Yemen is the New Black! Posted by Michael Cohen

 . . . or perhaps I should say Yemen is the new 40! Or maybe it's the must have of the Spring War season. One might even say that Yemen is "The Situation." 

The bottom line is that Yemen is hot and everyone wants a piece of it!

 

Frances Townsend is so enamored with Yemen, she wants to go in and "clean it up" unless they take care of their terrorism problem! The time for polite diplomacy is over she sternly adds, proving that women can engage in the same sort of mindless and irresponsible "flag" waving that men have been engaging in for years. Susan B. Anthony would be proud. 

56% of Fox News watchers probably can't find it on a map, but no matter; they want to invade Yemen!

But over at the LA Times, Richard Fontaine and Andrew Exum have really upped the ante:

The goal of U.S. foreign policy toward Yemen should be for the country to emerge as a stable, functioning state, one that presents no sanctuary for transnational terrorist groups. U.S. policy alone can't bring this about. It can, however, attempt to mitigate the worst of the coming challenges that will plague Yemen. 

This task will not be achieved easily, quickly or inexpensively, and the use of force alone won't be sufficient. Any effective strategy must combine security assistance with mediation efforts, development, regional engagement and an effective communications approach.

I suppose it can be considered progress that Exum and Fontaine don't believe that the use of force "alone" will be sufficient. Small victories, I suppose. Now truth be told, I know next to nothing about Yemen, so I have no idea if Exum and Fontaine's overall suggestion in this article that Yemen is facing disaster is accurate.

 

But here's something I think I do know: the United States has little capacity or inclination to turn Yemen into a stable and functioning state. So no matter what our "goal" for Yemen might be, the ability of the United States to realize that aspiration is, how shall we say, limited. Indeed, Exum and Fontaine argue,

"No amount of foreign assistance will cure Yemen's deeply entrenched economic, social and political problems. Yet in light of our compelling national interest in avoiding a failed state in Yemen, the United States has reason to devote even greater resources to the effort than it does today."

Why? 

Why should we devote more resources to a country that we barely understand; that has myriad economic, social and political problems; that is run by a unaccountable and corrupt dictator; and where our interests and capabilities are quite limited. Above all, why should we devote more resources when even the authors acknowledge that it won't cure Yemen's problems? (Just for shits and giggles can you imagine the response an op-ed in the LA Times would receive if it counseled sending more American taxpayer dollars into a domestic program that had limited chance of success! Ah, but I digress!)

 

I suppose I can see the benefit in increasing security assistance to the Yemeni government in cracking down on al Qaeda cells there, but to be honest not knowing enough about Yemen's internal politics - and the potency of the AQ presence there - I'm dubious about whether such a plan is really in US interests. After all it's not al Qaeda in Yemen has demonstrated any sort of potent capabilities, except for an unusual focus on bombs placed in male groin areas.

And I do really need to point out that immersing the United States in another downtrodden Islamic state and allying ourselves with yet another corrupt Arab dictator has the potential to create unforeseen consequences and produce a backlash against an interventionist United States, which of course is what motivates our terrorist enemies in the first place?

The simple fact is that no matter how "hot" Yemen might be today, the United States does not have a Yemen problem. We have a homeland security problem and we have an intelligence sharing problem.. One might actually think that making harder for folks like Abdulmutallab to get in the country in the first place would be a more productive use of taxpayer dollars then the uncertain and strategically limited goal of turning Yemen into a stable state (with the recognition that it ain't easy to bat 1000). And each of the domestic areas I've identified has the added benefit of being a problem that we might be able to solve; as opposed to seeking out another unstable Islamic country to try and stabilize. I mean imagine if we took all the money we've spent on fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan against phantom terrorists and actually focused it on improving our homeland security?

But look, as a wise man once wrote no one ever went broke in DC suggesting that the US has fewer not more strategic interests. 

How to Revive Obama's Middle East Policy? Some Responses. Posted by Shadi Hamid

Last month, an article of mine on Obama’s (faltering) Middle East strategy came out in Democracy: A Journal Ideas, which prompted some insightful responses in the blogosphere. Jim Arkedis of progressivefix and friend of DA seemed to like it. The Cairo-based Boursa Exchange (TBE), on the other hand, wrote a longish critique. A couple of their points are worth flagging.

