SUMMARY: Almost 20 years after American embassies in Africa were attacked by al-Qaida, a double agent who infiltrated the terror group is unmasking himself. Jonathan Rugman of Independent Television News reports.
SUMMARY: Five years ago, U.S. special operations forces launched a daring mission to kill al-Qaida leader Osama Bin Laden. Special correspondent Nick Schifrin, who visited the scene shortly after the battle, describes what he observed, then former Secretary of Defense and CIA Director Leon Panetta joins Hari Sreenivasan to reflect on how international terrorism has changed over the past five years.
HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour): Five years ago,U.S. special operations forces launched one of the most daring raids in history. They invaded a U.S. ally to kill the most wanted man on the planet.
I recorded this conversation last week with NewsHour special correspondent Nick Schifrin, who visited the scene shortly after the battle.
Nick Schifrin was the first Western reporter to arrive in Abbottabad, Pakistan, that day, and delivered exclusive, extraordinary video, images from inside the compound just hours after bin Laden was killed.
At the time, Nick was ABC News correspondent in the region. And now he's a NewsHour special correspondent.
And he joins me in the studio.
So, what did we see in that video?
NICK SCHIFRIN (NewsHour): Hari, we saw how the world's most wanted man lived and how he died.
In terms of how he lived, we see a bedroom, a large bed, bigger than any bed anywhere else in the house. We saw the medications he was on, very simple medications available at the local pharmacy. We saw a pantry where there was a week's worth of food stored up. We saw so many signs of children.
There was a red wagon outside in the backyard. There were 12 kids living there. Half of them were bin Laden's. We also saw a satellite dish outside. That was a one-way communication device used to watch TV on that dish, of course, never used it to communicate with the outside world.
And, of course, we saw how he died, the pools of blood in his bedroom and the room of Khaled, his son, and the mess that Navy SEALs left behind. They ransacked the room where all the computers were. And all the files from those computers became what intelligence officials referred to as the Abbottabad files.
HARI SREENIVASAN: Here we are five years later. The news is almost — almost on a daily basis mentions ISIS. It doesn't mention al-Qaida so much. Is there — explain the shift?
NICK SCHIFRIN: Yes.
I think, as one longtime al-Qaida puts it, al-Qaida has kind of like become Microsoft. It's still got a decent share of the market, but it's not preeminent. It's not really seen as cutting edge. And it doesn't really appeal to the younger generation.
And that is because, of course what we call core al-Qaida, the al-Qaida leadership as it was defined in 9/11 and the years after, has been decimated. And that started before bin Laden was killed, about two or three years before, probably 2009. The CIA moved a lot of assets and intelligence and technology into the region, and drones started picking off these leaders.
United States Special Operations troops are forming elite counterterrorism units in four countries in North and West Africa that American officials say are pivotal in the widening war against Al Qaeda’s affiliates and associates on the continent, even as they acknowledge the difficulties of working with weak allies.
The secretive program, financed in part with millions of dollars in classified Pentagon spending and carried out by trainers, including members of the Army’s Green Berets and Delta Force, was begun last year to instruct and equip hundreds of handpicked commandos in Libya, Niger, Mauritania and Mali.
The goal over the next few years is to build homegrown African counterterrorism teams capable of combating fighters like those in Boko Haram, the Islamist extremist group that abducted nearly 300 Nigerian schoolgirls last month. American military specialists are helping Nigerian officers in their efforts to rescue the girls.
“Training indigenous forces to go after threats in their own country is what we need to be doing,” said Michael A. Sheehan, who advocated the counterterrorism program last year when he was the senior Pentagon official in charge of Special Operations policy. Mr. Sheehan now holds the distinguished chair at the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point.
As the United States military seeks to extend its counterterrorism reach in Africa, President Obama is expected to appear at West Point on Wednesday to emphasize a foreign policy that would avoid large land wars, like those in Afghanistan and Iraq, and instead stress the training of allied and partner nations to battle militants on their own soil.
