Yemen's chaos is good news for Al Qaeda

[Guest guest]

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Yemen's chaos is good news for Al Qaeda

With Yemeni forces diverted to protect President Ali Abdullah Saleh's

beleaguered regime, U.S. spying and special military operations have suffered.

As result, Al Qaeda has had more opportunities to recruit and plot attacks.

By Ken Dilanian, Los Angeles Times

June 3, 2011

Reporting from Washington— The escalating violence in Yemen is hampering

critical U.S. counter-terrorism operations and has given Al Qaeda's most active

affiliate increased opportunities for recruitment and plotting, current and

former U.S. officials warn.

Yemeni forces trained by the U.S. to help hunt Islamic militants have been

diverted to protect the beleaguered regime of President Ali Abdullah Saleh,

making it more difficult to support American spying and special military

operations. At the same time, the U.S. has been forced to evacuate nonessential

personnel from its embassy in the capital, Sana.

" The trends are strongly negative, " Edmund Hull, U.S. ambassador to Yemen from

2001 to 2004, said Thursday. " The government is in chaos and Al Qaeda's

operating space has expanded. "

Yemen is the first nation caught up in this year's series of peaceful and

violent uprisings across the Middle East where Al Qaeda appears to be gaining

from the turmoil, experts said.

The rising chaos in Yemen after nearly four months of mostly peaceful street

protests has become a growing worry for Washington. President Obama's top

counter-terrorism advisor, Brennan, is visiting the region this week to get

a handle on what the White House called " the deteriorating situation in Yemen. "

Saleh has reneged on deals brokered by regional leaders and U.S. Ambassador

Gerald M. Feierstein to secure a peaceful end to the Yemeni president's nearly

33 years in power, a tenure marked by a separatist rebellion in the south, a

Shiite Muslim insurgency in the north and the emergence of an Al Qaeda faction

with global reach.

On Thursday, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney again called on Saleh " to

begin the process of transferring power immediately. We continue to call on his

government to cease and desist from using violence against peaceful protesters.

And we remain very concerned about what's happening there. "

Reports that Al Qaeda fighters have seized cities in recent days are

" overblown, " U.S. officials said. Militants who have captured the southern port

of Zinjibar are more likely local Islamists, said , Middle East

director for the National Democratic Institute, a nonpartisan U.S. organization

that works to support political and civic groups in Yemen.

But in the destitute, desolate land that was the ancestral home of Osama bin

Laden, Al Qaeda doesn't need to hold territory to plan attacks, analysts say.

" It's the classic safe haven objective, " said Hull, " trying to re-create a

situation similar to what they had in Afghanistan. "

Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the terrorist network's Yemeni branch, has

emerged since 2008 as the most significant threat with attempts to stage attacks

on American soil, overshadowing branches in Pakistan and elsewhere, U.S.

intelligence officials have said.

On Christmas Day 2009, for example, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a Nigerian,

attempted to detonate explosives in his underwear aboard a Northwest Airlines

jet over Detroit. The Yemeni group later said it was responsible for the bungled

bombing, describing it as revenge for U.S. support for a Yemeni military

offensive against Al Qaeda.

The Al Qaeda affiliate also claimed responsibility in October after U.S. and

allied intelligence services, acting on a tip, helped find mail bombs that were

disguised as ink toner cartridges aboard FedEx and UPS cargo planes headed from

Yemen to the United States.

Last month, less than a week after Navy SEALs killed Bin Laden in Pakistan, U.S.

forces in Yemen fired a missile from a drone aircraft that targeted, but failed

to kill, one of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula's most influential leaders,

American-born cleric Anwar Awlaki.

The U.S. government forged its close partnership with Saleh's authoritarian

regime after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, chiefly to gain support for

counter-terrorism operations in a strategically important nation that borders

critical waterways and the key oil-producing state of Saudi Arabia.

Over the years, U.S. special operations troops have been deployed to Yemen in

growing numbers to train Saleh's security forces and to help hunt Al Qaeda

militants. The CIA also has built close ties to the country's intelligence

service, known as the Political Security Organization, or PSO, officials say.

But according to U.S. Embassy cables recently released by the website WikiLeaks,

the PSO has been infiltrated by Al Qaeda supporters and sympathizers over the

last decade. U.S. officials have also warned that Yemeni security forces have

repeatedly orchestrated terrorist attacks within Yemen in order to manipulate

domestic and foreign perceptions about Islamist dangers.

In a country riven by tribal rivalries, Saleh's regime has been buffeted by

months of protests and high-level defections by army commanders and other senior

officials. The last two weeks of violence between government troops and armed

tribesmen and other factions represents a sharp expansion of the conflict, and

threatens to push the impoverished nation into civil war.

" The state's authority is starting to melt away, and it's those undergoverned

spaces that Al Qaeda is going to seek out to plot, plan, train and mount

operations, " said Boucek, a Yemen expert at the Carnegie Endowment

for International Peace, a nonprofit think tank based in Washington.

The unrest hurts U.S. counter-terrorism efforts because it limits cooperation

from Yemeni government officials, said Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at

town University. A U.S. counter-terrorism official said those efforts are

continuing.

" The fact that the Yemenis are distracted by internal unrest doesn't help, " said

the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized

to discuss sensitive intelligence matters. " But it doesn't mean that joint

counter-terrorism cooperation with Yemeni authorities has stopped entirely. "

About 250 to 300 people are believed to be members of Al Qaeda in Yemen, said

Barbara Bodine, the U.S. ambassador to Yemen from 1997 to 2001. For religious

and tribal reasons, Yemen is not as hospitable an environment for Al Qaeda as

the Pashtun areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan, she said.

Nevertheless, the U.S. has made little headway in finding the group's leaders.

Al Qaeda bomb maker Ibrahim Hassan Asiri, for example, whose fingerprints

reportedly were found on the explosive devices used in the Christmas Day 2009

" underwear bomb " and the 2010 parcel bombs, remains at large.

Hull, the former ambassador and author of " High-Value Target: Countering Al

Qaeda in Yemen, " said Al Qaeda may find fertile ground for growth if Yemen slips

further into civil warfare.

" I have not seen Al Qaeda in Yemen have as a strategy taking and formally

controlling specific areas, " he said. " Rather, what I would expect is that they

would just take advantage of the lack of government presence and authority and

chaos and operating space so that they can carry out their objectives against

us. "

U.S. options for reversing the situation in Yemen are limited, analysts said. A

campaign of drone airstrikes, like the covert CIA war against militants in

northwestern Pakistan, is not feasible because U.S. intelligence does not have

the network of informants needed to pinpoint targets and support the attacks,

analysts say.

" What you need to do is get beyond this impasse and get to a post-Saleh era in

Yemen, " Hull said. " I hope it happens sooner [rather] than later because time is

not an ally here. The longer it takes to do that, the more ungoverned space Al

Qaeda will have occupied. "

Copyright © 2011, Los Angeles Times

[Guest guest]

So has been the case in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, and it will be elsewhere. It is believed that Al Qaeda pillaged Libyan military stores for chemical weapons and other things shortly after the uprising began. Also, their political backers like the Muslim Brotherhood seem to be coming out well in the power struggles in Egypt at least.

In a message dated 6/2/2011 10:04:23 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time, no_reply writes:

With Yemeni forces diverted to protect President Ali Abdullah Saleh's beleaguered regime, U.S. spying and special military operations have suffered. As result, Al Qaeda has had more opportunities to recruit and plot attacks.