US
escalates war against al-Qaeda in
Yemen By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - Increasingly worried that
al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) is taking
advantage of the growing political chaos in Yemen,
the Barack Obama administration has tasked the
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to use drone
missiles to strike at suspected AQAP militants.
The move, which was reported in Tuesday's
Wall Street Journal and Washington Post, marks a
major escalation in Washington's fight against the
group, which is widely considered the most
threatening to the US homeland of all of
al-Qaeda's affiliates.
Until now, US
strikes against suspected militants in Yemen have
been conducted by US military forces under rules
of engagement that are more restrictive than those
that the CIA has used in its
drone program in Pakistan.
The new program will be modeled on the CIA's
operations in Pakistan, which has killed some
1,400 suspected al-Qaeda and Taliban militants,
according to the Journal.
As it has in
Pakistan, however, a more-aggressive CIA-directed
drone program could well provoke anti-Americanism
in the population, according to several experts
here.
"It is highly likely amid the chaos
in Yemen that the blowback from relying on "death
from above" will drive more recruits into AQAP and
wipe out any small tactical gains," noted Ken
Gude, managing director of the national security
program at the Center for American Progress on
Tuesday.
"The best way to blunt AQAP
advances is to help resolve the political crisis
in Sana'a as rapidly as possible," he added.
That political crisis, which began with
student protests in January and evolved
increasingly into a power struggle among elite
factions, intensified dramatically over the past
month when fighting between forces loyal to
President Ali Abdullah Saleh and those allied with
the powerful al-Ahmar family brought the country
to the brink of civil war.
Since the June
3 assassination attempt against Saleh and his
subsequent evacuation for urgent treatment of his
wounds in Saudi Arabia, however, the warring
parties have abided by a shaky ceasefire in the
capital and Vice President Abed Rabbo Mansour
al-Hadi, with the help of diplomats from the Gulf
states and the US, has sought to calm tensions.
Hadi met Monday for the first time with
representatives of the opposition.
Washington, which was slow to distance
itself from Saleh - in part because of his
general, if at times grudging, cooperation with US
counter-terrorism efforts, has supported a plan by
the Saudi-led Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) under
which he would give up the presidency in exchange
for immunity from prosecution.
The
administration clearly hopes that Saleh, whose
injuries appear to have been much more serious
than first reported, will now be prevailed upon to
acquiesce in the proposed deal - which he backed
out of three times before - and resign. But with
his son and nephews still ensconced in the
presidential palace and at the head of elite
military units, US officials are worried that the
danger of all-out civil war remains a distinct
possibility.
Amid all the turmoil of the
past several months, however, the government has
lost control of much of Yemen's territory, and the
resulting power vacuum has enabled AQAP, as well
as various other Islamist and tribal groups, to
expand their influence in different parts of the
country.
Indeed, as Saleh's position in
the capital eroded over that time, he diverted his
elite counter-terrorist units to Sana'a to protect
the regime against its foes - much to the
disappointment of the US, which has spent well
over US$300 million on training and equipping them
over the past five years.
"The operating
space for al-Qaeda is getting bigger and bigger,"
according to Christopher Boucek, a Yemen
specialist at the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace. "As the state's authority
recedes, the space for al-Qaeda to plot, plan, and
mount operations is getting larger."
Washington is particularly concerned about
recent advances by Islamist forces, some of whom
are believed to be linked to AQAP, in the southern
part of the country close to the Gulf of Aden,
particularly in Abyan province, where they
reportedly seized control of two towns, including
the provincial capital, Zinjibar, late last month.
It is in this context that the
administration has reportedly given the go-ahead
for the CIA, operating in close coordination with
the US Joint Special Operations Command that has
trained and worked with Yemeni counter-terrorist
units for several years, expand the current drone
program to kill suspected AQAP militants.
Implicated in three attacks on US
territory - the killing by a US Army major of 12
people at Fort Hood, Texas, in November 2009; the
foiled Christmas 2009 airliner bombing over
Detroit; and the aborted US-bound cargo aircraft
bombing last October - AQAP is regarded as the
most dangerous of all al-Qaeda affiliates.
Washington has used drones against targets
in Yemen in the past, most notably in 2002 when it
struck a car transporting a senior al-Qaeda
official.
In December 2009, a US cruise
missile presumably fired from a naval vessel
killed 52 people, most of them women and children,
in what the Saleh government initially claimed was
an attack on a suspected AQAP training camp in
Abyan.
Six months later, another strike,
reportedly by a drone, mistakenly killed the
deputy governor of Maarib province, Jaber
al-Shabwani, his family, and aides who were on a
mediating mission with a tribe in an area where
AQAP was active.
Since the May 2 killing
in Pakistan by US Special Operations Forces of
al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden, drones have
reportedly been used in several attacks against
AQAP suspects in Yemen, including at least one
attempt on Anwar Awlaki, a prominent
Yemeni-American preacher.
According to the
Journal, the current military-run program targets
only individuals that are known AQAP or affiliated
militants. Under the criteria used by the CIA in
Pakistan, however, targets can be selected by
their "pattern of life"; that is, if their
activities, as recorded by persistent
surveillance, are consistent with those of AQAP
militants. The Journal also reported that the CIA
intends to coordinate closely with Saudi
intelligence officers who are believed to be more
knowledgeable about Yemen.
All of that
worries Gude, who noted the "real potential for US
air strikes to either be misdirected or explicitly
manipulated by local groups to target rivals". The
mistaken strike that killed al-Shabwani, he added,
provoked his tribe to retaliate by destroying a
critical oil pipeline that has still not been
repaired.
"Every time civilians are
killed, you almost always do more harm than good,"
agreed Carnegie's Boucek. "You turn off the Yemeni
people from wanting to cooperate; you turn off the
government, because it looks like they're
facilitating it. It breeds further radicalization
and makes it appear that Americans only care about
terrorism, which is a pretty small issue compared
to the challenges that Yemen faces and that lead
to state failure or collapse," he added.
Jim Lobe's blog on US foreign
policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.
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