Since the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, the United States has slowly built a multipronged counterterrorism strategy in Africa: It has carried out armed drone strikes in Somalia from its only permanent base on the continent, in Djibouti; backed African proxies and French commandos fighting Islamist extremists in Somalia and Mali; and increasingly trained African troops to combat insurgents.
Under the new Africa plan, the Pentagon is spending nearly $70 million on training, intelligence-gathering equipment and other support to build a counterterrorism battalion in Niger and a similar unit in nearby Mauritania that are in their “formative stages,” a senior Defense Department official said.
In a cautionary note about operating in that part of Africa, troubled by a chronic shortage of resources and weak regional partners, the effort in Mali has yet to get off the ground as a new civilian government recovers from a military coup last year. In Libya, the most ambitious initial training ended ignominiously last August after a group of armed militia fighters overpowered a small Libyan guard force at a training base outside Tripoli and stole hundreds of American-supplied automatic weapons, night-vision goggles, vehicles and other equipment.
As a result, the training was halted and the American instructors were sent home. Libyan and American officials have been searching for a more secure training site in Libya to restart the program. But last summer’s debacle and the political upheaval in Libya since then have caused American officials to rethink how they select local personnel.
“You have to make sure of who you’re training,” said Maj. Gen. Patrick J. Donahue II, the commander of United States Army soldiers operating in Africa. “It can’t be the standard, ‘Has this guy been a terrorist or some sort of criminal?’ but also, ‘What are his allegiances? Is he true to the country, or is he still bound to his militia?’ ”
The American military uses conventional troops and elite Special Operations forces to train foreign armies all over the world. The tasks range from teaching basic marksmanship to more advanced counterterrorism tactics and techniques.
In the past decade, the Bush and Obama administrations put a premium on training and equipping foreign troops to combat terrorists and other Islamist extremists and persuaded Congress to approve funding for those programs.
The new program to train small counterterrorism forces in Africa resembles larger efforts by American Special Operations troops carried out in Iraq and Afghanistan. Pentagon officials declined to comment publicly on the new program, but budget documents reveal some details.
In Libya, the Pentagon has allotted just over $16 million from a train-and-equip fund to develop two companies of elite troops and their support elements “to counter terrorist and extremist threats in Libya,” according to budget documents. For the aborted training outside Tripoli, the Defense Department also tapped into a classified spending account called Section 1208, devised to aid foreign troops assisting American forces conducting counterterrorism missions.
For Mauritania, about $29 million has been set aside for logistics and surveillance equipment in support of the specialized unit.
For Niger, where the United States launches unarmed surveillance drones to fly over Mali in support of French and United Nations troops, the Pentagon is spending nearly $15 million on the country’s new counterterrorism unit. The funds are part of $39.5 million this year to train and equip the West Africa nation’s army as it struggles to stem a flow of insurgents across Niger’s lightly guarded borders with Mali, Nigeria and Libya.
Maman S. Sidikou, Niger’s ambassador to the United States, said he could not comment on the counterterrorism unit, but he added in an email, “Training remains a critical part of our needs to further increase our men’s readiness to face the many challenges of our regional environment.”
Mr. Sheehan, the former Pentagon official, said a 12-member Army Special Forces team could train about 50 soldiers initially, and expand after that. “It can be done,” said Mr. Sheehan, who conducted similar training in Latin America in the 1980s as a Special Forces commander.
J. Peter Pham, director of the Africa Center of the Atlantic Council, a policy research group in Washington, said the United States must make tough political judgments before investing in ambitious counterterrorism training programs. Mr. Pham cited the lessons of Mali, where American-trained commanders of elite army units defected to Islamic insurgents that seized the north last year.
“The host country has to have the political will to fight terrorism, not just the desire to build up an elite force that could be used for regime protection,” Mr. Pham said. “And the military has to be viewed well or at least neutrally by a country’s population.”
