In the Middle East, Our Enemy's Enemy Must Be Our Friend

[KoKo]

Al-Qaeda-type movements are gaining ground, and there's only one way to stop them

By Patrick Cockburn

April 17, 2015 "ICH" - "The Independent" - The ghost of Osama bin Laden will have been chuckling this month as he watches the movements he inspired conquer swathes of the Middle East. He will be particularly gratified to see fighters from Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) storm into Al Mukalla, the capital of Yemen’s eastern province of Hadhramaut from which the bin Laden family originated before making their fortune in Saudi Arabia.
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.


http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article41587.htm

[delrem]

1. It's an interesting coincidence

that everywhere Saudi Arabia and its sponsor the USA go militarily in the ME and northern Africa, either directly or with proxies, Al Qaeda and the most obnoxious and militaristic Islamic fundamentalism prospers.

Golly, what are the odds of a coincidence like that happening again?