[Recently, American
officials have also expressed heightened fears about an emerging Qaeda
affiliate in Syria; prison breaks in Pakistan, Libya and Iraq that have set
free hundreds of potential terrorists; an apparent inability to arrest Libyan
suspects indicted in connection with the lethal attack on the American mission
in Benghazi last year; and a new sanctuary in southern Libya for extremists
across North and West Africa. “Terrorists now have the largest area of safe
haven and operational training that they’ve had in 10 years,” John E.
McLaughlin, a former deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency, told a security
forum in Aspen, Colo., last month.]
By Eric Schmitt
 |
Yahya Arhab/European Pressphoto Agency
Yemeni security forces and barriers blocked access to the
United States Embassy
in Sana on Sunday. The embassy remained closed even as other
Middle East
diplomatic outposts reopened.
|
WASHINGTON —
American diplomatic outposts reopened throughout the Middle East on Sunday,
easing the sense of imminent danger that has preoccupied the Obama
administration since it learned of a possible terrorist attack from
communications between two high-ranking officials of Al Qaeda two weeks ago.
But the one embassy that
remained closed — in Sana, the capital of Yemen — underscored the challenges
President Obama faces in trying to wind down the nation’s decade-long campaign
against Al Qaeda and its affiliates, and reshape the nation’s counterterrorism
strategy.
In response to the
latest threat, the United States has unleashed a barrage of drone strikes in
that impoverished country, but it is unclear to what extent it has reduced the
persistent and deadly threat from an increasingly decentralized Qaeda
organization. The United States has carried out nine strikes in Yemen since
July 28, broadening its target list beyond the high-level leaders it has always
said are the main objective of the attacks.
Senior American
counterterrorism and intelligence officials say the lack of certainty about the
effectiveness of the latest drone strikes is a sobering reminder of the
limitations of American power to deal with the array of new security threats
the turmoil of the Arab Spring has produced. These doubts come even as
lawmakers in Washington debate whether to restrict the surveillance activities
of the National Security Agency. And Yemen is not their only concern.
Recently, American
officials have also expressed heightened fears about an emerging Qaeda
affiliate in Syria; prison breaks in Pakistan, Libya and Iraq that have set
free hundreds of potential terrorists; an apparent inability to arrest Libyan
suspects indicted in connection with the lethal attack on the American mission
in Benghazi last year; and a new sanctuary in southern Libya for extremists
across North and West Africa. “Terrorists now have the largest area of safe
haven and operational training that they’ve had in 10 years,” John E.
McLaughlin, a former deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency, told a security
forum in Aspen, Colo., last month.
Mr. Obama acknowledged
these challenges at his news conference on Friday, noting that while Al Qaeda’s
core leadership in Pakistan had been “decimated,” the terrorist organization
has “metastasized into regional groups that can pose significant dangers.” He
insisted that this development did not contradict his assertion in his May
speech that the struggle against terrorism had fundamentally changed. In that
speech at the National Defense University, he offered a path to wind down the war
against terrorists, a campaign against a lethal yet less able network of
regional Qaeda affiliates launching “periodic attacks against Western
diplomats, companies and other soft targets.” He also warned of homegrown
extremists like the Tsarnaev brothers who are accused of carrying out the
Boston Marathon attacks.
Mr. Obama also said in
May that targeted killing operations needed to be tightly limited.
The United States
carries out strikes only against terrorists who pose a “continuing and imminent
threat” to Americans, he said, and only when it is determined it would be
impossible to detain them, rather than kill them. But the increased reliance on
drones in Yemen suggests the limit of the resources the United States can
employ in combating the new threats.
A senior American
official said over the weekend that the most recent terrorist threat “expanded
the scope of people we could go after” in Yemen.
“Before, we couldn’t
necessarily go after a driver for the organization; it’d have to be an
operations director,” said the official, who like others spoke on the condition
of anonymity to discuss delicate intelligence issues. “Now that driver becomes
fair game because he’s providing direct support to the plot.”