American counterterrorism officials also warn that without a commitment to support the specialized units, training can stall. “It’s very difficult, very challenging dealing with African forces,” said Rudy Atallah, the former director of African counterterrorism policy for the Pentagon. “You train them to a certain level, and then they can run short on gear, communications, even tires for their vehicles.”
American officials say trainees must be carefully screened and monitored for possible human rights violations or shifting allegiances. “Any unit we train could be used to go after political opponents rather than Al Qaeda,” said Frederic Wehrey, a senior policy analyst with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who has visited Libya frequently.
No episode is a more sobering reminder of these risks than the collapse of the American counterterrorism training mission last August at Base 27, also called Camp Younis, a Libyan military installation about 15 miles from Tripoli, the capital.
The American trainers issued the Libyans M4 automatic rifles, night-vision goggles, Glock pistols and armored vehicles. The Libyans took custody of the weapons and equipment and were responsible for safeguarding them in a warehouse at the camp, American military officials said.
In a predawn raid on Aug. 4, gunmen believed to be from one of the local militias overpowered the Libyan guards and seized the weapons and equipment in the storage area, American officials said.
The American trainers were not at the training camp when the raid occurred because they regularly stayed at a nearby villa that served as a safe house at night, American officials said.
American military officials briefed on the raid suspect that the theft was an inside job in which a Libyan officer or soldier tipped off some local Tripoli militia members about the matériel stored at the base. Much of the stolen equipment was later recovered, but not before news reports indicated that some of the pilfered weapons had showed up online for sale on the black market.
The episode abruptly ended a weeks-long training course that American and Libyan officials had hoped would restart broader training efforts that were suspended after the attack on the American Mission in Benghazi on Sept. 11, 2012.
A former American Special Operations officer said there was a broader lesson for any future Libya training mission: “The take-away here is they’re going to take a lot more adult supervision to make sure the checks and balances are in place, so you don’t have outside militia taking over.”
Radical Sunni militants aligned with Al Qaeda fought for control of Falluja and Ramadi on Friday, escalating a battle over the two cities that have increasingly become centers of Sunni extremism since American forces withdrew from the country at the end of 2011.
Over the past several days, the Iraqi government has rushed troop reinforcements to the areas in the western province of Anbar, where the militants, dressed in black and waving the flag of Al Qaeda, have commandeered mosque loudspeakers to call for supporters to join their struggle. On Thursday, they set fire to police stations, freed prisoners from jail and occupied mosques.
The fighting picked up again on Friday after what appeared to be a morning lull.
In Falluja, traffic police officers returned to work and municipal workers cleaned the streets and fixed electricity lines. Messages broadcast from mosque loudspeakers asked merchants to reopen their shops because residents had begun running out of food after days of fighting.
Later in the day, the calm was shattered. Local imams had decided to hold Friday prayers in a public park, rather than in areas closer to the fighting, and as services were concluding large numbers of masked militants affiliated with Al Qaeda appeared and took the stage. Waving a black flag, one fighter shouted to the crowd: “We declare Falluja as an Islamic state and we call on you to be on our side.”
“We are here to defend you from the army of Maliki and the Iranian Safavids,” the fighter continued. “We welcome the return of all workers, even the local police, but they have to be under our state and our rule.”
Also on Friday, gunmen blew up several government buildings in Falluja, including the police headquarters, the local council and the office of the mayor, according to a security official.
As fighting spread, the militants recaptured that had been liberated by security forces and their tribal allies. Fighting was also said to have picked up again in Ramadi, and one official said four soldiers had been killed.
SUMMARY: The U.S. military completed two raids in North Africa over the weekend. Abu Anas al-Libi, an al-Qaida leader wanted for his involvement in the 1998 embassy bombings, is being interrogated after being nabbed in Tripoli, Libya. Meanwhile, Navy Seals unsuccessfully sought a leader of Al-Shabab in Somalia. Judy Woodruff reports.
