Here We Go Again

By Steve Hynd

Well, I'm back from my blog-holiday. But even though I wasn't posting, I couldn't resist the pull of the news cycle and I've been both unamazed and depressed by the massive hype of one fizzled bomber into an existential threat to Western civilization. The last couple of weeks since a guy called Abdulmutallab proved that Al Qaida globally is a pale shadow of what it once was, unable anymore to mount an effective multi-pronged attack, have been a case study in all that's wrong with US anti-terrorism policy and its massively overcompensated effect on foreign policy in general.

For a start, we've got rightie-tighties trying to use the incident to make political hay domestically, using it as a reason to call for a return to torturing suspects and to suggest that somehow the civilian court system is inadequate to try any terrorist. As John noted, Spencer Ackerman's already definitively dealt with such pushes on a logical basis - but logic isn't what the right wing is appealing to, rather they're appealing to the Fear Factor that got them re-elected in 2004. The same appeal to people's fears is being used to suggest that somehow Obama is personally to blame for a failure to catch Abdulmutallab before he could board a US-bound plane. Yet one thing we can predict for sure about the new decade is that terrorism will not be leaving the building. There will always be attempted attacks and as Dave points out no security system can prevent every single attempt from getting off the ground. The best that we can hope for is to prevent the largest, most organised and potentially most life threatening ones. The right wing knows all this and it's aim is to simultaneously attack their political opposition and to set up retrospective justifications for it's own previous overcompensated policies of torture, illegal detention and the repressive Patriot Act state. There's nothing in their motives about making people safer, at all.

Then there's the knock-on effect as interventionists, led by the usual neo-whatever suspects, call for a military response to the Saga of the Burning Underwear - a response which they suggest should include a Bush-style aggressive war. Yemen, we are told, is to be the "new central front in the war on terror". It's all depressingly familiar and depressingly useless. Yemen has been a problem for many years now, but in 2006 the Bush administration dropped the ball there by ignoring it to concentrate on Iraq. Former FBI special agent Ali Soufan, who investigated the attack on the USS Cole, writes today:

Some Yemeni government officials highly value their relationship with the United States, which provides financial aid and military training. During our investigation of the Cole bombing, when the American government made it clear to the Yemenis that they expected full cooperation, the Yemenis who were dedicated to justice were given free rein and those with extremist ties were sidelined. After the trials were over and the terrorists made it out of jail, Robert S. Mueller III, the director of the F.B.I., flew to Yemen to complain, but there was little further protest by the United States. We dropped the ball.

A year and a half ago, when I briefed a bipartisan group of Senate staff members on Yemen, I warned that unless the American government sent a united message to the Yemenis to act against Al Qaeda, the terrorists responsible for the Cole would remain free and there would be future attacks against the United States connected to Yemen. Today, the terrorists behind the Cole are still free, and an attack connected to Yemen has been attempted.

It is possible to defeat Al Qaeda in Yemen without sending American troops. Now that the Yemenis are once again acting against Al Qaeda by striking the terrorist group�s bases and killing or apprehending many of its members, the United States must show that it has learned to stay focused and hold Yemeni officials accountable.

As I've said before, the best analogy is to the field of preventative medicine. Do you invest the bulk of your effort and budget in intensive care or in preventative medecine? If the latter, you end up not needing as much intensive care capability anyway. If the former, you inevitably spend all your time and money temporarily prolonging the miserable coma-like existense of terminally ill patients. There's a place for both, sure - but preventative care is the better bet for the bulk of your investment. It is almost always easier and less costly to prevent an emergency arising in the first place by the use of judicious aid than to do interventionist surgery after the cancer has taken hold.

Yet the short-termist thinkers in D.C., enamoured of the procedures and technologies of military intervention, will always opt for the latter rather than the former. When Jon Soltz of VoteVets wrote an op-ed the other day entitled "After Detroit Near-Attack, Is Afghan Strategy The Right One?" my response was to suggest that a better question would be whether a strategy that always reaches for the post-facto military option is the right one.

Alas, while even now a non-military response would be a better one it's unlikely to be what happens. Today the US and UK embassies in Yemen were closed and just yesterday the sainted General David Petraeus visited Yemen. That suggests to me that the handover of US engagement in Yemen from civilian to military control is already a done deal, and that the $100 million plus the US plans to funnel into Yemen in the way of counter-terrorism aid next year will now have a distinctly military cast to it.

Just the other day, Matt Yglesias wrote:

The great challenge for policymakers moving forward is to recognize the existence of American interests in countries like Yemen without overstating them. American foreign policy has never been comfortable with gray areas, and the press prefers table-pounding statements of resolve. But the idea of real, but limited, interests is completely coherent. Around the world we face a number of places where international terrorists can or might gain a toehold, and what�s needed is an approach that can realistically be applied in a broad way, not an endless series of wars as we play whack-a-mole with the latest would-be bomber.

A "broad and realistic approach" isn't one that should ever be left primarily in the hands of the military, but unfotunately that's exactly what the COINdinista faction has convinced the Serious People should be done. The Pentagon has co-opted to itself all of the practical, hands-on, tools of foreign aid to such an extent that civilian agencies languish without budget or staff while the military does what they should be doing. It's a massive internal bureaucratic and budgetary imbalance that taints everything the US now does abroad. Yet despite their on-paper promises of COIN-savvy sensitivity, the military will always be Hummvees in a china shop in such delicate situations.

William D. Hartung, director of the Arms and Security Initiative at the New York-based New America Foundation, recently told IPS News that putting a uniformed face on US aid to Yemen "could provide a rallying cry for extremists seeking to garner support for terrorist activities originating there" and that Obama is "essentially initiating a low-level war in Yemen with little or no public discussion about its potential consequences".

 It's as if we've learned nothing from the last decade's debacles in Afghanistan and Iraq.