"We Got the Operational Guys We Were After"

ABC News reports that an American drone strike has killed four suspected al-Qa'ida operatives associated with the threat that prompted the closing of U.S. embassies in the Middle East and North Africa.

U.S. officials said they believed the original threat was a possible vehicle-borne bombing attack against the U.S. Embassy in Sana'a, which remains the only embassy still closed.

The U.S. official who was ABC's source said there currently was no information to substantiate the claim that AQAP bombmaker Ibrahim Hassan al-Asiri had been wounded in a recent drone strike, although the AP reported that there have been nine drone strikes in Yemen since July 27 that have killed 38 suspected militants.

Today in Manhunting History -- August 14, 1998: Targeting Bin Laden for the First Time

On Friday, August 14, 1998, a week after the bombings of the U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, CIA Director George Tenet delivered to the NSC the CIA’s formal judgment that Osama bin Laden was responsible. Tenet began his presentation of the CIA and FBI’s investigation by stating: “This one is a slam dunk, Mr. President,” a phrase he would infamously repeat nearly five years later to a different president. Although the embassy attacks clearly constituted an act of war against sovereign U.S. territory, there was no serious discussion of a broad U.S.-led military campaign in Afghanistan.

Within days of the attacks the CIA received a report that senior leaders of terrorist groups linked to bin Laden had been summoned to a meeting on August 20 at the Zawhar Kili camp complex roughly seven miles south of Khost in eastern Afghanistan. The intelligence indicated that bin Laden himself would be present. Tenet called this information “a godsend. . . . We were accustomed to getting intelligence about where bin Laden had been. This was a rarity: intelligence predicting where he was going to be.” The principals quickly reached a consensus on attacking the gathering, with the objective of killing Osama bin Laden.

Former CIA Director George Tenet

Catching Up With . . . Joseph Kony

Okay, not really, as unlike Seif al-Islam Gaddafi, nobody has any clue where the leader of the Lord's Resistance Army is right now.

However, on Friday a bipartisan group of 23 senators urged President Obama to continue the manhunt for the fugitive war criminal/child kidnapper/slaver/elephant poacher.

In April Ugandan and U.S. Special Operations Forces suspended the hunt for Kony was suspended because rebel leaders who had seized power in the Central African Republic were refusing to cooperate with Ugandan troops pursuing the fugitive warlord in that country. Deputy Secretary of Defense Ash Carter held closed door meetings with Ugandan Army officials in Kampala two weeks ago, and the Ugandan People's Defense Force is in talks with the CAR government to resume the hunt.

Given the DepSec Carter trip, and the fact that Samantha Power chose Invisible Children (the group responsible for the #Kony2012 campaign that went viral)'s Leadership Summit to make her first speech since being confirmed as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, it is doubtful the Obama administration is actually considering ending the U.S. advisory mission.

Because you have to be a really bad guy to get bipartisan agreement on anything these days!

Catching Up With . . . Seif al-Islam Gaddafi

When last we checked in on Seif al-Islam Gaddafi, son and once heir apparent of the Libyan dictator, he had been captured after a firefight in Southern Libya while trying to flee to Niger on November 19, 2011. He was subsequently flown to the town of Zintan in the western Mountains of Libya to be detained until he could be tried either by the International Criminal Court in The Hague or by the new Libyan government in Tripoli.

Seif al-Islam after his capture in November 2011.

So whatever happened to Seif al-Islam? Not much, apparently. As Reuters reported two weeks ago, he is still being held in Zintan by local forces who insist he must be tried in Libya, but don't trust the central government to do the job. Zintan's leaders say that if the Tripoli government isn't able to fix the security problems in the capital and fix its "corruption", they will bring Gaddafi to trial themselves before a revolutionary court. Until then, Seif al-Islam is "just like any other prisoner," with air conditioning, a television, time for reading, and time spent "outside in the sun."


Christian Caryl's piece in ForeignPolicy.com on the dispute is also worth the read, and provides some more details about his capture by a Zintani militia.

Yusuf Islam: Touring Brazil in November 2013

Seif al-Islam: No current plans to travel

AQAP Bombmaker Asiri Wounded in Drone Strike?

The Washington Free Beacon (citing a Yemeni news outlet) is reporting that Ibrahim Hassan al-Asiri, the AQAP bombmaker who has been called the most dangerous man in the world, was wounded in a recent drone strike in Yemen:

A Saudi national known to be a key al Qaeda bomb maker was wounded during a U.S.-led drone strike in Yemen, according to a Yemeni news report.

Ibrahim al Asiri, the bomb maker, was targeted during a missile strike launched from a U.S.-operated armed drone in southern Yemen that killed two other al Qaeda terrorists, the online Yemeni news outlet Al Watan reported Sunday.