SUMMARY: The high-risk mission to capture of Abu Anas al-Libi in Libya may prove to have a high payoff in terms of gained intelligence. Judy Woodruff talks to chief foreign affairs correspondent Margaret Warner and Jeremy Bash, a former Defense Department official, about U.S. efforts to go after al-Qaida groups in Africa.
SUMMARY: President Barack Obama tried to reframe America's approach to the war on terror in an address on foreign policy. Jeffrey Brown examines the president's remarks with Pardiss Kebriaei from the Center for Constitutional Rights, former State Department official Harold Koh and Danielle Pletka of the American Enterprise Institute.
JUDY WOODRUFF (Newshour): The president used a wide-ranging speech today to try to reframe America's approach to fighting terrorism. In so doing, he tackled some of the most controversial elements of his administration's national security policy.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: From our use of drones to the detention of terrorist suspects, the decisions that we are making now will define the type of nation and world that we leave to our children.
JUDY WOODRUFF: The president aimed to redefine not just the tactics, but the overall approach to countering terrorists, at the National Defense University in Washington.
PRESIDENT OBAMA: Neither I, nor any President, can promise the total defeat of terror.
What we can do -- what we must do -- is dismantle networks that pose a direct danger to us and make it less likely for new groups to gain a foothold, all while maintaining the freedoms and ideals that we defend.
We must define our effort not as a boundless global war on terror, but rather as a series of persistent, targeted efforts to dismantle specific networks of violent extremists that threaten America.
GWEN IFILL (Newshour): Today marks the second anniversary of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. Tonight, we bring you the previously unknown story of the sisterhood of CIA analysts who chased the al-Qaida leader.
Margaret Warner reports.
MARGARET WARNER (Newshour): It was the news most Americans had waited nearly a decade to hear.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: After a firefight, they killed Osama bin Laden and took custody of his body.
MARGARET WARNER: But for many of the people who'd helped find Osama bin Laden, their work had started nearly two decades earlier, long before the most-wanted man on earth had earned his infamy.
Their story of the CIA analysts and officers who'd tracked down the al-Qaida chief is told in the documentary HBO film "Manhunt" debuting tonight. It's based on the book by CNN's Peter Bergen.
PETER BERGEN, CNN: In '97, Osama bin Laden had declared war on the United States, but no one paid any attention.
CINDY STORER, Former CIA Analyst: There were just warning after warning. We knew something huge was going to happen.
MARGARET WARNER: But long before that September day, their chase began in a near-total information vacuum.
WOMAN: Well, we certainly didn't know that al-Qaida existed. We didn't know there was a terrorist organization.
MARGARET WARNER: The group tracking the elusive Saudi militant was known as Alec Station and was novel in its approach.
MAN: The unique thing about Alec Station was the fusion of analysis and operations.
MARGARET WARNER: The analytical team at CIA was comprised mostly of women. Before 9/11, it wasn't a prime assignment. Cindy Storer was an analyst, part of what was called “The Sisterhood.”
CINDY STORER: I was counseled once in a performance review that I was spending too much time working on bin Laden. They said we were obsessed crusaders, overly emotional, using all those women stereotypes.
MARGARET WARNER: Nada Bakos followed Storer on the mostly female team.
NADA BAKOS, Former CIA Analyst: We picked up that end of the spear, where some of the operations officers tend to be mostly men.
MARGARET WARNER: After 9/11, the tempo of operations shifted to hunting al-Qaida figures in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere. Many analysts moved into new jobs as “targeters.” Nada Bakos was among them, forward-deployed in Iraq to track Abu Musab al Zarqawi.
She also targeted a vital al-Qaida emissary who, after capture, gave up the name of the courier who eventually led the U.S. to bin Laden's door two years ago today.
