The rise of AQAP dissected

[davidbfpo]

Within the media furore over a potential attack are many questions, within this NYT piece on the situation in the Yemen Gregory Johnsen rightly asks:

If the Obama administration is confident that its strategy in Yemen is correct, then why is Al Qaeda growing in Yemen and why is the group still capable of forcing the United States to shut down embassies in more than a dozen countries?

Link:http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/06/wo...pagewanted=all

[Bob's World]

The reality is, and always has been, that AQ is largely moot. They threaten us, they even attack us, but they are not, and have never been a "threat" to us.

More accurately they have been a ringing claxon, a loud, clear metric that US foreign policy for the Middle East has been growing increasingly out of date since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

This does not mean that we should ignore them, but we certainly need to put them in a fresh perspective that recognizes that chasing the symptoms of problems is kind of like putting one of those pine tree deodorizers in an outhouse. At some point you are going to have to deal with the real problem down below where the stench is radiating from. For the US, that problem is a foreign policy designed for the Cold War to both prevent Soviet influence over the region, while at the same time fostering stable economic conditions. The go to move for creating those conditions was to put in place, or simply work to sustain in place those leaders who were willing to sign up for the US agenda.

At some point the people of the region fell out of the equation. Not a big problem when they could rationalize that the US version of external influence was probably far less offensive than what the Soviets would offer, and definitely less offensive than what the Europeans and Ottomans had dished up for so long. But then the Soviets collapsed, and the threat of their influence along with them. At the same time the revolution in information technology informed and empowered the people of the region in a way that had never been seen before. Suddenly the people were in the equation in an unprecedented, and they didn't like the math others were doing for them.

AQ simply exploits this unrest that is so widespread across the greater Middle East. They also exploit the widely held perception that US influence is wielded in inappropriate ways and to inappropriate degrees. The people of the region also tend to believe that this influence is an obstacle, rather than an enabler, to getting their own governments to listen to them and be willing to adopt reasonable changes through means short of revolutionary insurgency. So they listen to AQ.

But when reasonable ways are denied, people will turn to unreasonable ways to address these types of fundamental grievances. People will also accept help from anyone willing to offer it. Insurgency makes for strange bedfellows. Enter AQ and bin Laden. Working with AQ does not make one AQ any more than working with Russia made North Vietnamese Russian, or that working with France made Americans French. We exaggerate that connection due to the nature of the legal authorities and CT focus we apply. We have canalized our thinking to fit our tools.

As to "AQAP," this is simply one localized mix of nationalist insurgents and AQ UW providers taking physical sanctuary in the most logical place to do so in the region. If this conglomeration of insurgents from several nations and their AQ facilitators appears to be growing, it is because the problem is growing. We can add more deodorizers, or we can start shoveling manure.

The good news is that Arab Spring is scaring these governments to action. Equally, when the US did not offer carte blanche support to Mubarak it sent a frightening message to the remaining autocrats as well. But the people are restless and motivated by the changes occurring around them. Small bribes and increased security will likely prove inadequate to the task of preventing Arab Spring revolutions from continuing to spread. Efforts by the US to slow that spread serve primarily to increase the popular perception that the US enables governments to resist change. It also serves to validate AQ's message. It is counter productive to our ends.

We should take growing AQAP activity as a clear metric that KSA is closer to going from a suppressed insurgency to an active one. We should take it as a metric that the solution we imposed upon Iraq was a tactical one designed for what we thought would be best for us, and that a true solution is one the people of the region are not done acting out to achieve. We should take it as a metric that Yemen is far from getting to an acceptably sustainable system of governance simply by the change of one man. We should take it that Jordan is doing better than most, but quite possibly not enough, particularly with the stress of Syrian refugees and Israel as neighbor adding to their internal challenges.

I see glimmers of light in many of the recent policy decisions made by the Obama administration. But we lack a comprehensive vision and plan for the complete overhaul of how the US secures and services it interests in the region in the modern and evolving strategic environment. We are reacting rather than being proactive. Our policy, diplomacy and security efforts are all in the reactive mode. We run from fire to fire, wondering how it started and how to best put it out, or if we should just let it burn.

The worst thing we could do is to ID AQAP as a new focal point for increased CT and partner security force capacity building. But that is the tactically logical move, and that is what our current doctrine and plans tell us to do. To become more strategically sound we will have to act tactically illogical. That is politically very hard to do unless you can explain why and how you are doing what you intend to do.

We lack that how and that why.

[Bob's World]

And yet the problem continues to grow...

4. U.S. Authorized Series Of Drone Strikes In Yemen
Unclear whether move disrupted terrorism
By Greg Miller, Anne Gearan and Sudarsan Raghavan
Washington Post
The Obama administration authorized a series of drone strikes in Yemen over
the past 10 days as part of an effort to disrupt an al-Qaeda terrorism plot
that has forced the closure of American embassies around the world, U.S.
officials said.
The officials said the revived drone campaign - with four strikes in rapid
succession - is directly related to the emergence of intelligence indicating
that al-Qaeda's leader has urged the group's Yemen affiliate to attack
Western targets.
... A few dozen U.S. Special Operations forces have been stationed in Yemen
since last year to train Yemeni counterterrorism forces and to help pinpoint
targets for airstrikes against al-Qaeda targets in the country. The U.S.
military carries out drone strikes in Yemen from its base in Djibouti, while
the CIA flies armed drones from a separate base in Saudi Arabia.
The CIA and the U.S. military have carried out 16 drone strikes in Yemen
this year, according to the New America Foundation, which monitors the drone
campaign. Last year, a record 54 strikes occurred.

I can not help but visualize a Ranger Instructor in the face of some poor, lost, sleep deprived patrol leader, yelling "Ranger, are you as F'd up as you want to be"?