A U.S. official had no public comment but urged caution regarding claims that al Asiri was dead.

The drone attack took place in Yemen’s southernmost Lahij Governorate that borders the Gulf of Aden. Covert, U.S. military-operated drones carried out the strike. The United States operates a drone base located in southern Saudi Arabia.

There have been nine drone strikes in Yemen since July 27, which according to the AP, have killed 38 suspected militants.

This is very good news, if true, but should be taken with a grain of salt, as the Drone Wars abound with premature reports about the demise of targeted individuals, and Asiri himself was reported to have been killed before in 2011, only to emerge unscathed.

Stay tuned . . . 

Has the U.S. finally hit the "Most Dangerous Man in the World"?

Is Syria an Extremist Haven or Not?

On Friday, Anne Barnard and Eric Schmitt of the New York Times reported that "As foreign fighters pour into Syria at an increasing clip, extremist groups are carving out pockets of territory that are becoming havens for Islamist militants, posing what United States and Western intelligence officials say may be developing into one of the biggest terrorist threats in the world today." The counterterrorism officials cited on background say that say there are more than 6,000 foreigners fighting in Syria [Note: Two weeks ago I cited an article in the Atlantic that claimed there were 130,000 foreign jihadists in Syria. That number seemed high at the time, and the lower, more recent number is likely more credible] and that these jihadists are streaming into Syria in even greater numbers than went into Iraq at the height of that insurgency.

So this is a significant problem, right?

Not necessarily, says former CIA officer and current Georgetown/Brookings Institution scholar Paul Pillar, in a response in The National Interest. Pillar argues that physical safe havens are overrated, claiming "a patch of physical real estate has not proven to be one of the more important variables determining the degree" of threat a terrorist group poses. He then goes on to specifically question what practical good any U.S. intervention in Syria would have. And finally, he concludes by arguing against the kinetic element to the U.S. War on Terror, saying that we should shift this effort over to local proxies. Instead, we should focus on working to weaken the extremists' narrative . . . specifically, by forcing Israel to make a peace deal with the Palestinians.

Let's briefly take these points on one-by-one. First, I get what Pillar is trying to say about the fungibility of safe havens (i.e. if we drive them out of Afghanistan, they move to Iraq; if we drive them from Iraq, they move to Yemen, etc) and the globalization of terrorism. But to date, all of the significant, high-casualty terrorist attacks in the West involved either travel and training by the jihadist operatives to an al-Qa'ida or similar extremist-controlled safe haven such as the terror training camps in Afghanistan that were instrumental to the planning/training for the 9/11 attacks. The most dangerous plots in the intervening decade have involved training in Pakistan's tribal areas, or the construction of explosive devices/distribution of propaganda from AQAP's sanctuary in Yemen. Although it is true that eliminating one sanctuary does not preclude the establishment of another somewhere else, the senior leaders and experienced bomb makers we worry most about have been proven less effective if they are constantly on the run from one safe haven to another.

Pillar does raise some important points regarding whether a limited U.S. intervention can be strategically effective, and if, in fact, we wouldn't be better off with Assad in power rather than any ungovernable mess that might result from the fall of the Alawite-Ba'athist regime in Syria. As Barnard and Schmitt note, many of the Free Syrian Army leaders have, out of necessity, had to fight alongside with many of the al-Qa'ida affiliated groups we fear in Syria. Thus, there is no assurance that weapons delivered intending to help the "good" rebels won't end up in the wrong hands.

But this furthers a point I've made several times before, which is that the Obama administration's strategic paralysis at the front-end of the conflict has drastically constrained our strategic options so that there are few, if any, good options left. As Barnard and Schmitt note:

It was fear of militants coming to dominate the opposition that caused the United States and its Western allies to hold off providing lethal aid to the Syrian opposition, at least until now. But as a result, counterterrorism analysts say, they lost a chance to influence the battle in Syria. Even Congressional supporters of the CIA's covert program to arm moderate elements of the Syrian opposition fear the delivery of weapons, set to begin this month, will be too little, too late.

Pillar may be right that there is no good option on Syria at this point, but recent history shows that leaving a conflict to sort itself out (i.e. Afghanistan after the Soviet withdrawal) poses its own risks.

I also agree with Pillar regarding the importance of shifting a significant portion of the fight against al-Qa'ida's affiliates to local proxy forces, with U.S. drone strikes or SOF raids only being used on rare occasions against strategic jihadist leaders. However, one of the great paradoxes of the War on Terror has been that by empowering local leaders to fight al-Qa'ida or other militants within their borders through training, arms sales, and intelligence support, it also becomes more difficult to get them to enact the political/economic reforms Pillar believes are necessary to mitigate the "exploitable grievances in a target population" that give rise to jihadist groups. It is easy to say we should chose strategies designed to eliminate local grievances, it is much harder to walk the policy/cultural tightrope to effect these changes in a government fighting for its survival and that we have agreed is critical to our fight against al-Qa'ida.

