Obama confronts Al-Qaeda

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It is apparent that, from the moment of his inauguration, Barack Obama was acutely aware of the challenge of Al-Qaeda and the global jihad. But two events in December – the failed attempt to blow up a US airliner on Christmas Day as it approached Detroit, and the killing of seven CIA officers in Afghanistan a few days later – have brought his approach to counter-terrorism under an altogether new level of scrutiny. They have posed three uncomfortable questions about the administration’s security policies.

1. 1. Did the two attacks expose alarming failures on the part of US intelligence? With regard to the Detroit attack, President Obama was scathing: “We screwed up”. The young Nigerian was known to have militant links, but had boarded his flight without being challenged.The killings in Afghanistan showed up failings of a different kind: so eager had the CIA been to place a mole inside the top ranks of Al-Qaeda that it had failed to follow its own time-honoured security procedures. The CIA emerged from both events considerably bruised, but so too did the administration.
2. 2. Does President Obama in fact have a different approach to counter-terrorism than that of his predecessor? Certainly, there has been a shift of tone. The term“war on terror ” has been banished. There is a desire to take a cooler, calmer approach to the fight against extremism, which officials believe had become for the Bush administration both a dangerous obsession and a distorting lens through which to view world affairs. But it is not easy to be cool and calm when Congress and the US media are in a state of high agitation. The Detroit attack may have failed; but it was a near miss. And in any case, well before the December events, analysts comparing the approach of the two administrations tended to see more continuity than difference. The language might be less combative, but many of the policies were substantially the same.
3. 3. Is the administration likely to succeed in the new battlefield of Yemen? Yemen was already on the administration’s radar screen, well before the Christmas Day attack. But that attack – which officials were convinced was the work of the Yemen-based “Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula” – suddenly gave the country a new prominence and gave US involvement there a new urgency. But as a number of analysts noted, the Americans are coming late to a poor, fragmented country beset by a series of complex interlocking problems: the Al-Qaeda presence, the Shi’ ite insurgency in the north, a secessionist movement in the south, and a severe set of socio-economic problems. Moreover the Americans now find themselves tied to one more problematic ally: a Yemeni president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, widely regarded as both corrupt and autocratic, who in recent years has managed to alienate a growing number of his citizens.

Handling this new set of challenges and their contentious domestic implications – not least, what to do about the Yemenis who comprise almost half the remaining inmates of Guantanamo – presents formidable difficulties. President Obama’s speech in Cairo, in June last year, offering to turn the page in relations between the US and the Muslim world, is already a receding memory. The speech was intended to provide a framework for dealing with the all-important ideological dimension of the fight against the global jihadists. But, despite the well-intentioned policy agenda set out in the speech, 2009 represented a difficult learning-curve for the administration in the Greater Middle East. The failure to revive Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, the complication of the Iran problem (because of continuing protests over the disputed election there in June), the high-profile bombings of government buildings in Baghdad, the crisis of credibility of the Karzai administration in Afghanistan – these and other developments underline how hard it will be in 2010 to turn the aspirations of the Cairo speech into tangible progress.

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