In the article, I criticized the Obama administration for cutting assistance to Egyptian NGOs. As I argue toward the end of the piece, civil society assistance has too often been used as a sort of default policy stand-in, in the absence of bolder, more effective strategies. Increasing civil society assistance in the Arab world might very well be the most regurgitated, unimaginative policy proposal at our disposal. TBE argue that “democratization aid tends to go toward things like workshops to teach people about democracy and paying native English speakers to write the reports about how money is being spent that funders demand.” Too often, this is true. But I’m more concerned with what the reduction of assistance says about our priorities in Egypt. Budgets, after all, speak louder than words.

And there are ways to make U.S. civil society assistance more effective. Depending on how you define terms, the Muslim Brotherhood is arguably the largest civil society organization in the Arab world, with a vast, interlocking network of hospitals, clinics, mosques, schools, foundations, boy scout troops, and day care centers in numerous countries. Those that argue that the Muslim Brotherhood is an anti-democratic organization - and therefore uncivil - are a bit off the mark. For instance, he Islamic Action Front, the political wing of the Jordanian Brotherhood, might very well be the most democratically run political party in the Arab world. Even the Egyptian Brotherhood, which is less democratic, is still more internally democratic than most of its secular counterparts.

As I note, however, the State Department’s Middle East Partnership Initiative (MEPI) has an informal ban on funding Brotherhood-affiliated organizations in Egypt and has not allowed Brotherhood leaders to participate in conferences that receive MEPI funding. This led to me to suggest the following: “As a simple first step to remove such hurdles, Secretary Clinton should issue a directive explicitly permitting all State Department employees to meet with and incorporate members of Brotherhood in their programming.”

TBE write “but we also think it quite simplistic when writers claim that regimes in the region use the Palestinian issue to focus citizens’ anger away from the regimes’ own misdeeds. It has been our experience that people (not just in the Middle East, but everywhere, if you can imagine) are perfectly capable of denouncing injustice abroad without forgetting about injustice at home.” I don't believe I made any such claim, although it is, in general terms, an accurate one. There’s only so much one person can be angry about, particularly when it’s much more practical for the average Egyptian to become angry about Israel than to become angry about domestic politics. The former is permitted, sometimes even encouraged, while the latter can land you in jail. I think I know which one I’d choose. 

TBE then go on to critique the two policy “pillars” that I recommend for U.S. policymakers – “positive conditionality” and Islamist engagement: “We don’t find the idea of positive conditionality likely to be implemented.” Neither do I. That’s why I wrote the article.

Later: “Hamid presupposes that the Brotherhood wants to talk to the US.” This is not a presupposition or even a supposition. A number of Brotherhood leaders and officials have explicitly told me that they want to talk to the U.S. Of course, the conditions have to be right. But the desire is there. To some extent, it’s already happened in isolated instances, informally and off-the-record, sometimes through interlocutors and other times directly. More generally, the Egyptian Brotherhood, in recent years, has devoted increased attention and resources to reaching out to Western audiences, and in particular the policy community. In 2005, the Brotherhood’s Guidance Bureau, the organization’s top decision-making body, launched an internal initiative under the title “Re-introducing the Brotherhood to the West.”

In a section called “our solutions,” TBE say “the most important thing US-based democracy-in-Egypt-supporters could be doing right now is voicing full-throated support for a settlement in Palestine.” Well, this is precisely what I argue against in my article. Democracy has been held hostage to the peace process long enough. How much longer should we wait? What if a peace settlement is finally signed 30 years now? Are Egyptians supposed to wait 20 years for their freedom, and why should Egyptians wait for Palestinians to form their own state, before they can control their own?

Fortunately, the U.S., can walk and chew gum at the same time (although, in practice, this hasn’t always been evident), by supporting the peace process while simultaneously having a more assertive pro-democracy posture toward its autocratic allies, who, in any case, haven’t made for great allies.

The new Burj Dubai Posted by Shadi Hamid

Because what Dubai needs is another really, really tall tower...