Which brings us to Pillar's last point. I appeared on a panel with Paul back in 2011, and during a breakout session we got into a heated exchange over his insistence that the way to defeat al-Qa'ida was to force Israel to sign a peace agreement with the Palestinians because it is "the most salient issue to people across the Middle East." I challenged him to name a single time an Israeli concession (i.e. withdrawal from Sinai, withdrawal from southern Lebanon, withdrawal from Gaza, etc.) that had been met with a significant uptick in acceptance of Israel's right to exist in the Middle East. He couldn't. I asked whether Salafist jihadism had been stronger in the Middle East before or after Camp David, before or after Oslo, before or after Ehud Barak's offer at Taba in January 2001. I also disputed whether the Arab intellectuals he talks to at international conferences are necessarily representative of the demographic that volunteers to fight in Afghanistan, Iraq, or now Syria, none of which had anything to do with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

This is not to say that the Israelis will not have to make serious concessions if/when the Palestinian leadership is ready to negotiate and enforce a genuine final status agreement leading to a Palestinian state (that is a whole other topic outside the sphere of this blog . . . ). Yet even if Israel were to concede on every point of contention (i.e. accept the 1949 borders, grant full right of return for all the descendants of Palestinian refugees into Israel-proper), I believe it is naive to think that people who believe the slaughter of thousands of Afghans, Iraqis, Arab Shi'a, and other Arab/Muslim civilian victims of al-Qa'ida-affiliated attacks are Koranically justified won't find some other grievance to justify murder on behalf of their utopian vision of a global caliphate. Unlike Pillar, I believe the jihadists and their supporters would be more inclined to see this as a reason to redouble their efforts than as a reason to stand down.

Two Views on Al-Qa'ida: Reidel and Tankel

In the wake of the recent global terror alert and subsequent closure of U.S. embassies, there has been an understandable flood of pieces analyzing the "state of al-Qa'ida."

Alas, I've been too busy on other projects to link to all of them, but two pieces that merit particular consideration are Bruce Reidel's "The Coming of Al Qaeda 3.0" in the Daily Beast and Stephen Tankel's "Not Another al-Qaeda Article" at War On the Rocks. Both are intelligent and thoughtful, but offer slightly contrasting outlooks on the nature and severity of the challenge al-Qa'ida's various affiliates pose.

Both authors agree that al-Qa'ida (in one form or another) is not going to be defeated anytime soon. Tankel writes: "Jihadist violence will be a feature of the security landscape for the foreseeable future," and Reidel similarly laments: "After 15 years, there is no end in sight to al Qaeda. And the new generation -- AQ 3.0 -- may be with us for years to come."

Where they differ, however, is how significant a threat this new reality poses to U.S. national security. Whereas Tankel notes that "there are rising threats to regional stability [and] U.S. interests" due to the diffusion/decentralization of power to al-Qa'ida's regional affiliates, their rise "does not pose an existential threat to the U.S." Reidel is more circumspect, cautioning: "The new generation of al Qaeda . . . is more focused on the nearby enemy close to home than the faraway enemy in America and Europe. For now at least." [Emphasis added].

I think Tankel is correct to note that making foreign policy wholly subordinate to CT policy is foolish as it risks reinforcing the local conditions that spawn extremism. But to say "We need to realign resources away from targeting al-Qaeda to focus more on broader political and security phenomena" oversimplifies the deep structural problems that many of these countries face (as if we could wave a magic wand and make Yemen economically viable, much less prosperous) as well as the fact that even many middle-to-upper class Muslims truly, deeply believe in the Salafist ideology that is both attractively utopian in its ends (i.e. doing Allah's will by creating a strictly Islamist Caliphate) and desperately nihilistic in its means (i.e. murdering anybody who is perceived as preventing this vision, including the rationalization for killing innocent bystanders).

Unfortunately, I'm afraid Reidel is more realistic in predicting that "The coup in Egypt and the chaotic aftermath of the Arab awakening is only going to add more militants to this army of radicals" by "fueling more anger and frustration in the Islamic world." Yes, these jihadists will concentrate on local conflicts in the near-term that will not directly threaten the U.S. homeland or merit large-scale intervention. But I fear that minimizing the potential of these regional conflicts to serve as incubators for a more direct threat will lead to a repeat of America's counterterrorism miasma in the 1990s, where we mistakenly had a "Vegas strategy" for jihadism: What happens in Afghanistan stays in Afghanistan. That, obviously, turned out to be tragically wrong.

The challenge for the next generation of policymakers will be how to support a wide variety of allies in judiciously conducting these local fights against what Tankel correctly calls "the variegated nature of the jihadist movement," before the threat becomes global.