SUMMARY: Cindy Storer and Nada Bakos were part of a majority female team of CIA intelligence analysts -- dubbed "The Sisterhood" -- who contributed to the effort to locate Osama bin Laden. Margaret Warner talks with Storer and Bakos about their intensely detailed work and frustrations with having that work sometimes ignored or belittled.
Al Qaeda’s affiliate in North Africa is operating terrorist training camps in northern Mali and providing arms, explosives and financing to a militant Islamist organization in northern Nigeria, the top American military commander in Africa said on Monday.
The affiliate, Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, has used the momentum gained since seizing control of the northern part of the impoverished country in March to increase recruiting across sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and Europe, said the commander, Gen. Carter F. Ham.
General Ham’s assessment is the most detailed and sobering American military analysis so far of the consequences of the Qaeda affiliate and associated extremist groups seizing the northern part of Mali to use as a haven.
“As each day goes by, Al Qaeda and other organizations are strengthening their hold in northern Mali,” General Ham said in remarks at the Homeland Security Policy Institute at George Washington University. “There is a compelling need for the international community, led by Africans, to address that.”
In addition to the risks inside Mali, General Ham also said that members of Boko Haram, an extremist group in northern Nigeria, had traveled to training camps in northern Mali and have most likely received financing and explosives from the Qaeda franchise. “We have seen clear indications of collaboration among the organizations,” he said.
Radical Islamists have turned northern Mali into an enclave for Qaeda militants and for the imposition of harsh Shariah law, which has been used to terrorize the population, particularly women, with amputations, stonings, whippings and other abuses.
The Qaeda North Africa affiliate is now considered one of the best armed and wealthiest of the Qaeda franchises across the world, largely because of millions of dollars gained in kidnapping ransoms, drug proceeds and illicit trafficking in fuel and tobacco, General Ham said.
JUDY WOODRUFF (Newshour): Earlier this week, Lindsey Hilsum of Independent Television News reported on Islamic militants who now control two-thirds of the country. Violence and harsh punishments carried out by the militants have driven thousands to flee to neighboring Mauritania.
Tonight, Hilsum has the stories of families crossing the border.
LINDSEY HILSUM: It's been a long journey, three days' trek through desert. Another seven families who have loaded everything they have onto their carts and crossed the border into Mauritania. Fear and hunger drove them out of Northern Mali.
They tell their story to the police chief in the border town of Fassala.
SUMMARY: In April 2012, Islamists and local Tuareg rebels entered the city of Timbuktu and seized control, imposing sharia law. Now, popular militias train to take back the northern part of the country from the militants, who are backed by al-Qaida and other foreign jihadis. Lindsey Hilsum of Independent Television News reports.
MARGARET WARNER (Newshour): The bombings and shootings tore through Iraq on the fourth day of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. It was the worst day of violence there in two years.
Suspicion fell on the Sunni insurgent group al-Qaida in Iraq, known for mounting closely coordinated strikes. In recent days, the group's leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, was said to have used the group's website to announce a new offensive, code-named ‘Breaking the Walls.'
ABU BAKR AL-BAGHDADI, Al-Qaida in Iraq (through translator): At the top your priorities regarding targets is to chase and liquidate the judges, the investigators and the guards.
MARGARET WARNER: Today saw 37 separate attacks in 15 cities. Most hit government, military and police targets.
SUMMARY: Monday's deadly attacks come just as tension between Sunnis and Shiites has increased and just after al-Qaida leadership declared they intend to free prisoners and assassinate court officials. Margaret Warner talks to Al-Jazeera's Jane Arraf in Baghdad about what the attacks mean for the possible resurgence of al-Qaida.
JEFFREY BROWN (Newshour): U.S. officials confirmed today a drone strike killed the number-two leader of al-Qaida. The strike happened yesterday in North Waziristan in Pakistan, targeting Abu Yahya al-Libi, seen as the most prominent figure in the terrorist network after its leader, Ayman al- Zawahri.
At the White House today, Press Secretary Jay Carney wouldn't confirm how al-Libi died, but said his death was a major blow to the terror group.
