As happened in Mosul, Iraq last summer when the Iraqi
army fled before a jihadi attack,
Yemeni government soldiers abandoned their bases in Al Mukalla
leaving US Humvees and other military equipment. Earlier, AQAP had
seized the central prison in the city and freed 300 prisoners, including
Khaled Batarfi, one of the most important jihadi leaders in Yemen.
It is a measure of the severity of the multiple crises
engulfing the region that AQAP, previously said by the United States to
be the most dangerous branch of al-Qaeda, can capture a provincial
capital without attracting more than cursory attention in the outside
world. How different it was on 2 May 2011 when President Obama and much
of his administration had themselves pictured watching the helicopter
raid on Abbottabad, Pakistan where bin Laden was killed. The
grandstanding gave the impression that his death meant that the
perpetrators of 9/11 had finally been defeated.
But look at the map today as unitary Muslim states
dissolve or weaken from the north-west frontier of Pakistan to the
north-east corner of Nigeria. The beneficiaries are al-Qaeda or al-Qaeda
inspired groups which are growing in power and influence. The US and its
allies recognise this, but cannot work out how to prevent it.
“It’s always easier to conduct counter-terrorism when
there’s a stable government in place,” said the US Defense Secretary
Ashton Carter, rather plaintively, last week. “That circumstance
obviously doesn’t exist in Yemen.”
You can say that again. Mr Carter sounded a little put
out that “terrorists” have not chosen well-ordered countries such as
Denmark or Canada in which to base themselves, and are instead operating
in anarchic places like Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Libya and Somalia, where
there is no government to stop them. Suddenly, the drone war supposedly
targeting leaders and supporters of al-Qaeda in Yemen, Pakistan and
Somalia is exposed as the politically convenient irrelevance it always
was. In fact, it was worse than an irrelevance, because the use of
drones, and periodic announcements about the great success they were
having, masked America’s failure to develop an effective policy for
destroying al-Qaeda in the years since 9/11.
Al Mukalla was not the only victory of an al-Qaeda
affiliate in recent weeks. In northern Syria, al-Qaeda’s Syrian
affiliate, Jabhat al-Nusra, led an attack force of between
4,000 and 5,000 jihadis to capture the provincial capital of Idlib whose
Syrian army garrison was overwhelmed. Saudi sources revealed that
Saudi Arabia and Turkey had both given their backing to Jabhat al-Nusra
and other extreme jihadis in seizing Idlib.
Saudi Arabia and other Sunni states seem intent on
rebranding Jabhat al-Nusra and its clones as wholly different from
Islamic State (Isis) and therefore acceptable as a potential ally. Al-Nusra
may not publicly revel in its own atrocities as does Isis, but otherwise
it differs little from it in ideology and tactics. Created by Isis in
2012, it split from the parent movement and fought a bloody inter-rebel
civil war against it in early 2014, but today there are worrying signs
of cooperation. According to accounts from the Syrian opposition, it was
al-Nusra that allowed Isis fighters to take over in recent days most of
Yarmouk Palestinian camp a few miles from the centre of Damascus.
For all the billions of dollars
spent on security since 9/11, the tedious searches at airports, the
restrictions on civil liberties, tolerance of torture – not to mention
the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – the so-called “war on terror” is
being very publicly lost. The heirs of 9/11 are far stronger than ever.
As argued previously in this column, there are seven wars going on in
Muslim countries between Pakistan and Nigeria and in all of them
al-Qaeda-type movements are gaining in strength or are already strong.
It would be astonishing if these conflicts did not at some point produce
extreme violence in nearby countries such as the massacre of Christian
students by Somali gunmen in Kenya or the killing of Charlie Hebdo
cartoonists, police and Jewish shoppers in Paris. Given that there are
2.8 million Muslims in Britain, 4.1 million in Germany and 5 million in
France, al-Qaeda-type movements are bound to find some supporters.
What should be done? The only way of dealing with
Isis, al-Qaeda and other jihadi movements is in the countries where they
flourish. The great mistake after 9/11 was for Washington to absolve
Saudi Arabia of responsibility – though 15 of the 19 hijackers, bin
Laden himself, and much of the money spent on the operation came from
Saudi Arabia – as well as Pakistan, which had propelled bin Laden’s
hosts, the Taliban, into power in Afghanistan.
Once again al-Qaeda-type movements are not being
targeted effectively despite their many enemies. This failure can best
be explained by a saying popular a few months ago among western
politicians and diplomats to explain their policy in Syria and Iraq.
This was “the enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend”.
Few of those who pronounced these glib but shallow
words had thought them through or appreciated that, if this was indeed
the policy of the US, Britain and their allies, then there is no way the
Isis, Jabhat al-Nusra or AQAP can be defeated. In Yemen, the Houthis are
the strongest military force opposing AQAP, but since we support Saudi
Arabia in its air campaign against the Houthis we are ensuring a
situation in which AQAP will be able to expand. Since the Saudis’ stated
aim is to restore to power President Abd-Rabbu Hadi, who has almost no
support (those described as his supporters are mostly southern
secessionists), the chief beneficiary of prolonged war will be AQAP.
In Syria, similarly, “the enemy of our enemy” and the
strongest military force is the Syrian army, though it shows signs of
weakening after four years of war. But if we have decided that US air
power is not to be used against Isis or Jabhat al-Nusra when they are
fighting the Syrian army because we want to get rid of President Bashar
al-Assad, then this is a decision that benefits Isis, Jabhat al-Nusra
and extreme jihadis. In Iraq the situation is less dire because,
although there is a pretence of not cooperating with the Shia militias,
in practice the US had been launching air strikes on the same Isis
positions these militia are attacking on the ground. The reality is that
it is only by supporting “the enemy of my enemy” that the expansion of
al-Qaeda and its lookalikes can be beaten back and the movement
defeated.