THE PLANK JANUARY 4, 2010
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Good WSJ story on how al Qaeda operatives migrate away from U.S. military pressure, always finding the next safe haven:
U.S. and allied-government officials have claimed significant progress against al Qaeda in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq recently. But the group appears able to nimbly deploy forces to places where international military pressure isn't as concentrated or has eased, including most recently Yemen and Somalia, according to officials and analysts.
Arab intelligence officers say they have tracked foreign fighters allied with al Qaeda traveling from one Mideast battlefield to another -- in particular from Iraq to Yemen, and, over the summer, from Pakistan to Yemen....
The global network "moves to the weakest point," says Mustafa Alani, director of security and terrorism studies at the Dubai-based Gulf Research Center, a think tank. "In Yemen, they have found opportunity."
Obama has his hands pretty full right now just responding to this new threat. But at some point I'd like to see him explain whether and how it affects his thinking about going big in Afghanistan. You can make the case that it only raises the stakes in our larger confrontation with al Qaeda. But there's also a strong argument suggesting that we just can't win this fight through major military action, and all those billions of dollars are better spent on surveillance, drones, and counter-terror training for local forces. I still haven't quite made up my own mind.
Any bets on whether Obama would have made a different AfPak decision had Abdulmutllab popped up a few weeks earlier?
4 comments
There's been concern that Yemen's President Saleh would just use any counter-terrorism funding to crack the heads of separatists. I hope we track use of these funds closely, and if this turns out to be the case, eliminate counter-terrorism aid to them.
- Juniper
January 4, 2010 at 10:05am
Obama clearly knew about Al Qaeda's presence in Yemen and about the "whack-a-mole" situation well prior to the Abdulmutallab incident. So there is no reason to think his "Afpak decision" would have been different had that incident occurred earlier. That said, it has never been clear to me why we should not approach Al Qaeda's presence in Afghanistan in the same way we approach it in Pakistan and Yemen. I think it probably is a function of the fact that we are already in Afghanistan militarily, and that the optics of pulling out or immediately dialing back are simply unacceptable from the perspective of international and domestic politics.
- dhurtado
January 4, 2010 at 10:52am
This is a central problem that our system is very ill-equipped to address. Al Qaeda and it's spinoffs act much less like a government or even a traditional armed nationalist group like the IRA or ETA, and much more like a set of affinity groups or even a globalized free-market model (firms gravitate towards regions with low labor costs -- AQ gravitates toward areas with little to no government). We are always fighting the AQ that did the last action, not the AQ that's planning the next one. My hope is that Obama understands that -- he's of the generation that has experienced more networking, less hierarchical work relationships, dealing with a more uncertain kind of reality, and other phenomena of the last 20 years. But we have huge a military complex that sees the world in traditional terms (even if there are also bright people like Petraeus and McChrystal) and a kind of peculiar American dislike of intelligence work. One thing that disappoints me about our intel and covert ops responses is that we don't seem to have been able to run interference on these online imams and other inspirational recuriters for AQ. We should be faking and confusing the whole landscape of online Islamic "advice" and "guidance" so that these guys are no longer trusted.
- ironyroad
January 4, 2010 at 1:30pm
Irony, right, Al Qaeda is in a sense a registered trademark whose franchisees freely use the name, regardless of their initial connection to bin-Laden and al-Zawahiri. Though in this case, as two of the four leaders were former Guantanamo detainees they may have been close to or received training from the original founders.
- Juniper
January 4, 2010 at 1:38pm