JAY CARNEY, White House press secretary: Removing leaders like al-Libi from the very top of al-Qaida is part of an ongoing effort to disrupt and dismantle and ultimately defeat al-Qaida. And that is an important piece of business.
MARGARET WARNER (Newshour): It seemed business as usual at U.S. airports the day after news that the CIA foiled a new al-Qaida plot to bomb an airliner.
On ABC, White House Counterterrorism Adviser John Brennan led a chorus of U.S. officials seeking to reassure the public.
JOHN BRENNAN, U.S. deputy National Security adviser: I think people getting on a plane today should feel confident that their intelligence services are working day in and day out to stop these types of IEDs from getting anywhere near a plane.
MARGARET WARNER: Officials have said the recovered bomb containing no metal designed to fit inside underwear wouldn't have been detected by magnetometers. It's unclear if the new body scanners would have picked it up. The FBI is now analyzing the device.
JOHN BRENNAN: This IED was a threat from the standpoint of the design that we have been able to determine. And so now we're trying to make sure that we take the measures that we need to prevent any other type of IED, similarly constructed, from getting through security procedures.
MARGARET WARNER: There was no word on the fate of the would-be bomber, but at a Washington event with the NewsHour's Ray Suarez, Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano said the plot represents a clear challenge.
SECRETARY OF HOMELAND SECURITY JANET NAPOLITANO: And I think we have to acknowledge that our adversaries are very creative, and they are very determined, and they are very persistent. And that requires us to always be thinking proactively, not just reactively.
MARGARET WARNER: Authorities suspect the bomb was designed by Yemen-Ibrahim Hassan al-Asiri, the alleged designer of a cruder underwear bomb that failed to detonate on a jetliner over Detroit on Christmas Day, 2009, and devices found in printer cartridges seized in shipments from Yemen to the U.S. in 2010.
This latest plot underscored how al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, AQAP, has gained ground in Yemen in the unrest that ousted President Ali Abdullah Saleh. The U.S. has responded with a stepped-up drone campaign that killed leading AQAP figure Anwar al-Awlaki last fall, and this past Sunday, a drone took out Fahd al-Quso, believed responsible for the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000.
SUMMARY: A day after news broke that the CIA foiled a new al-Qaida plot to bomb an airliner, the official responses were low key on Tuesday. Margaret Warner, former National Counterterrorism Center director Michael Leiter and former FBI supervisory special agent Ali Soufan assess the current reach of the terror network.
EDITOR'S NOTE: Shortly after this segment was recorded, U.S. and Yemeni officials said the would-be-bomber was actually an informant working for the CIA.
RAY SUAREZ (Newshour): The story has been emerging since last summer. New York City police began extensively monitoring Muslims in the city after 9/11.
The operation, revealed by the Associated Press, triggered immediate criticism from civil rights groups.
CHRISTOPHER DUNN, attorney, New York Civil Liberties Union: At the end of the day, it is, pure and simple, a rogue domestic surveillance operation. And that's a matter of serious concern to us.
RAY SUAREZ: But New York City's police commissioner, Ray Kelly, insisted last year the surveillance is necessary and legal.
RAYMOND KELLY, New York City Police commissioner: We're doing what we believe we have to do to protect the city. We have many, many lawyers in our employ. We see ourselves as very conscious and aware of civil liberties.
And we know that there's always going to be scrutiny. There's always going to be some tension between the police department and the so-called civil liberties groups.
RAY SUAREZ: Matt, you've called the NYPD one of America's most aggressive domestic intelligence agencies. What was the New York City Police Department doing?
MATT APUZZO, The Associated Press: Well, they have domestic intelligence programs that go far beyond what we would have expected pre-9/11 to see from any police department and in many ways operate in ways that the federal government, the FBI just simply can't.