Obama the Counter-Insurgent Revisited Posted by Michael Cohen

Over at the Plank, Isaac Chotiner is concerned that Obama is taking his own rhetorical prowess too seriously:

[Obama] is committed to taking aggressive actions to disrupt terrorist cells, aides said, but he also considers his speech in Cairo to the Islamic world in June central to his efforts to combat terrorism. “If you asked him what are the most important things he’s done to fight terrorism in his first year, he would put Cairo in the top three,” Rahm Emanuel, his chief of staff, told me.

Really? This is called putting too much faith in the power of your own words.

Actually, I think Obama is 100% correct about this - and it gives me an opportunity to revisit one of my favorite blog posts ever. It's the one I wrote back in June after the President's Cairo speech in which I argued that by speaking to the Muslims as equals and partners; by pledging even-handedness on Israel/Palestine and by arguing that Arab regimes must create political space for Islamic movements, the Cairo speech was an extremely effective counter-insurgent approach to dealing with Al Qaeda. 

Of course, in fairness to Isaac there is the whole issue of follow through . . . and there is certainly room for criticism on that front.

Read the whole thing here:

Afghanistan Mission Creep Revisited Posted by Michael Cohen

For some reason, the Washington Post buried Rajiv Chandrasekaran's barn-burner of a piece about the disconnect between the civilian and military leadership on Afghanistan the day after Xmas.  It's worth a re-examination because it speaks to the strategic disconnect that amazingly still defines US policy in Afghanistan:

Nearly a month after Obama unveiled his revised Afghanistan strategy, military and civilian leaders have come away with differing views of several fundamental aspects of the President's new approach. 

What is perhaps most shocking is that we are seeing a bizarre repeat of the situation that played out in the Spring with the civilian and military side having two very different views of what counter-insurgency means:

During a videoconference two days before the speech, Obama made it clear to McChrystal and U.S. Ambassador Karl W. Eikenberry that he did not want the additional troops to fuel a broader mission. Speaking to both men from the White House Situation Room, the president told them not to deploy the forces to areas they would not be able to transfer to Afghan security forces by July 2011, according to two senior officials with knowledge of the conversation.

Obama's essential instruction was, according to one of the officials, "Don't bite off more than you can chew. The strategy has fundamentally changed. 

"This is not a COIN strategy," Vice President Biden said on MSNBC last week, using the military's shorthand for counterinsurgency. "This is not 'go out and occupy the whole country.' "

Ok, that all seems well and good, but no one seems to have gotten the memo to the generals:

Although Pentagon strategists and McChrystal's advisers in Kabul are looking at how they can fulfill the White House desire for a less extensive mission, military officials said they are reluctant to strip too much away and weaken an approach that has come to be revered within the ranks as the only way to suppress guerrilla movements.

Reluctant to do what the President had told them to do! Who's in charge here?

Military officials contend that McChrystal does not harbor expansionist aims. They note that he has begun removing troops from remote mountain valleys and concentrating resources on a modest number of key population centers. But the approach in those areas will involve counterinsurgency tactics: Troops will focus on restoring normal patterns of life by trying to keep the Taliban at bay, helping the Afghan government provide basic services to the population and training local security forces.

McChrystal's plan, the senior Pentagon official said, "is still counterinsurgency, regardless of the various agendas people are trying to spin."

How does this keep happening? How is it possible that a mere month after the President concluded a serious review of Afghan policy - and announced a new policy - we have the Vice President saying we're NOT doing COIN and a senior Pentagon officials saying that we ARE doing COIN? Seriously, how is that possible?

Part of the problem is what seems like a real breakdown of the civil-military relationship. The generals seem to be carrying out their own tactical approach in Afghanistan; one that in very significant places is at odds with what the President has decided. For example, if the President told Eikenberry and McChrystal not to deploy forces "to areas they would not be able to transfer to Afghan security forces by July" why was the first military mission post-surge to send troops to Helmand Province? And why are there plans in works for a more significant intervention there when more US troops arrive? Does anyone seriously believe that the US will be able to begin transferring responsibility to the Afghans in Helmand in 18 months? If Obama's message to the military was don't bite off more than you can chew, why are American forces trying to pacify Helmand - a goal that has eluded ISAF and US forces for much of the Afghan conflict.