Senior American
intelligence officials said last week that none of the about three dozen
militants killed so far in the drone strikes were “household names,” meaning
top-tier leaders of the affiliate, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. But the
American official said the strikes had targeted “rising stars” in the Yemen
network, people who were more likely to be moving around and vulnerable to
attack. “They may not be big names now,” the official said, “but these were the
guys that would have been future leaders.”
Yet just how effective
the strikes have been is unclear. In the past several years, the drone strikes
have set off a major public backlash against the United States in Yemen,
Pakistan and across the Muslim world, prompting in part Mr. Obama’s decision to
constrain their use.
The administration has been
criticized by some analysts for overreacting to the threat in Yemen, but
intelligence officials now believe they have evidence that at least one target
was the United States Embassy in Sana.
That is not the only
obstacle American efforts must confront in the aftermath of the Arab Spring.
Security analysts also note that many of the Arab spy services that the United
States relied on in the past in places like Egypt, Tunisia and Yemen have been
upended in the political turmoil, robbing the C.I.A. and American intelligence
of long-trusted allies.
“U.S. intelligence has
drastically lost its influence over Arab intelligence partners as a consequence
of the Arab awakening and, more worryingly, its intelligence probing
capability,” said Magnus Ranstorp, research director of the Center for
Asymmetric Threat Studies at the Swedish National Defense College in Stockholm.
“Without a longer-term U.S. strategy that builds capacity in key countries,
counterterrorism is effectively reduced to tackling the superficial symptoms
and to putting out perpetual terrorist fires,” he said.
But developments in the
past week or so are testing the American ability to respond effectively to the
more diffuse threat, as well as the administration’s strategy to help
strengthen regional allies to fight extremists on their soil so the United
States does not have to send in troops to do so.
Earlier this month,
Interpol issued a global alert asking member countries to help track hundreds
of terrorism suspects who escaped in a wave of prison breaks over the past
month, and requesting assistance in determining whether any of the operations
“are coordinated or linked.”
Al Qaeda’s Iraq
affiliate orchestrated attacks in late July that freed hundreds of inmates from
two prisons in Iraq, including Abu Ghraib, American officials said. A few days
later, more than 1,000 prisoners escaped under murky circumstances at a prison
near Benghazi. In another attack, fighters stormed a prison at Dera Ismail
Khan, just outside Pakistan’s tribal belt, freeing nearly 250 inmates.
“The escapes don’t
dramatically increase the risk to the U.S. homeland, but they illustrate the
difficulty of combating regional Al Qaeda affiliates — both because those
organizations are resilient and U.S. partners are unable to even keep captured
fighters locked up,” said Brian Fishman, a counterterrorism analyst at the New
America Foundation.
Also this month, federal
law enforcement authorities filed murder charges against Ahmed Abu Khattala, a
prominent militia leader in Benghazi, in connection with the attacks on a
diplomatic mission there last Sept. 11 that killed the United States ambassador
and three other Americans.
Roughly a dozen other
militants that the authorities believe joined in the assault have also been
identified, and charges under seal have been filed against some of them,
according to American officials.
Investigators have made
only halting progress on the case, leading some F.B.I. agents in Tripoli, the
Libyan capital, to voice frustration that there have been no arrests so far,
the officials said. Capturing the suspects will most likely require significant
negotiations between the State Department and the Libyan government over who
will conduct any raids and where the suspects will be tried. The military’s
Joint Special Operations Command has drafted plans to capture or kill the
suspects, but for now that option has been set aside, Pentagon officials said.
In the same region, the
United States and its allies are still hunting for Mokhtar Belmokhtar, the
mastermind of the January seizure of an Algerian gas plant that left at least
37 foreign hostages dead, including three Americans.
A potential new center
for Al Qaeda’s operations may be developing in Syria. As foreign fighters pour
into Syria at an increasing clip — now estimated at more than 6,000 combatants
— 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. Mr. Obama acknowledged these emerging threats on
Friday. “We are not going to completely eliminate terrorism,” he said. “What we
can do is to weaken it and to strengthen our partnerships in such a way that it
does not pose the kind of horrible threat that we saw on 9/11.”
