America's New War Against al-Qaida

First thing yesterday morning, at perhaps the same time, U.S. Army Special Forces units launched two operations in Libya and Somalia targeting leaders of al-Qaida. Although the operation in Libya resulted in the arrest of Abu Anas al-Libi, reports conflict over the results of the Somali operation and whether it really succeeded in killing an important leader of al-Shabab.

If we also consider the ongoing operations — particularly the use of drones — to kill al-Qaida members in Yemen, Afghanistan and Pakistan, it might seem possible to say that the war declared by former U.S. President George W. Bush on terrorism and al-Qaida that has continued during the reign of his successor Barack Obama (despite it having become a war on limited targets) exhibits some changes, perhaps, that are seen by some as positive ones. In reality, declaring this conceals a change that has occurred in this war that may constitute the most dangerous thing the Arab world faces today.

In contrast to America’s clear resolve in the examples mentioned above, the U.S. administration has refused to even look into intervening with drones against al-Qaida in Iraq. As the U.S. magazine Foreign Policy relates, this refusal came even as Iraqi Minister of Foreign Affairs Hoshyar Zebari and Baghdad’s ambassador in Washington, Lukman Faily, openly expressed an official request for drone operations last August. That al-Qaida’s presence in Iraq is one side effect of the U.S. invasion and that the organization is responsible for most, if not all, the terrorist attacks that have recommenced at a frequency not seen since perhaps 2003 — killing 5,740 people in just the last nine months, including 887 in September alone — hasn’t altered America’s opposition to “intervening in the affairs of others!”*

Put shortly and explicitly, al-Qaida is no longer an absolute enemy for the United States. It is only an enemy when it threatens American interests, as happened in the case of Abu Anas al-Libi, who the Americans accuse of involvement in the attacks on their embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. Consequently, al-Qaida becomes an Arab problem — just a local, regional issue as long as it stays within these borders, regardless of what atrocities it commits or what atrocities, like those of Bashar Assad’s regime, are committed in its name.

But the biggest danger is that al-Qaida’s preoccupation with Arab arenas is at least beneficial to the United States, if not the latter’s objective. This seems clear in the case of Syria, where the organization fights Hezbollah and the regime in a cheap yet total war of attrition that serves Israel in particular, without the United States or the West, more generally, having to fire a single bullet or send a single soldier. And it will always be possible to finish what this civil war doesn’t accomplish when it reaches its final act, but with fewer costs and losses.

But what does it mean for al-Qaida to become a time bomb with a lit fuse in the Arabs’ lap? How can it be prevented from exploding to the detriment of everyone? The failure of the United States, the superpower, to eliminate al-Qaida using military and security measures suggests that the tried and tested solution is a delusion, an option that must be rooted out from among those available to the Arabs in order to actually uproot the organization itself.

* Editor’s note: The original quotation, accurately translated, could not be verified.