But it's not all the fault of the military. By trying to be too cute by half on the question of troop withdrawals the White House has left the door open for the military to interpret the mission in their own way:

The ambiguity over the meaning of the July 2011 deadline has generated uncertainty over the president's intent. "Is the surge a way of helping us leave more quickly, or is the timeline a way to help win support for the surge?" asked a senior Democratic staff member in Congress. "Which is the strategy and which is the head-fake? Nobody knows."

 

One senior military officer in Afghanistan said he and his fellow soldiers "don't know if this is all over in 18 months, or whether this is just a progress report that leads to minor changes." "Until they tell us otherwise," the officer said, "we're operating as if the latter is the policy." Although senior-level civilians in the administration emerged from the review process thinking the mission had been circumscribed, senior military officials continue to have a different view. The result, as they see it, is that the White House has embraced McChrystal's original plan.

Like many, I read Rory Stewart's brilliant piece in the New York Review of Books where he offers cautious praise for Obama's approach in Afghanistan. The problem, however, is that wars are not fought in august academic journals - they are fought on the ground and are dependent on the tactical decisions made by commanders. For all the moderation of Obama's speech, which Stewart rightfully praises, in the month since that speech was delivered we are seeing repeated examples of serious disconnect between what the President declared at West Point and what is happening on the ground in Afghanistan. For example: 

• The Pakistanis have made clear that they have no interest in cracking down on Afghan Taliban safe havens in their midst - a key element of the President's plan.    

• The Afghan government lacks the capabilities or inclination to properly support the US mission there.   

• The President's goal of having 30,000 troops in Afghanistan by the middle of 2010 is a pipe dream.   

• There are serious impediments to a true civilian surge in Afghanistan.

And now we read that the military is operating under a very different time frame and tactical approach than the White House. The question now is whether the President and the civilian leadership will be able to ensure that they and the military are on the same page - or more important that the military will do what is has been ordered to do.

If the mission creep we saw this summer -- which led the President to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan - is any indication, my confidence is not high.

Did Al-Qaeda Ever Matter as Much as We Think it Did? Posted by Shadi Hamid

Marc Lynch has a post well worth reading on the Al-Qaeda’s diminishing influence in the Arab world:

The Arab media's indifference to the story speaks to a vitally important trend. Al-Qaeda's attempted acts of terrorism simply no longer carry the kind of persuasive political force with mass Arab or Muslim publics which they may have commanded in the immediate aftermath of 9/11.

It’s not so much that al-Qaeda is irrelevant – it isn’t – but, rather, that it is, and has increasingly become, beside the point. Having lived in Jordan in 2008 and now in Doha, it’s really quite remarkable the extent to which al-Qaeda doesn’t figure into Arab conversations about the future of the Arab world. Except it’s not remarkable.

Al-Qaeda was never the threat some thought it was, and others wanted it to be. Al-Qaeda was never going to become mainstream, because other organizations, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, that were strong opponents of al-Qaeda were already quite popular, commanding the loyalty of millions in the region. These were the mainstream, nonviolent Islamists, and it was never coincidental that Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda’s no. 2, had written an entire book accusing the Muslim Brotherhood of betraying the Islamic cause by, among other things, participating in elections.

To be sure, Al-Qaeda certainly gained some sympathy in the years after 9/11, largely due to the perception that they were the only ones actively confronting the United States. But sympathy is different than support, and al-Qaeda could never really claim much of the latter. But then again, it was never al-Qaeda’s objective to gain mass support or become what might be called a membership organization. It’s model has always been different, to use small numbers for big effect, and, in this, there is little doubt they succeeded, at least for a time.

What people seem to forget is that al-Qaeda wasn’t influential for what it was – or perhaps even what it did – but, rather, for how others reacted to it, namely the Bush administration.

The Sad and Predictable Ending to the Nisour Square Tragedy Posted by Michael Cohen

The last hours of 2009 brought with it the quite unsurprising dismissal of charges against five Blackwater guards charged in the killing of 14 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad's Nisour Square in September 2007. I say unsurprising because for those of us who followed this case closely it has always had the odor of politics around it - and the chances of a successful prosecution seemed far-fetched at best.

First, there was the obvious and seemingly insurmountable jurisdictional challenges. The five BW guards were immune from Iraqi law and so instead were charged under the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act (MEJA). Yet it was far from clear that the law could even be applied to the defendants. Indeed, I had long assumed that the case would be thrown out because of jurisdictional issues and the lack of a clear and identifiable legal framework with which to charge the defendants. 

