice cream eating contests for children.

This news comes via a Washington Post report on the al-Qa'ida affiliate's attempt to soften its image and gain more popular support in its struggle against the Assad regime (and every other rebel group in Syria). 

On the one hand, this ranks right up there with Michael Moore's attempt to summarize Saddam Hussein's rule of Iraq through images of a kite festival in his odious Fahrenheit 911. On the hand, however, this is of a piece with previous anecdotes suggesting the ISIL has learned some lessons about the second-order effects of harrassing residents for not adhering to strict Islamic codes. (See previous stories about ISIL's complaint department, and their attempt at stewardship of Syrian resources). That brutality is what backfired on them in Iraq and led to the Anbar Awakening. If so, they may prove more formidable than previous iterations of al-Qa'ida, a scary thought to be sure.

Jihad with a cherry on top, courtesy of al-Qa'ida's Syrian affiliate. (Just don't give them a hard time about the lack of sprinkles . . . )

New Report on Civilian Drone Casualties

Speaking of the New America Foundation, Peter Bergen and Jennifer Rowland report on a leaked internal Pakistani government document on civilian casualties from drone strikes which concludes they are much lower than has often been claimed in Pakistan (i.e. Interior Minister Rehman Malik's claim that 80% of people killed in drone strikes were civilians) but higher than the Obama administration has claimed (i.e. John Brennan's absurd claim in 2011 that "there hasn't been a single collateral death" from drone strikes).

Interestingly, the report finds that the civilian casualty rate has declined over time as both the technology and intelligence-gathering/analysis behind drone strikes has improved. Whereas civilians made up about 20% of the death toll from 2006 to 2009, in 2012 civilians represented only 2% of the total deaths, and thus far in 2013 only one civilian has been confirmed killed.

If accurate, these findings suggest three conclusions:

1. The rhetoric against drone strikes outstrips the reality;
2. Drone strikes have steadily declined from 2010 to the present due to greater discrimination in targeting rather than to public or diplomatic pressure (contra the AP story cited below); and
3. Drone strikes continue to have positive strategic utility (i.e. they kill more terrorists than they create) if signature strikes and "double-tap" strikes are removed from the equation, and if the public diplomacy of drone strikes could be better managed (i.e. don't let Pakistani Islamists like Maulana Sami ul-Haq, leader of the Jamiat Ulama-i-Islam party, claim that drones kill "dozens of innocent people daily" without a response).

The End of Signature Strikes?

The Associated Press, citing statistics from the New America Foundation, reports that "the United States has drastically scaled back the number of drone attacks against militants in Pakistan." Specifically, the CIA is limiting strikes "to high-value targets and dropping the practice of so-called "signature strikes", and has only conducted 16 drone strikes in Pakistan so far in 2013, compared to 122 in all of 2010, 73 in 2011, and 48 in 2012.

The anonymous officials the AP spoke to say this drop is because the CIA was "feeling the drone program may be under threat from public scrutiny" and "as a concession to the Pakistani army." But they also say that the reduced tempo is the result of "concern that civilian casualties were breeding more militants."

If this reduction stems from a sense that we are creating more terrorists than we are killing through drone strikes, however, this suggests the drop in attacks results more from a strategic calculation than in response to external criticism, as the AP's headline suggests. If criticism from Congress or Pakistan alone were the cause of the drop, then how would one explain the consistent drop since 2010?

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."