Intel Chief: al-Qaeda Affiliates Getting Stronger

There are nearly 100,000 troops in Afghanistan to prevent al-Qaeda from returning to the country and bottle up its leadership in its Pakistani safe havens. But the leader of the U.S. spy apparatus warned Congress this morning that its Yemeni and Somali branches are increasing in strength and importance to global terrorism. Sorry, Osama. “Absent more effective and sustained activities to disrupt them, some regional affiliates — particularly al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and al-Shabaab in Somalia — probably will grow stronger,” James Clapper, the director of national intelligence told the House intelligence committee Thursday morning in an opening statement.

That’s in contrast to the “core al-Qaeda,” based in the Pakistani tribal areas, which “continues to be damaged” by U.S. and allied counterterrorism efforts, Clapper said. The affiliates will likely conduct “most of the terror attacks” and “provide inspiration for the global jihadist movement.”
Clapper didn’t mention the name of Osama bin Laden, Ayman Zawahiri or other old-time al-Qaeda figures. But he did call out Anwar al-Awlaki, the Yemen-based U.S. citizen and radical preacher, as an example of the mutating al-Qaeda threat, who Clapper said “demonstrate[s] the appeal of these types of Western extremist ideologues.” Notably, he didn’t say al-Awlaki was a terrorist himself, a contention that anonymous Obama administration officials have offered in the press to justify targeting him.
al-Qaeda in Yemen has launched several recent unsuccessful attempts to attack the U.S. at home, including the 2009 Christmas plane bombing plot and the 2010 attempt to blow up cargo aircraft with bombs packed into printer cartridges. Expect a lot more of those smaller-scale attempts in the coming years.
The group is known to “employ known [homemade bomb] technologies and innovative ways,” Clapper said. “Their exhortations to followers to conduct small-scale attacks that can still have a major impact.”
If Clapper’s assessment has a policy upshot, it’s that the U.S.’ shadow wars in Yemen and Somalia may intensify. And it’s likely to spur questioning about whether the U.S. military is over-invested in Afghanistan if the terror threat — the reason for the war — is elsewhere around the world.
To say nothing of the growth of homegrown radicals. “We see disturbing instances of self-radicalization among our own citizens,” Clapper said. But while U.S. citizens will remain a small portion of al-Qaeda adherents, they’ll “play a disproportionately large role” because of their “relatively easy access to the homeland and potentially to U.S. interests worldwide.”
Robert Mueller, the director of the FBI, added that the terror threat at home is “of a lone wolf, people who are radicalized domestically,” with minimal involvement by foreign terrorist groups. But Michael Leiter, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, said that he perceived new signs of “networking amongst independently minded homegrown extremists,” if not necessarily ties back to al-Qaeda franchises in Yemen or Pakistan.