Putting aside the legal questions, the challenge in assembling evidence and witnesses as well as convincing a jury to pass judgment on a firing decision made by individuals who believed they were under attack was always going to be a hard bar to surpass. As my good friend Tara Lee (with whom I've appeared on more PSC-related panels than seemingly imaginable) always reminds me, juries generally don't like to second guess the split-second decisions made in the heat of war. 

Finally, there was the issue of statements given by the five men to the State Department's Bureau of Diplomatic Security in the days after the shooting. The contractors were required to give the statements, but with the understanding that they could not be used in any prosecution against the men. There was always a question as to how DoJ was going to get around that issue, but as it now seems clear, they didn't even bother to try. 

As Judge Ricardo Urbina's ruling makes clear DoJ prosecutors actively used statements by the defendants, given after immunity was provided, as a tool for building a case against them:

In their zeal to bring charges against the defendants in this case, the prosecutors and investigators aggressively sought out statements the defendants had been compelled to make to government investigators in the immediate aftermath of the shooting and in the subsequent investigation. 

In so doing, the government’s trial team repeatedly disregarded the warnings of experienced, senior prosecutors, assigned to the case specifically to advise the trial team . . . that this course of action threatened the viability of the prosecution. The government used the defendants’ compelled statements to guide its charging decisions, to formulate its theory of the case, to develop investigatory leads and, ultimately, to obtain the indictment in this case. The government’s key witnesses immersed themselves in the defendants’ compelled statements, and . . . these compelled statements shaped portions of the witnesses’ testimony to the indicting grand jury. The explanations offered by the prosecutors and investigators in an attempt to justify their actions and persuade the court that they did not use the defendants’ compelled testimony were all too often contradictory, unbelievable and lacking in credibility.

But the level of misconduct gets worse. DoJ lawyers also withheld exculpatory evidence from the grand jury suggesting that the BW guards believed that they were under attack when they opened fire and prosecutors distorted versions of the statements offered to jurors. 

Quite simply, the level of misconduct detailed in this ruling is shocking. The constitutional rights of the defendants were trampled over in what appeared to be an overzealous and deeply improper prosecution. I realize that no many progressives are going to shed tears for the ill-treatment of five Blackwater guards; but they should be outraged nonetheless - prosecutorial misconduct is prosecutorial misconduct, no matter who is the defendant.

Indeed, it is hard not to come to the conclusion that this entire case was politically charged from the outset; an effort on behalf of DoJ (which for years had simply failed to pursue charges of private security contractor misconduct) to show solidarity with an Iraqi government outraged by the incident and demonstrate some "toughness" against much maligned contractors like Blackwater.

Of course, the real victims here are not the now exonerated Blackwater guards - they are the 14 Iraqis killed and more than three dozen wounded in Nisour Square. For them there will be no justice. I don't know what happened that day in Nisour Square. The military concluded that the BW guards acted with malice; the guards claimed they were under attack by insurgents and responded accordingly. I have no idea where the truth lies, but because of actions taken by the USG we will never know the real answers. 

And to be sure the blame is not solely applied to DoJ lawyers. What about the State Department, which allowed BW to operate as private security guards in Iraq with no clear legal framework, conducted poor oversight of them and ignored repeated warnings of aggressive behavior by Blackwater employees and actual incidents of misconduct? What about DoD and its refusal to protect US diplomats, forcing State to rely on private contractors for security?  What about DoJ for failing to prosecute a single private contractor under existing legal frameworks contributing to a culture of impunity for contractors in Iraq? What about the CPA for granting full immunity from Iraqi law to private contractors? What about Congress for failing to provide proper oversight of the USG's burgeoning use of contractors in Iraq or even updating legal frameworks to cover the actions of these private actors (to this day, Congress has still not amended MEJA to ensure that contractors working for State Department are covered by it)? 

The list goes on; and it's indicative of the complete failure of the US military and State Department to fully contemplate - before going to war - the challenge of placing hundreds of thousands private contractors in the midst of an active war zone. After the Balkans, in which the ratio of contractors to soldiers was 1:1, the proliferation of private contractors in Iraq should have been a surprise to no one - and yet across the board, the USG was simply unprepared. The fact that DoD is now showing significant improvement in managing and overseeing contractors is a positive sign, but it hardly washes away the sins of the past 6 1/2 years.

