U.S. Lacks Intelligence for Yemen Drone Strikes
AEIdeas
The front page of Sunday’s Washington Post arrived with an encouraging banner headline: “U.S. Drones on Hunt in Yemen.” But after reading the first paragraph, the real news comes through: almost a year after al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) nearly succeeded in blowing up a plane over Detroit, we have no idea where its key leaders are hiding or where its terrorist operatives are training, so we can’t hit them.
The Post reports:
The United States has deployed Predator drones to hunt for al-Qaeda operatives in Yemen for the first time in years but has not fired missiles from the unmanned aircraft because it lacks solid intelligence on the insurgents’ whereabouts, senior U.S. officials said.
The story continues:
The officials said senior members of AQAP, including the U.S.-born cleric Anwar al-Aulaqi, have taken advantage of Yemen’s rugged terrain and their ties to its tribal networks to all but disappear from view … Current and former U.S. intelligence officials said the drones’ surveillance prowess is often overstated and will be of limited use in identifying al-Qaeda operatives in Yemen without the aid of signal intercepts or human sources on the ground. “All Land Rovers look pretty much alike,” said a former high-ranking U.S. intelligence official familiar with operations in Yemen. “You have to have something that tells you this is the one to follow.”
After 9/11, that something that told us what Range Rover to follow and what safe houses to bust into was the CIA interrogation program. Yet here we are, two years into the Obama administration, and the United States has no coherent detention and interrogation policy. As a result, we are not capturing or questioning senior al Qaeda leaders who could help us decipher the location, intent, and capabilities or emerging threats like AQAP and the al-Shabab terror network in Somalia that recently merged with al Qaeda and has recruited more than 20 Americans to its ranks.
As I have explained here before, we cannot protect the country without the intelligence that captured terrorists provide. Trying to stop terrorist attacks without the benefit of interrogation is like trying to put together a puzzle without being allowed to see the picture on the cover of the box. You have all the pieces laid out on the table in front of you, but you cannot fit them together because you don’t know what the final picture looks like. There is only one way to get a look at the picture on the cover of the box, and that is to capture the people who know what the picture looks like—the KSMs of the world who drew the picture in the first place.
AQAP has succeeded twice in less than 11 months in penetrating our defenses: first with the Christmas Day plot, and now with the package bomb plot. In the first case, we avoided disaster because the bomb malfunctioned; in the second, we got a lucky tip from Saudi intelligence. We cannot depend on luck to keep America safe. We need human intelligence to target the enemy with predators. And—more importantly—we need human intelligence to figure out what the terrorists are planning so we can stop them before they deploy an underwear bomber or a parcel packed with explosives.