They have a program called the Demographics Unit, which the NYPD originally denied even existed, plainclothes officers search that -- often Arab officers -- who will go out into Muslim neighborhoods, and they are called rakers. They're going to rake the coals looking for hot spots, meaning they're going to go out and they're going to take pictures of mosques. They're going to take pictures of all the Muslim businesses in the area.
They're going to go into the Muslim cafes or hookah bars and they're just going to eavesdrop and listen to people's conversations, try to gauge the sentiment of the owner, maybe write down his ethnicity, definitely write down his ethnicity. And those goes all into police reports.
So we have seen them for many neighborhoods. We have seen them for Egyptians, Moroccans, Albanians. They are building these profiles of where Muslims live, eat, shop, pray, where they watch sports, where they go to Internet cafes. It's just -- it's an incredible process by which they're bringing in information about the Northeast Muslims.
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MATT APUZZO: And what's interesting about the NYPD is, they have no -- almost no oversight. And the city council is not aware of the programs that are going on. Congress is not aware of what's going on. The attorney general has said that it basically doesn't have the ability to investigate.
The White House said yesterday, yes, we -- our money is being used here, but we're just a policy office. We don't actually have operational control. So, you know, these decisions are largely kept in-house at the NYPD and with Mayor Bloomberg.
As the United States prepares to withdraw its troops from Iraq by year’s end, senior American and Iraqi officials are expressing growing concern that Al Qaeda’s offshoot here, which just a few years ago waged a debilitating insurgency that plunged the country into a civil war, is poised for a deadly resurgence.
Qaeda allies in North Africa, Somalia and Yemen are seeking to assert more influence after the death of Osama bin Laden and the diminished role of Al Qaeda’s remaining top leadership in Pakistan. For its part, Al Qaeda in Iraq is striving to rebound from major defeats inflicted by Iraqi tribal groups and American troops in 2007, as well as the deaths of its two leaders in 2010.
Although the organization is certainly weaker than it was at its peak five years ago and is unlikely to regain its prior strength, American and Iraqi analysts said the Qaeda franchise is shifting its tactics and strategies — like attacking Iraqi security forces in small squads — to exploit gaps left by the departing American troops and to try to reignite sectarian violence in the country.
The group, which has also been known as Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, has shown surprising resilience even as its traditional supply lines of foreign fighters through Syria have been disrupted by the turmoil in that country, American intelligence officials say. It conducts a little more than 30 attacks a week, carries out a large-scale strike every four to six weeks, and has expanded its efforts to recruit Iraqis, leading to a significant increase in the number of Iraqi-born suicide bombers.
“I cringe whenever anybody makes a pronouncement that Al Qaeda is on its last legs,” said Maj. Gen. Jeffrey Buchanan, the American military’s top spokesman in Iraq. “I think one day we are going to look around and say it’s been a long time since we have heard from Al Qaeda, and maybe then we can say it is on its last legs.”
The Qaeda affiliate’s nascent resurgence has helped fuel a debate between some Pentagon officials on one side, who are seeking a way to permit small numbers of American military trainers and Special Operations forces to operate in Iraq, and some White House officials on the other, who are eager to close the final chapter on a divisive eight-year war that cost the lives of more than 4,400 troops.
Iraqi analysts express fears that ties between Al Qaeda and members of the former ruling Baath Party may be re-forming. “The government is afraid from an alliance between Qaeda and Baath precisely in this time, after the American withdrawal from Iraq,” said Ehssan al-Shemari, a political science professor at Baghdad University. “The security issue is the biggest challenge for the government in the next stage.”
JUDY WOODRUFF (Newshour): The U.S. war on al-Qaida claimed another high-profile kill today, this time in Yemen. The target was an American imam who preached at mosques in the U.S. before taking up jihad overseas.
Ray Suarez has the story.
RAY SUAREZ (Newshour): The announcement of Anwar al-Awlaki death made him the most prominent al-Qaida figure killed since Osama bin Laden back in May. Yemeni intelligence officials said he was located three weeks ago and tracked intensively on the ground and from the air.