In the end, the Nisour Square incident - and the dismissal of charges against BW guards - is a sad and tragic coda to the war in Iraq. Like the larger US conflict there, the use of contractors of Iraq is an embarrassing tale of mismanagement, incompetence, malfeasance and an abdication of responsibility across wide swathes of the US government.

Realism and "Regime Change" in Iran Posted by Shadi Hamid

The problem with realist analyses of international affairs is that it’s not always clear when the descriptive ends, and the prescriptive begins. I usually think this after reading Stephen Walt's posts on Iran. See, for instance, this post from a couple days ago. In a different post from last month, Walt, interestingly, says he’s torn on whether a change in regime in Iran would be a good thing. He says it most certainly would, from a human rights perspective:

Judged on purely human rights grounds, a more democratic and/or liberal government would clearly be preferable.

And then the “but” comes. He removes moral considerations and looks at the question from the standpoint of American interests. As much as it might give us emotional satisfaction, a democratic Iran – with the consent of its people, it would be more effective in channeling its human capital – would be a more powerful Iran. And a more powerful Iran would probably cause us a number of problems.

This type of arbitrary extraction of human rights from interest-based assessments has always struck me as a bizarre way of looking at how American interests are furthered. This, I suppose, is the realist proclivity for compartmentalization, for separating interests from ideals, as if the latter has no bearing on the former. I don’t know if Walt’s actually saying that we should think twice about promoting even peaceful reform in Iran or simply engaging in a counterfactual exercise, but, if it’s the former, it represents a rather myopic way of thinking about U.S. foreign policy.

First of all, the argument he presents – that we should be careful what we wish for, because democratic governments will be more able to oppose U.S. policy – isn’t very convincing even on its own terms. We have at least one example of a previously authoritarian country that democratized significantly in the Middle East: Turkey (one could perhaps add Iraq to this list). Turkey sometimes says “no” to America, as it should, and this, of course, sometimes causes us difficulty. But the Turkish government – an Islamist one no less – continues to have a strong pro-U.S. orientation. Moreover, the very fact that Turkey is both democratic and Islamist-leaning - these two features are correlated - is what gives the current Erdogan-led government the legitimacy and regional credibility to plan an increasingly influential role that U.S.-backed autocracies, such as Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, appear either unable or unwilling to play.

Taken to its logical conclusion, the reasoning in Walt's post – that dictatorships, by virtue of their authoritarianism, are weaker and easier to manage – has provided the implicit and explicit justification for more than five decades of destructive American policies in the Middle East, not just destructive to Arabs and Muslims, but destructive to us and our interests (we helped create a Middle East uniquely consumed with inordinate amounts of instability, political violence, sectarianism, and religious extremism). Doesn't seem very realist to me.

Things That Make You Go Hmm . . . Posted by Michael Cohen

So perhaps I spoke a bit too soon a few days ago when I said that the dots on Abdulmutallab were not bright enough for the intelligence community to connect. When intel folks pick up leaders of an al Qaeda branch in Yemen talking about a "Nigerian" being prepared for a terrorist attack . . . how does that not affect aviation security screening?  At the very least if attention was being paid to Nigerian passengers the fact that Abdulmutallab paid for his ticket in cash and had no checked luggage would, one might think, lead to a more thorough search.

Frankly, I don't blame Obama for being pissed about this . . . or pissed about this report from CNN:

The father of terrorism suspect Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab talked about his son's extremist views with someone from the CIA and a report was prepared, but the report was not circulated outside the agency. Had that information been shared, the 23-year-old Nigerian who is alleged to have bungled an attempt to blow up a jetliner as it was landing in Detroit, Michigan, on Christmas Day might have been denied passage on the Northwest Airlines flight.

Now I don't if this story is bulletproof, but if it's true it's far too reminiscent of the missed opportunities and lack of shared information that predated the 9/11 attack. How can this still be happening 8 years after September 11th? And how can Republicans with a straight face blame the Obama Administration exclusively for this failure?

