What is the link between Ansar al-Sharia and Al-Qa'ida in the Arabian Peninsula?

From: RUSI

The recent escalation of violence in Yemen underscores the terrorist challenge there. However, western policy will be unsuccessful if it conflates the international agenda of Al-Qa'ida with the local ambitions of Ansar al-Sharia.

By Benedict Wilkinson, Associate Fellow, RUSI 

Much has happened in Yemen in recent weeks.  The spate of events began in early May when, to the surprise of many, Al-Qa'ida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) released Issues 8 and 9 of the now infamous Inspire magazine despite the fact its editor and guiding force, Samir Khan, was killed alongside Anwar al-Awlaqi last year. The re-release of Inspire was followed quickly by what appears to have been a retaliatory US drone strike which killed Fahd al-Quso (a high-ranking member of AQAP) in Shabwa province and the highly-publicised disruption of a plot, modelled exactly on the modus operandi of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, to attack the aviation industry.[1] Further US drone strikes in Yemen saw the killing of eleven militants on 12 May and two more on 17 May. More recently, Ansar al-Shariah, often described as an AQAP affiliate, attacked US civilian contractors who were training the Yemeni coast guard in the port of Hudaydah, before launching a major attack in Sana'a which left more than 90 dead.[2]

U.S. Drug War Expands to Africa, a Newer Hub for Cartels

From: NYTimes

In a significant expansion of the war on drugs, the United States has begun training an elite unit of counternarcotics police in Ghana and planning similar units in Nigeria and Kenya as part of an effort to combat the Latin American cartels that are increasingly using Africa to smuggle cocaine into Europe.

The growing American involvement in Africa follows an earlier escalation of antidrug efforts in Central America, according to documents, Congressional testimony and interviews with a range of officials at the State Department, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Pentagon.

In both regions, American officials are responding to fears that crackdowns in more direct staging points for smuggling — like Mexico and Spain — have prompted traffickers to move into smaller and weakly governed states, further corrupting and destabilizing them.

The aggressive response by the United States is also a sign of how greater attention and resources have turned to efforts to fight drugs as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have wound down. 

NATO and the problem of asymmetric warfare

From: DW

Calls for military intervention in Syria are becoming louder in view of the worsening situation. But NATO states are not much inclined to get involved – the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are a warning.
This was not war as he knew it.
On his first mission in the Persian Gulf War in 1991, the situation was still relatively clear: John Nagl led a US Army tank platoon against Iraqi troops that had invaded Kuwait. “I fought against a conventional enemy wearing uniform,” he says.
12 years later, he was again deployed to Iraq. “I fought in a counterinsurgency campaign in Al Anbar and that was a very different kind of war,” Nagl told DW. It was “so different that the character of the fight was almost completely changed.” Nagl says he “fought against an enemy who waged war from the shadows, who was almost invisible, indiscernible from the general population, a much more challenging task in many ways.”
Among other areas in Iraq, the lieutenant colonel was deployed to Fallujah, where hundreds of civilians were killed in 2004 and large parts of the city were destroyed.

Fearing recruitment, India restricts contacts with CIA

From: NYDaily

Fearing that the CIA might use counter-terrorism meetings to recruit Indian intelligence operatives, New Delhi has restricted agency-to-agency contacts with Washington, says a new book. Scholar Prem Mahadevan says that unlike the 1970s when India was a virtual socialist state, the hunger for government jobs has fallen considerably since the Indian economy opened up in 1991. “Today, middle-ranking IB (Intelligence Bureau) and RAW (Research and Analysis Wing) officers are vulnerable to enticement by well-funded foreign intelligence agencies – a factor which has constrained counter-terrorism cooperation post 9/11.” Mahadevan’s book, “The Politics of Counterterrorism in India” (I.B. Tauris), says the fears are not altogether unfounded. It reveals that since 2001, there have been at least two cases of penetration of RAW by the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

Taiwan: China vessels closely monitored during Han Kuang war games

From: China Post

Taiwan was closely monitoring the whereabouts of China’s military aircraft and vessels deployed near Taiwanese waters during last week’s computerized war games, the Ministry of National Defense (MND) said yesterday.
There were no military information leaks during the five-day computer-aided Han Kuang drills, the MND said in a released statement yesterday to refute a Chinese-language report that said Chinese Navy vessels were collecting confidential data on the drills.