Wired
Noah Shachtman
In September, American-born militant Anwar al-Awlaki and his son were killed by a U.S. drone strike in Yemen. In the seven months since, the al-Qaida affiliate there has only grown in power, influence, and lethality. The American solution? Authorize more drone attacks — and not just against well-known extremists like Awlaki, but against faceless, nameless low-level terrorists, as well.
A relentless campaign of unmanned airstrikes has significantly weakened al-Qaida’s central leadership in Pakistan, American policymakers say. There, militants were chosen for robotic elimination based solely on their intelligence “signatures” — their behavior, as captured by wiretaps, overhead surveillance, and local informants. A similar approach might not work in this case, however. “Every Yemeni is armed,” one unnamed U.S. official told the Wall Street Journal. “So how can they differentiate between suspected militants and armed Yemenis?”
What’s more, al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula — the Yemeni affiliate of the terror collective — “is joined at the hip” with an insurgency largely focused on toppling the local government, another official told the Washington Post last week. So there’s a very real risk of America being “perceived as taking sides in a civil war.”
Noah Shachtman
In September, American-born militant Anwar al-Awlaki and his son were killed by a U.S. drone strike in Yemen. In the seven months since, the al-Qaida affiliate there has only grown in power, influence, and lethality. The American solution? Authorize more drone attacks — and not just against well-known extremists like Awlaki, but against faceless, nameless low-level terrorists, as well.
A relentless campaign of unmanned airstrikes has significantly weakened al-Qaida’s central leadership in Pakistan, American policymakers say. There, militants were chosen for robotic elimination based solely on their intelligence “signatures” — their behavior, as captured by wiretaps, overhead surveillance, and local informants. A similar approach might not work in this case, however. “Every Yemeni is armed,” one unnamed U.S. official told the Wall Street Journal. “So how can they differentiate between suspected militants and armed Yemenis?”
What’s more, al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula — the Yemeni affiliate of the terror collective — “is joined at the hip” with an insurgency largely focused on toppling the local government, another official told the Washington Post last week. So there’s a very real risk of America being “perceived as taking sides in a civil war.”
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