In other news, it now appears that Abdulmutallab was recruited in London by al Qaeda and traveled to Yemen for training and to receive explosives. It's difficult to draw broad conclusions from this information, but a few things jump out to me. It's interesting that no one is talking about Afghanistan/Pakistan here, which bolsters the argument, oft heard during the Afghanistan policy debate, that al Qaeda has become a far more franchised organization. Certainly, the AQ training camps in the FATA should be of great concern (as the Zazi arrest showed), but clearly AQ can operate effectively elsewhere. 

Second, Abdulmutallab seems more like an easy recruit than necessarily an effective terrorist operative. As a Nigerian - and the scion of a wealthy family - he seems less likely to attract attention as a possible al Qaeda operative. I wonder if this speaks to AQ's recruiting challenges or perhaps that they are looking for potential operatives who are less likely to draw scrutiny from security officials.

On an unrelated note, it's interesting to me that al Qaeda continues to plot ways of outwitting one of the hardest possible US targets - aviation - while largely ignoring soft targets like trains, subways, shopping malls etc.  The arrest of Najibullah Zazi (who was a legal US resident) may have suggested that such a shift was in the offing, but one can't help but wonder if AQ's continued focus on aviation targets is a sign of a lack of capacity to hit other targets, rather than a lack of imagination.

Finally, it looks like Dick Cheney has slithered out of his cave long enough to comment on the latest doings:

“[W]e are at war and when President Obama pretends we aren’t, it makes us less safe,” Cheney said in a statement to POLITICO. “Why doesn’t he want to admit we’re at war? It doesn’t fit with the view of the world he brought with him to the Oval Office. It doesn’t fit with what seems to be the goal of his presidency — social transformation — the restructuring of American society.

I won't even bother to engage with Cheney's latest detritus, but here's the bigger question; why does Politico continue to reprint the ramblings of this decrepit old man? As Steve Benen accurately sums it up here - the man is a national disgrace.

GOP Continues to Cower in Front of al Qaeda Posted by Adam Blickstein

Spencer Ackerman reports that despite Republican histrionics in the wake of failed Flight 253 bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Obama administration is still steadfast in its goal of closing Guantanamo. According to a senior administration official:

We are, as I suggested, going through this with a fine-tooth comb. But I also just hasten to add the bigger picture here which is that we believe closing Gitmo is in the national security interest of the country for the reasons I’ve just outlined.

This is obviously a resolute response to the Dick Cheneys and Peter Kings who want to revert back to the Bush administration policies that failed to keep us safe and inflamed the embers of extremism overseas. But it also goes back to a larger point. It's been official U.S. policy for nearly a year now that Guantanamo will be closing, despite some setbacks in congress and in the time line. This isn't just a rhetorical aspiration, it's actually encoded in U.S. law through executive order. Congress hasn't been able to stop it. Heck, even the former Vice President has been powerless to influence this outcome. But wouldn't the greatest gift we could give al Qaeda is for one 23 year old from Nigeria with failed explosives in his underwear to upend U.S. law, derail our political system, and cause a stated U.S. policy to be reversed? This for al Qaeda would be more important than the tragic deaths of innocent Americans, to see our way of life and political system continue to be disrupted by their terrorist tactics. Sadly, this has already happened with the previous Republican administration allowing torture to become official U.S. policy and casting aside the rule of law by opening Guantanamo in the first place. This didn't enhance American security. It gave dangerous moral victories our enemies.

And this reality is something the GOP just can't grasp. Every time they clamor for torture, every time they say we can't try terrorists in U.S. courts or detain them domestically, that ostensibly does more to embolden al Qaeda than actually them causing the loss of lives. Killing Americans is secondary to their larger goal of creating mass casualty of America's constitution, bedrock institutions and society in general. And the GOP's reactionary and hostile calls for Guantanamo to remain open because some twisted and wayward extremist failed to blow up a plane simply plays into our enemies hands. Simply put, American policies should not be the knee jerk reaction to the whims and tyranny of terrorists. We've been down that road before, and it did nothing protect American lives.

Instead of cowering in front of our enemies, the tougher, more resolute and inherently more patriotic approach would be to say it doesn't matter how many terrorists al Qaeda sends our way, we're going to remain steadfast in our system of governance, way of life, and uphold the values that make America great while keeping our country safe. And making sure America, not al Qaeda, dictates the course of which this process takes is central to that.