WASHINGTON — American diplomatic outposts reopened throughout the Middle East on Sunday, easing the sense of imminent danger that has preoccupied the Obama administration since it learned of a possible terrorist attack from communications between two high-ranking officials of Al Qaeda two weeks ago.
Yahya Arhab/European Pressphoto Agency
Yemeni security forces and barriers blocked access to the United States Embassy in Sana on Sunday. The embassy remained closed even as other Middle East diplomatic outposts reopened.
But the one embassy that remained closed — in Sana, the capital of Yemen — underscored the challenges President Obama faces in trying to wind down the nation's decade-long campaign against Al Qaeda and its affiliates, and reshape the nation's counterterrorism strategy.
In response to the latest threat, the United States has unleashed a barrage of drone strikes in that impoverished country, but it is unclear to what extent it has reduced the persistent and deadly threat from an increasingly decentralized Qaeda organization. The United States has carried out nine strikes in Yemen since July 28, broadening its target list beyond the high-level leaders it has always said are the main objective of the attacks.
Senior American counterterrorism and intelligence officials say the lack of certainty about the effectiveness of the latest drone strikes is a sobering reminder of the limitations of American power to deal with the array of new security threats the turmoil of the Arab Spring has produced. These doubts come even as lawmakers in Washington debate whether to restrict the surveillance activities of the National Security Agency. And Yemen is not their only concern.
Recently, American officials have also expressed heightened fears about an emerging Qaeda affiliate in Syria; prison breaks in Pakistan, Libya and Iraq that have set free hundreds of potential terrorists; an apparent inability to arrest Libyan suspects indicted in connection with the lethal attack on the American mission in Benghazi last year; and a new sanctuary in southern Libya for extremists across North and West Africa. "Terrorists now have the largest area of safe haven and operational training that they've had in 10 years," John E. McLaughlin, a former deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency, told a security forum in Aspen, Colo., last month.
Mr. Obama acknowledged these challenges at his news conference on Friday, noting that while Al Qaeda's core leadership in Pakistan had been "decimated," the terrorist organization has "metastasized into regional groups that can pose significant dangers." He insisted that this development did not contradict his assertion in his May speech that the struggle against terrorism had fundamentally changed. In that speech at the National Defense University, he offered a path to wind down the war against terrorists, a campaign against a lethal yet less able network of regional Qaeda affiliates launching "periodic attacks against Western diplomats, companies and other soft targets." He also warned of homegrown extremists like the Tsarnaev brothers who are accused of carrying out the Boston Marathon attacks.
Mr. Obama also said in May that targeted killing operations needed to be tightly limited.
The United States carries out strikes only against terrorists who pose a "continuing and imminent threat" to Americans, he said, and only when it is determined it would be impossible to detain them, rather than kill them. But the increased reliance on drones in Yemen suggests the limit of the resources the United States can employ in combating the new threats.
A senior American official said over the weekend that the most recent terrorist threat "expanded the scope of people we could go after" in Yemen.
"Before, we couldn't necessarily go after a driver for the organization; it'd have to be an operations director," said the official, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss delicate intelligence issues. "Now that driver becomes fair game because he's providing direct support to the plot."
Senior American intelligence officials said last week that none of the about three dozen militants killed so far in the drone strikes were "household names," meaning top-tier leaders of the affiliate, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. But the American official said the strikes had targeted "rising stars" in the Yemen network, people who were more likely to be moving around and vulnerable to attack. "They may not be big names now," the official said, "but these were the guys that would have been future leaders."
Yet just how effective the strikes have been is unclear. In the past several years, the drone strikes have set off a major public backlash against the United States in Yemen, Pakistan and across the Muslim world, prompting in part Mr. Obama's decision to constrain their use.
The administration has been criticized by some analysts for overreacting to the threat in Yemen, but intelligence officials now believe they have evidence that at least one target was the United States Embassy in Sana.
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