Today, U.S. drone aircraft blasted Awlaki's convoy with missiles near the town of Khashef in Jawf Province, about 90 miles east of Yemen's capital, Sana'a.
President Obama had authorized Awlaki's killing almost two years ago. He hailed today's news at a ceremony for the outgoing chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff.
RAY SUAREZ: To assess the implications of Awlaki's killing, we turn to Brian Fishman, a fellow at the New America Foundation and the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point. Juan Carlos Zarate was deputy national security adviser for counter-terrorism in the Bush administration and is now a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
RAY SUAREZ: Juan, Anwar all Awlaki was the first American citizen to be the subject of a CIA kill-or-capture order.
And now that he has been killed, a lot more attention is being focused on the nature of his death, without charge, without indictment, obviously without trial. Is this a problem?
JUAN CARLOS ZARATE: Well, I think it's something the administration is clearly sensitive to. And it explains in part why they are describing him so ardently as the chief -- external operations chief.
The administration is going to great pains to explain his operational role, the fact that he was engaged in ongoing activity. All of that is a way of framing this in terms of imminent danger to the United States that then gives the U.S. credibility under international law and under our own laws to take self-defensive measures and to take kinetic activities against an individual, even if that individual is an American citizen.
But we have known this issue has been out there. The ACLU had challenged, via Awlaki's father, the alleged targeting of Awlaki, a case they lost at the lower court level in federal court. And so this issue of what the government can do with respect to an individual, an American citizen who has joined al-Qaida, who is clearly trying to plot against the United States, what level of kinetic activity, what level of force can they use without some level of due process, that is clearly something the administration is very sensitive about.
RAY SUAREZ: Brian, was it legal?
BRIAN FISHMAN: Well, I'm not a Supreme Court justice, but I have got real concerns about it, because it sets a precedent.
And I simply don't understand the criteria by which the decision was made that Anwar al-Awlaki could be killed. What does an American citizen have to do to fall into that category? The second concern I have -- and why I think that a judicial process of some kind would have been useful here -- is that it would have been an opportunity for the U.S. government to lay out all the things that Anwar Awlaki has done.
He may be dead, but his vision and his message is not. And what I think would have been useful is to have a judicial process where you get to talk about the fact that he solicited prostitutes. You get to talk about the fact that he was sort of a hypocrite in and of himself. And because of that, the fact that we weren't able to do those things -- we didn't do those things, I think we have missed an opportunity to do more than just kill him, but to discredit the ideas that he pushed for years.
President Obama’s national security team is contemplating troop reductions in Afghanistan that would be steeper than those discussed even a few weeks ago, with some officials arguing that such a change is justified by the rising cost of the war and the death of Osama bin Laden, which they called new “strategic considerations.”
These new considerations, along with a desire to find new ways to press the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, to get more of his forces to take the lead, are combining to create a counterweight to an approach favored by the departing secretary of defense, Robert M. Gates, and top military commanders in the field. They want gradual cuts that would keep American forces at a much higher combat strength well into next year, senior administration officials said.
The cost of the war and Mr. Karzai’s uneven progress in getting his forces prepared have been latent issues since Mr. Obama took office. But in recent weeks they have gained greater political potency as Mr. Obama’s newly refashioned national security team takes up the crucial decision of the size and the pace of American troop cuts, administration and military officials said. Mr. Obama is expected to address these decisions in a speech to the nation this month, they said.
A sharp drawdown of troops is one of many options Mr. Obama is considering. The National Security Council is convening its monthly meeting on Afghanistan and Pakistan on Monday, and although the debate over troop levels is operating on a separate track, the assessments from that meeting are likely to inform the decisions about the size of the force.
In a range of interviews in the past few days, several senior Pentagon, military and administration officials said that many of these pivotal questions were still in flux and would be debated intensely over the next two weeks. They would not be quoted by name about an issue that Mr. Obama had yet to decide on.
