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The Yemeni government, under pressure from neighboring Saudi Arabia and the U.S.--and facing internal threats--has recently stepped up operations against al-Qaeda within its borders. With American help, it carried out air strikes Dec. 17 and 24, killing more than 60 militants. But al-Qaeda's affiliate in Yemen, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), is a distinctly creative branch. In August a supposedly repentant member of AQAP drew close to Saudi Arabia's Deputy Interior Minister before detonating a bomb secreted in his anal cavity, according to Stratfor, a well-regarded private intelligence outfit based in Texas. Although the attacker died, his target was only slightly wounded. A Stratfor report issued five days later concluded, "The operation could have succeeded had it been better executed"--a judgment that sounds a great deal like the early verdict on Flight 253.
4 | Downplaying the threat doesn't help
Though Obama learned of it while vacationing in Hawaii soon after the attack was foiled, it took him more than 72 hours to make a live, on-camera comment about the near tragedy. (There is some evidence that Democratic partisans were privately pleading with the White House to say something after 24 hours.) Obama's cause was not helped by the comments of his Homeland Security chief, Janet Napolitano, who announced on Sunday, "Once the incident occurred, the system worked." Say what? Napolitano has eschewed the word terrorism for "man-caused disasters," explaining, "We want to move away from the politics of fear." That probably reflects the no-drama Obama team's desire to close the books on the George W. Bush era and its obsession with the war on terrorism. But this episode suggests there are some things no government can afford to soft-pedal.
Is there any good news here? If there is, it mostly falls in the category of cold comfort. Al-Qaeda's high command in Pakistan is under pressure from the U.S.'s steady campaign of drone strikes, and the jihadists' indiscriminate cruelty has earned more revulsion than support from ordinary Muslims. And yet even if terrorists have been reduced to wearing explosives in their underwear, they are still able to find aimless, religiously fired or underloved young men to carry out suicide missions. And while al-Qaeda scientists in Yemen and western Pakistan have not fully mastered the chemistry of high-temperature charges needed to detonate compact high explosives--or acquired deadlier weapons of mass destruction--it is reasonable to assume they eventually will. Security experts say the chemical packet Abdulmutallab carried was more than enough to blow a good-size hole in the side of the fuselage, had he successfully triggered it.
Of course, Abdulmutallab's plot failed not just because of technical difficulties but also because of the bravery of the people he was trying to murder. The one hopeful outcome of the saga is that, thanks to the swift action of passengers on Flight 253, Abdulmutallab was captured alive and is being held at a federal facility southwest of Detroit, where he may well prove to be a source of intelligence. It was an unexpected but valuable gift from those who moved quickly on an otherwise quiet Christmas morning.