McClatchy Errs on Yemen’s AlQaeda Resiliance

January 22, 2014

McClatchy reports on the (predictable) failing "national dialog" in Yemen. While the report is quite good this paragraph contains one serious error:

Tensions between government troops and hard-line secessionist factions – the bulk of which have boycotted the dialogue – turned violent in the formerly independent south, while the fighters of Al Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, a Yemen-based terrorist franchise, remained resilient despite continuing U.S. drone strikes.

A correct report would not use "despite" but "because of" as the U.S. drone strikes are the major recruiting argument for Al Qaeda aligned forces in Yemen:

The use of drones in Yemen might seem a simple, quick-fix option for Obama. But with every civilian death, al Qaeda's recruiting power increases. Nabeel Khoury, former U.S. Deputy Chief of Mission to Yemen, recently reminded us of just that. Asked whether the covert U.S. drone war in Yemen was creating more enemies than it removed, he concluded: "Drone strikes take out a few bad guys to be sure, but they also kill a large number of innocent civilians. Given Yemen's tribal structure, the U.S. generates roughly forty to sixty new enemies for every AQAP operative killed by drones."

The McClatchy DC reporting is usually excellent and much more objective than other U.S. news sources. It should correct its above noted error.

Posted by b on January 22, 2014 at 09:47 UTC | Permalink

Comments

I think McClatchy’s editors are just being a little sloppy here. The usage is not that unusual, it might even be defended as a subtle dig at the White House’s gung ho warmongers.
More important is the mistake of swallowing the US propaganda concerning “AQ in the Arabian Peninsula.” This group is the least of the government’s problems: the real resistance has nothing to do with wahhabism and is rooted in the forces which long sustained the fight against the British empire and founded the Peoples Republic of South Yemen.
Add these socialists to the various shia federations, which regard the current government as a Saudi puppet, and the al qaida Washington is fixated upon becomes rather small beer.

Posted by: bevin | Jan 22 2014 13:56 utc | 1

From b’s second link article:
“Our intelligence for targeting in Yemen is of such low quality that the latest barrage of strikes hasn’t killed a single high level al Qaeda leader. Instead, we are now claiming that those killed “were the guys that would have been future leaders”.
Brilliant. I guess the drone targeting teams now have pre-cogs working for them so that we can know who the future AQAP leaders would have been. How much faster will AQAP grow now?”
I think they know these done strikes enhance recruitment for AQAP. The “War on Terror” needs enemies.

Posted by: ben | Jan 22 2014 16:04 utc | 2

The UN began, gingerly, to condemn drone strikes only in 2013. Re. Yemen and Pakistan.
Googling *UN condemns drones*, you will see signatories such as the human rights council, mandated individuals, various reports by different bodies. Nothing that says randomly killing ppl is not acceptable, by whatever means.
Drones conveniently fall out of categories of ‘arms’, ‘WMD’, chem poisons, or planes that bomb, tanks, even land mines, etc. As they are used by one nation against others – or elements within other countries -, ‘illegal arms’, ‘gansterism’ or ‘murder’ can’t be applied by the countries themselves.
Obama knows all this.
While one need not look far to vituperate the UN, plus its various agencies, offshoots, this is a failure so staggering, the fact that it is being covered up, or if one likes, reactions are muted, held back, and if made, then ignored, spells, imho, some kind of watershed, tipping point.
Now one can compare with other moves: chem poisoning that is not directly pointed in public to killing people – destruction of agriculture, of water ways, of energy inputs like electricity, of med care, etc. (see e.g. US invasion of Iraq) – and more – but drones, as direct killers are in another category. (Unfortunately.)
> Taking if for granted that ‘killing AlQ leaders’ is BS and possibly engineered to create more opponents. Yet, public understanding and support is present as the mantra is that ‘some few ppl are evil’ and ‘others are good citizens’, which is exactly in line with divisive individualism, fighting low level wars, mass surveillance, etc.

Posted by: Noirette | Jan 22 2014 16:39 utc | 3

It was Yemen and Somalia I was thinking of when I formulated my ‘push-pull theory’ of false flag terrorist pseudo-gangs worldwide. The theory starts with the assumption that all AQ ‘franchises’, and this inevitably AQ Central (Zawahihi) are all phony. Their job is to stage the occasional terrorist spectacular, and to keep up a steady drumbeat of grandiose pronouncements. By these two means, they accomplish several useful things. First and most obviously, they provide a pretext for general militarisation (the GWOT); second, they soak up the useful idiots who might otherwise join genuine revolutionary groups and become a genuine nuisance. These useful idiots are turned into patsies, who can be framed for preposterous mega terror plans, which never come to fruition; we have one today, a group of three patsies from East Jayloomia ‘recruited’ and ‘groomed’ by an ‘al-Qaeda terror master’ in Gaza, monitored from day one by Shin Bet, the ‘terror master’ suggests lots of wonderful things, like attacking the US Embassy, but anyway when these three are rolled up there is nothing solid, only this log of ‘plans’ and ‘suggestions’ and ‘they discussed bombing buses then using a truck bomb in a second attack to blow up the rescue workers’, etc. So in the same way, Zawahiri will (we are told) exhort his followers to attack Jewish or Israeli targets, but they never do except for silly little rockets and more grandiose pronouncements, which get picked up by SITE and broadcast word for word all over the USA… but anyway, push-pull is the CIA luring the pseudo-gang on with promises of money (for the leaders) while JSOC drones the useful idiots and the leaders are never there at that moment, they just left, half an hour before, you get the picture, as Tarpley would say.

Posted by: Rowan Berkeley | Jan 22 2014 18:38 utc | 4

RB @ 4.
I’ve never been hooked on your pseudo gang theory, but it’s more plausible than the contradictions hilighted by b; i.e. that using drones to kill unidentified “suspects” in Islamic countries makes Muslims want to go to other Islamic countries and behave like the Jews responsible for wiping Palestine off the map. Your theory helps a bit, but still falls a long way short of a full and coherent explanation for such mind-boggling weirdness.

Posted by: Hoarsewhisperer | Jan 23 2014 3:25 utc | 5

5 (cont)
Is it possible, for example, that the people who live in ‘tribal’ areas, and find themselves being targeted for explosive assassination as “suspects,” don’t know that they’re being killed by drones? And if they do know drones are responsible, do they know whose drones they are? There’s much scope for them to be fed disinfo when one considers that the Yankees know well in advance where the next drone strike will occur. So the likelihood that drones are targeting people who have been misled, rather than people who “look like” ter’rists can’t be lightly dismissed.
And we know what sneaky, lying cowards the Yankees are.

Posted by: Hoarsewhisperer | Jan 23 2014 5:34 utc | 6

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