The US Predicament

We have yet again heard from a top US official that the US is determined to destroy al-Qaeda, be it in Pakistan, Afghanistan or in Yemen. Washington has been saying this ever since the 9/11 attack destroyed the belief that the superpower was unassailable. According to the US official in question, John Brennan, who is President Barack Obama’s assistant for homeland security and counter-terrorism, the US has indications that al-Qaeda is planning an attack against a target in the Yemeni capital of Sanaa, and there are ‘‘several hundred’’ al-Qaeda members in Yemen — to deal with which the US is ‘‘doing everything possible to scour all the intelligence that is out there to see whether or not there’s another Abdulmutallab out there’’. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a Nigerian al-Qaeda operative, is charged with attempting to blow up a US passenger aircraft on the Christmas day. Differentiating the plot from the one that led to 9/11, Brennan told CNN that human error and system lapses, rather than deliberate concealing of information, had allowed the terror suspect with explosives to board the US-bound plane. But the fact remains that there was an attempt to terrorize the US for the second time after 9/11.

The US would do well to reckon the fact that despite the sustained war against al-Qaeda in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region, the outfit has only ramified globally. Recruits are aplenty not just in that zone, but also in countries like Yemen. The global spread of the al-Qaeda network is almost independent of the global offensive against it. And if there are battle-hardened terrorists on the field commanded in a military fashion, thanks of course to the Pakistan Army’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) that has been instrumental in transferring the military-style terror methodologies from one so-called jihadi to another, there are also numerous unseen faces across the Islamic world — well-educated and technology-savvy — contributing to al-Qaeda’s public relations department and providing sophistication to the enterprise of super-terrorism. The US cannot ignore this fact, nor can it attack every Muslim-majority country where the outfit is finding takers. Therefore, as it is confronted with that reality, the US has worked out a new formula to avert plane hijack and entry of jihadi terrorists into US territory. On Monday, it began enhanced screening procedures on any US-bound air passenger travelling through 14 notified countries regarded as ‘‘state sponsors of terrorism or other countries of interest’’ — because ‘‘effective aviation security must begin beyond our borders’’. India is not in the list, but Indians, as well as Americans or any other nationals for that matter, who travel through the 14 countries will have to go through the enhanced screening procedures. What is interesting is that the notified countries include not just the long-US-held state sponsors of terrorism like Libya and Algeria, but also, and ironically, the US’ own allies like Pakistan and Saudi Arabia — the latter being ‘‘countries of interest’’ now.

What does ‘‘countries of interest’’ really mean? Why, countries that have already become capitals of jihadi terrorism but that the US is forced to forge alliance with due to factors such as oil politics and base in the Arab world in the case of Saudi Arabia and strategic interest in Afghanistan when it comes to mollycoddling Pakistan. The predicament is that these allies have themselves become al-Qaeda hubs and the US cannot do anything about it except a direct military assault on them all, which it would not do considering its other long-term interests and goals. Is not the US paying for its past blunders? There is a great lesson here. THE SENTINEL